The earliest printed image of a human skeleton is this cartoonish image from a German block book from the 1450s. [i] It is one of a series of skeletons in the popular genre known as the danse macabre or dance of death. Art historian extraordinaire Jack Hartnell first told me about this book. It is now …
Continue reading The Dance of Death and the first printed skeleton
I’m always looking for skeleton stories. But it’s not often that I come across an article in the scientific literature that includes references to the ancient Greek physician and herbalist Dioscorides (ca. 40-90 CE) or the medieval abbess and scholar St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179). So this open-access article in Science Advances, “Medieval women’s early …
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 …
Last month, artist Lisa Temple-Cox had a residency at Oregon State for two weeks as part of the Horning Series on "The Material Body" that I organized this academic year. Among the numerous talks and demonstrations she gave was this collaborative talk with art historian Glenn Harcourt on a joint project they are calling "Vesalius …
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 …
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. …
Last week, while at the massive International Congress of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (ICHSTM) in Manchester, England (more on that in another post), I visited the John Rylands Library. It’s a wonderful late-Victorian neo-gothic building that opened on 1 January 1900 as a private library endowed by the widow of John Rylands, …
Within the past year, two of my favorite authors died, Maurice Sendak and Russell Hoban. Sendak was undoubtedly the better known, author of picture books such as the wonderful Where the Wild Things Are and my favorite, In the Night Kitchen, as well as an illustrator of many more books. Hoban also wrote children’s books, …
Anita Guerrini 