Diseases America Forgot

It all starts with this article: Where are they now? Diseases That Killed You In Oregon Trail. In its adolescence, America's population was constantly struggling with viral and bacterial plagues that are now largely under control in the US due to vaccinations and antibiotics. (That's right, anti-vaccine celebrities).

Along with the near-eradication of these diseases, we can also see how the places that once treated the sick were abandoned to the wilderness. North Brother Island is one such place, eerily close to the Bronx. It was a home to lepers as well as the famous Typhoid Mary. Recently, Ian Ference decided to photograph its remains.

Slowly, some of these areas are being reused, such as the site of the White Haven Sanitorium, which was once used to quarantine and treat consumptives (i.e. tuberculosis patients) and is now the Powerhouse Eatery.

But if you're just into abandoned hospitals, look only slightly further than a Google search.

Nurturing a Mimetic Vocabulary

Once upon a time, a friend and I would stay up late at the diner, drinking coffee, writing, and reading. Once we decided to find new words to use, looking through the dictionary until we found something interesting. My favorite find was "vermicular"--wormlike. I haven't used it much since, but I realized how functional and colorful descriptive words can be--especially in art history where mimesis is a key component preceding any argument.

The article 18 Fancy Words for Specific Shapes is a fantastic list of largely scientific words that can easily transcend their disciplinary confines.

"Kidney beans may be reniform, but actual kidneys are fabiform."

Action verbs provide another level of interest. Poetry and literature, of course, provide a parallel universe where nouns have been verbed since at least James Joyce. Billy Collins does not write that the dog jumps through the snow--he "porpoise[s]" through it.

Victorian and 20th-Century Medical Men

Many of the collections where I do research were owned by single collectors--men that generally had a background in medicine that blossomed into an obsession with medical objects and their histories. These include Sir Henry Wellcome (Wellcome Collection, London), Josiah C. Trent (Trent Collection, Duke University), Howard Dittrick (Dittrick Museum), Arno B. Luckhardt, LeRoy Crummer, and various people that connected them: the booksellers Henry and Ida Schuman, physician Harvey Cushing, etc. etc.

Howard Dittrick, whose museum has three manikins, was originally awed by Henry Wellcome's Collection--which had dozens of ivory manikins bought before his death in 1936--and in an obituary he wrote for Josiah Trent he makes sure to mention that "[Trent] was particularly proud of a group of 15 ivory manikins of rare beauty.*

*Bulletin of the History of Medicine23 (Jan 1, 1949): 95.

Know Thyself, In Your Likeness

A post by Morbid Anatomy that links Frederik Ruysch--the master of dead baby tableaux--to a later publication by a little-known German medical man and historian, Johann Jakob Scheuchzer.

Vernacular Literature Meets Anatomy

The New York Academy of Medicine has compiled some interesting blog posts, including one on a compilation of anatomical limericks and one children's book teaching morals through sickness.

Bone Architecture and Book Review

Ossuaries, charnel houses, catacombs--whatever they are called, they are part of a major phenomenon whereby bones were used to create and decorate spaces. They were memorials, spiritual spaces, and warnings wrapped into one. A great article in VICE discusses the specific site of Kutná Hora. A few quotes:

"The hundreds of thousands of human bones have been arranged in all kinds of creative ways, from bone chalices and chandeliers to strings of skulls and bones hung across the ceiling like history’s most depressing party bunting. It’s the Ted Bundy approach to interior design: the entrance to Disneyland’s Nightmare Before Christmas ride if they’d sourced their raw materials from a morgue rather than a Hollywood prop department." 

"the aristocratic Schwarzenberg family, who owned the church at the time, asked a woodcarver to do something with the forgotten bones, and what you see today is what he came up with. František Rint worked for decades to organize and style the remains into decorations, recruiting his wife and kids to help him in perhaps the least family-friendly family business I’ve ever come across."

For a much broader scope, there is Paul Koudounaris's The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses (London: Thames and Hudson, 2011). Koudounaris is perhaps best known for his appearance on the Discovery Channel’s Oddities television series as a quirky gothic collector, but his true work is laid out in The Empire of Death. It is never an easy task for a scholar—the author is an art history Ph.D.—to transform rigorous research into a readable monograph, but here the objects are just curious enough, and the stories behind them written specifically to lead the reader through the adventures of a scholar into the deep, dark works of charnel houses without devolving into lecturedom.

Before diving into the book’s content, I should add that the quality of its design does nothing but add interest to the volume by imbuing the stamped black cover with dramatic imagery, a gothic fashion sense, and details such as burgundy binding cloth and book marker. The endsheets feature what seem to be maps redesigned to emphasize other design elements within and without and also show the far-flung reaches where these houses of bones lie. Freckled with sepia figures and nostalgically-tinged typography interrupted only by giant beautifully photographed plates, this book was made to be fetishized, much like the bones are treated in the text. Nonetheless, Koudounaris also has a website for all of his photographs as well. 

