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 …
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
21 September 2014, Berlin Louis XIV, who saw himself as the new Alexander the Great, adopted the lion as one of his symbols. Although he didn’t wear a lion skin on his head like Alexander, real and imaginary lions surrounded him. The lion long pre-dated Alexander as a symbol of power and majesty. On visits …
Beavers Are Mysteriously Back in Britain—but Not Entirely Welcome...
You could smell them before you saw them, what Raymond Chandler called “that peculiar tomcat smell,” so evocative of southern California. I did not expect to smell them in a forest in Galicia, in northwestern Spain, where I spent a week last September walking the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. But there they were, …
Aristotle had not been entirely certain that the ostrich was a bird, but it took pride of place among the birds in the Versailles menagerie and in the 1676 Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des animaux. Ostriches had first made the long journey from Africa to Paris in the early seventeenth century; the young …
Scientific American has just written about the research on mountain meadows of OSU's Harold Zald. Harold was one of the featured participants in Alpine Environment workshop I organized last month.
"...Anatomy... differs essentially from natural history. ....natural history dwells upon forms, upon the exterior qualities of bodies, and is restricted, in whatever guise, to skimming their surfaces. Anatomy goes further: it penetrates bodies, divides them, isolates the parts of which they are composed, and seeks to lift the veil hiding the secret of their organization." …
Anita Guerrini 