"[A] new figure of Anatomy, which represents a woman chained down upon a table, suppos'd opened alive; wherein the circulation of the blood is made visible through glass veins and arteries: the circulation is also seen from the mother to the child, and from the child to the mother, with the Histolick and Diastolick motion of the hears and action of the lungs. All which particulars, with several others, will be shewn and clearly explained by [the surgeon] Mr. Chovet himself. Note, a Gentlewoman qualified will attend the ladies."

--From the London Evening Post, 27 December 1733, quoted in George C. Peachey, A Memoir of William and John Hunter (William Brendan, 1924), p. 30 and requoted in Lyle Massey, "“On Waxes and Wombs: Eighteenth-Century Representations of the Gravid Uterus,” in Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, ed., Roberta Panzanella (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2008), p. 98.

Robert Fludd and Healing Crafts

"Fludd had supported the use of the weapon-salve in his Anatomiae amphitheatrum; this was the Paracelsian doctrine that a wound could be cured by anointing the weapon which caused it with a mixture of the patient's blood, moss grown on a human skull, and mummy (human flesh from the body of a hanged man). The cure is based on the theory that there is a magnetic or sympathetic relationship between the weapon and the wound which allows for action over distance to occur; the wound itself needs only to be disinfected with the patient's own urine."

From the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

The Erotics of Electric Eels

The 'electric stroke' and the 'electric spark': anatomists and eroticism at George Baker's electric eel exhibition in 1776 and 1777.

Plumb C.

Source

Abstract

In 1776 and 1777 five living electric eels exhibited in London became a sensational spectacle that appealed to anatomists, electricians and connoisseurs of erotica. George Baker's exhibition made visible the 'electric spark' of the electrical eel and a series of experiments were both witnessed by and participated in by members of the Royal Society and the metropolitan elite. Some participants even grasped the eels firmly in their hands and felt the 'electric stroke' of the eel in addition to observing the spark. In their observation of the electric eel some of these spectators transposed the vivid electric spark from the sphere of electricians and anatomists into that of satirical and erotic literature. Here the erotic electric eel proliferated in the literature and the eel took on quite different connotations that nonetheless were reliant on readers knowledge and experience of the exhibition, experiments and the preoccupations of anatomists. George Baker's electric eel exhibition of 1776 and 1777 is then instructive in exploring the production and circulation of knowledge in Georgian Britain. The story of the electric eel in Georgian culture charts the creation of the electric spark and stroke as objects of observation and encounter, their exhibitionary context, and finally their divergent meanings as the electric eel became erotically charged for a metropolitan masculine elite.

Endeavour. 2010 Sep;34(3):87-94. doi: 10.1016/j.endeavour.2010.06.003. 

"Hearing pregnancy described as cheese-making gave a familiar texture to the body's transformations."

Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 4.

And p. 23

Note the quote, "Jokes about incontinence focus not on those women most likely to have bladder problems--mothers and older women--but on adolescents, whose leakiness is sexier"

Real Live Academic Quote of the Day 4/15/12

"The two great ages of geographical discovery through the voyages of the early 1500s and through Alexander's conquests correspond to two great ages of anatomical discovery. These are also the two most inventive ages of erotic art in the West, for happy discoveries inspire a hopeful curiosity about everything."

Mayor, Artists and Anatomists, 1984

"Do we really need to embalm everything?"

One of the most entertaining calls for papers I've seen in a long time:

Activating Stilled Lives: The Aesthetics and Politics of Specimens on Display

Not the best way to get a letter of recommendation

"The...inscription, which Lando rolled up and placed in Christ's nostril...reads, 'Jesus Christ through your mercy let the soul of Lando di Pietro, who made this crucifix, be recommended.'"

-Pamela Smith's Body of the Artisan, p. 10.

(for more, click on the picture)

Whose poop doesn't stink?

"Irenaeus even claims that, if Adam had never sinned, his excrement would have no stench"

Academic Paper Title of the Day

Coming to Understand: Orgasm and the Epistemology of Ignorance

Dead-animal painting

Quote of the Day: "The main reference point in this debate was the Cartesian theory of the ’beast-machine’, which viewed animals as senseless automata. The present study examines dead-animal painting in the context of this debate."

Real Live Academic Quote of the Day 2/3/10

"one of Steen's biographers wrote that the painter's 'wife was irked by his repeated portrayal of her as a loose woman.'"

Real Live Academic Quote of the Day 2/4/10

"This allows the viewer to experience the anatomist's dissected head without perceived mediation; our immediate perception is of this dissected head in a soup bowl and not of a photograph of any other dissected head in a soup bowl."

For Real Academic Quote of the Day

"Jacquemont seems to have regarded his silver rectal syringe as of more value than any of his scientific instruments during his various expeditions to north-western India, a perfect symbol of his 'anal' disdain for Indian culture."

- from Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840 by By Nigel Leask

Real Academic Quote of the Day 2

"Renaissance literature makes much of the pubic forest, the wooded grotto, the mossy hill, and so on."

-Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes

Real Live Academic Quote of the Day

"Also see the conclusion for a brief discussion of the classical sources for barrel erotica."

-Yale Dissertation, 2006