The fabulous online journal Atlas Obscura just published an article on some of my skeleton research. This is based on the talk, "The Whiteness of Bones," that I gave a Columbia a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to Sarah Laskow. Link here.
Category: skeletons
Vesalius and the beheaded man
On the 12th of May, 1543, Jakob Karrer von Getweiler was executed in Basel, Switzerland. Reports say he was beheaded, although hanging was a more usual mode of execution. Karrer was a bigamist who attacked his legal wife with a knife after she discovered his second wife. According to a contemporary account, Karrer was a …
The Secret Horror of Dissection
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 …
The Moving Skeleton
Here's the full version of the Slate blog post: I've been reading Charles Burney's collection of newspapers for close to two decades: first turning fragile pages in the Rare Books and Music Reading Room at the British Library, then dipping periodically into the many boxes of microfilm there, and now online, unfortunately behind the Gale paywall. …
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 …
The King’s Elephant
Last month, someone broke into the Paleontology wing of the Paris Museum of Natural History, and used a chain saw to cut off one of the tusks of the elephant skeleton there. The skeleton dates from 1681 and is the oldest specimen at the museum. Here is a little on the skeleton’s origins, from my …
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 