When I gave a talk on fossils last year at the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden, my Dutch friends told me to be sure to include a mention of the Maastricht mosasaur, the most famous fossil Maastricht mosasaurus. Wikimedia in the Netherlands, even though I was actually talking about much more recent fossils such as mammoths. …
For the past few weeks, many news outlets have reported that the skull of Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus, ca. 23-79 CE), the Roman naturalist and statesman who died at Pompeii, has been identified. The latest story, in the New York Times, expresses some skepticism but admits the skull could have been Pliny’s. To …
In January 1613, workers at an estate in the Dauphiné, in southeastern France, unearthed a number of large bones. They included two mandibles with some teeth, a couple of vertebrae, what seemed to be a sternum, a shoulder blade, the heel and instep of a foot, the top of a humerus, and (the prize) a …
Utrecht, Netherlands, July 2019 Among the many delights for a historian of medicine like me at the University Museum in Utrecht is a reconstructed anatomy cabinet from the late eighteenth century. It contains objects from the collection of Jan Bleuland (1756-1838), professor of medicine and "rector magnificus" of the University. Domenico Bertoloni Meli discussed Bleuland …
A few weeks ago I looked at some manuscripts of the French intellectual and antiquarian Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637) at the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence, France. I describe Peiresc as an “intellectual”; he was one of those universal scholars we find in early modern Europe who were interested in everything. Peiresc’s fame, such as …
Various large bones, discovered across Europe from around 1500 onward, raised the possibility among Renaissance naturalists and intellectuals that very large humans – some five or even ten meters tall – once existed in the past. The idea of giant ancestors already was prominent among scholars: the hugely popular works of Annius of Viterbo, particularly …
Last month I spent some time in Special Collections at the University of Glasgow Library, looking at the catalogues of the anatomical preparations of London anatomist and man-midwife William Hunter (1718-1783). Hunter, a Scot, left his collections to the University of Glasgow, where they still reside. Among the anatomical preparations listed in 1784 was “A …
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 2017 I am sitting in the sun on the roof of my hotel in Rio, looking at the heavily forested hills to the east, the high rise hotels lining the Copacabana to the south, the elaborate rooftop garden across the Avenida de Princesa Isabel, and beyond, the rickety tin shacks …
The eighteenth-century anatomist William Hunter (1718-1783) told his students that the practice of dissection “familiarizes the heart to a kind of necessary inhumanity.”(1) A few decades earlier, Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton (1716-1800) expressed more forcefully the “secret horror” that dissection, particularly of the human corpse, elicited in most of its practitioners. His comments appeared in the “Description …
An occasional blog, beginning with this lion from Versailles. Lions were a favorite symbol for Louis XIV, and, it turns out, there are lions and other animals to be seen all over Paris. Mar… Source: Hidden Animals of Paris/Les animaux cachés à Paris
Anita Guerrini 