Koudounaris begins with a simple anecdote, but reading like a novel, “An American woman, a tourist, had descended into the crypt underneath the Capuchin monastery of Santa Maria della Concezione in Rome.” By the end of the next page he has already cited two theorists, but in such a way as to just break the tip of how the reader’s understanding of death and its treatment must be expanded to read further. Through two hundred, albeit highly illustrated and wide-margined, pages of text, the author holds our hands and leads us from one location to another, never dwelling in one place too long, but using the individual spaces to speak visually and through his intellectual interpretation and the stories he has gathered. He also makes it very clear that death has not always forced sadness and fear, also hope, piousness, and respect for the ancestral past on people throughout history. The stories are both enlightening and entertaining, but the catalogue of sites, maps, and informative captions relevant to either research or far flung travels for the curious and macabre.

Brief Statement Regarding Penny Dreadful

There is a new show by Showtime called Penny Dreadful. The name comes from cheap, sensational novels. The show is dramatic enough to earn the name, but has a great deal of historical and literary references to pique the interest of historians of science and medicine.

 Within the first episode, resurrection men, vampires, egyptologists, tarot readers, and Victor Frankenstein and his empathy-worthy recreation appear. Justice is done to all in some sense: The resurrection men are working in squalid and secretive conditions, the major vampires are very much like their early literary counterparts, the Egyptian scholar is set at the British Museum (fairly enough), and Mr. Frankenstein names his lovely little project "Adam" as a sort of nod to Mary Shelley's so-called monster who was obliquely, and of his own accord, given that title. 

Viewers will also get to see characters from The Picture of Dorian Gray and Dracula imbedded into the plot. I only wonder how many historians were on the budget...

Renaissance Depilatory Practices

One of the most memorable stories in art history is about John Ruskin's plea for an annulment. The art historian said his marriage was never consummated because he had seen so many classical and renaissance sculptures of women that he was horrified to see his wife naked--he was shocked and disgusted by her pubic hair. This begs the question did women of antiquity and the Renaissance remove their hair? Recently, there was a talk given at the Renaissance Society of America conference on this topic. Now, there is also an article in the Smithsonian Magazine using the speaker, Jill Burke's, research.

A quote:

Boil together a solution of one pint of arsenic and eighth of a pint of quicklime. Go to a baths or a hot room and smear medicine over the area to be depilated. When the skin feels hot, wash quickly with hot water so the flesh doesn’t come off.

The Man Who Read Stories From Bones

From the New York Times:

With ghoulish geniality, Clyde Snow liked to say that bones made good witnesses, never lying, never forgetting, and that a skeleton, no matter how old, could sketch the tale of a human life, revealing how it had been lived, how long it had lasted, what traumas it had endured and especially how it had ended.
...
“Bones can be puzzles,” he told The New York Times in 1991, “but they never lie, and they don’t smell bad.”
...
“Witnesses may forget throughout the years, but the dead, those skeletons, they don’t forget,” he told The Times in 2002. “Their testimony is silent, but it is also very eloquent.”

No doubt he was an inspiration to Kathy Reichs, who is a forensic anthropologist and the novelist who wrote the books on which the TV show Bones is based on.

And for a Dolly Parton song to go with it: 

Wine Design

From Designboom 

From Uncommonstudio

From HERE

The Known Knowns and Known Unknowns of Animal Sex

The latest reportage on comparative genitalia studies:

From duck vaginas to bumblebee sex: The amazing, overlooked science of genitals

Inscribed Human Skulls

So this all started with a beautiful office object found on the Colossal Shop's page. Turns out, there's a cheaper option on Etsy, even though I like the idea of a coral-colored skull better:

From here, I recall the myriad skulls I have seen with writing on them. Skulls on their own become separated from the individual that owned it, looking to non-anthropologists and biologists as just another skull. So why not write a caption right on there?

Descartes' skull was inscribed with a poem about the great brain that lived inside it (yeah, I know, body/mind duality. But Descartes also thought that the two might come together in the pineal gland, so the physical body was important to him as well). 

Musée de l'homme, Paris

Other brains were not drawn upon as odes, but as didactic or research models, like this poor soul's noggin used as a phrenology model:

Semmelweis Museum, Budapest

And sometimes, it's just for identification:

Mütter Museum, Philadelphia

*more info can be found by clicking on the pictures

Medieval Medicine and Popular Culture

First of all, THIS VIDEO starring Steve Martin as Theodoric of York. And we all know the Bring Out Your Dead scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

But then there's Phone Call to the Fourteenth Century.

And this Leech Collector.

And then, for a lack of knowledge regarding popular culture, here's some medieval torture.

I *HEART* YOU

It's hard to tell the proportion of adorable to disgusting when it comes to some pictures. Point and case:

from Discarding Images