To appear from the University of Chicago Press on May 20. See the Chicago website or Amazon. Book launch party at OSU on May 21. More soon!
Category: Medicine
An Eighteenth-Century Sweeney Todd
2 January 2015 A human skeleton was an essential ornament to the early modern dissecting room. Beginning with Vesalius, a number of anatomical textbooks offered instructions for making an articulated skeleton from a dead body, and there was a flourishing clandestine industry in making skeletons and in stealing or otherwise procuring the necessary dead bodies …
A Sonnet to an Anatomist
Montpellier surgeon Barthélémy Cabrol (1529-1603) first published his Alphabet anatomic in 1594. A series of tables that graphically represented the parts of the body, it was immensely popular, with eleven editions in the seventeenth century as well as translations into Latin and Dutch; the Dutch translation in 1633 was by Descartes’s friend and correspondent Vopiscus …
Sir Nicholas Gimcrack rides again
In today’s New York Times there is a report on some new experiments on rejuvenation. Blood from young mice, it appears, can reverse signs of aging in old mice. The article cites experiments in the 1950s by Clive McCay (famous for his experiments showing that calorie restriction extends life) that joined rats together by their …
Why fierce animals are fierce
The eighteenth-century Dutch physician Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738) wrote many books, but among his most famous were his Aphorisms and his Materia medica, both of which were translated and reprinted throughout the century. They distilled the conventional wisdom of the day and added Boerhaave's own astute observations. The following observations from Materia medica follow a logic we …
Playing Chicken
Back in 2012, the US Department of Agriculture proposed new regulations for processing chickens. These included speeding up the processing line from 140 birds a minute to 175 birds a minute. At the same time, the number of federal inspectors would be reduced. This head-scratching equation would supposedly save money and allow inspectors to pay …
Cultures of anatomical collections
A few weeks ago, I attended the conference “Cultures of Anatomical Collections” in Leiden, the Netherlands. I’m still thinking about and absorbing all the things I learned there. It was the kind of conference where you are still up at midnight talking about things – in this case, dead bodies, anatomical waxes, anatomical preparations, anatomical …
Anita Guerrini 