Category Archives: Anatomy

I am very excited to announce a few open slots in this Saturday's long sold-out Anthropomorphic Insect Shadowbox Workshop with Former AMNH Senior Insect Preparator Daisy Tainton, part of The Morbid Anatomy Art Academy at Observatory. Full details for the class follow; send an email to morbidanatomy [at] gmail.com to be added to class list. First come, first served!

Anthropomorphic Insect Shadowbox Workshop with Former AMNH Senior Insect Preparator Daisy Tainton
With Daisy Tainton, Former Senior Insect Preparator at the American Museum of Natural History
Date: This Saturday, May 12
Time: 1 - 4 PM
Admission: $65
***Must RSVP to morbidanatomy [at] gmail.com to be added to class list
This class is part of The Morbid Anatomy Art Academy

Rhinoceros beetles: nature's tiny giants. Adorable, with their giant heads and tiny legs, and wonderful antler-like protrusions. If you think they would be even more adorable drinking tiny beers and holding tiny fishing poles, we have the perfect class for you! In today's workshop, students will learn to make--and leave with their own!--shadowbox dioramas featuring carefully positioned beetles doing nearly anything you can imagine. An assortment of miniature furniture and foods will be made available to decorate your habitat, but students are strongly encouraged to bring any dollhouse props they would like to use. 1:12 scale is generally best.

Daisy Tainton was formerly Senior Insect Preparator at the American Museum of Natural History, and has been working with insects professionally for several years. Eventually her fascination with insects and  love of Japanese miniature food items naturally came together, resulting in cute and ridiculous museum-inspired yet utterly unrealistic dioramas. Beetles at the dentist? Beetles eating pie and knitting sweaters? Even beetles on the toilet? Why not?

You can find out more about this class here, and more about The Morbid Anatomy Art Academy by clicking here.

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This week and next at Observatory! Hope to see you there.

Blaschka: Glass creatures of the Ocean – An Illustrated History of The Natural History Museum (NHM), London Collection
 Illustrated lecture with Miranda Lowe, The Natural History Museum (NHM), London Curator
Date: Thursday, May 10
Time: 8:00
Admission: $8
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

Although more famously know for the making the glass flowers exhibited at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the father and son partnership of Leopold (1822-1895) and Rudolf (1857-1939) Blaschka also made numerous marine invertebrate glass models. Some of the first models they made were sea anemones in the early 1860’s. The Natural History Museum (NHM), London purchased their first set around 1865 and holds over 185 Blaschka glass models consisting of anemones, sea slugs, jellyfish, octopus, squid, protozoans and corals representing their entire model making career. The models were made in a variety ways with many formed over wire skeletons (known as armatures) with the glass fused together or glued. Profiled in various scientific sales catalogues such as Henry A. Ward’s they were to sold museums, universities and private collectors by the Blaschkas themselves and various agents who worked on their behalf worldwide. In the past these models were of scientific importance in teaching but as trends change their significance as works of art are also being highlighted. Each glass model is a unique blend of art, science and craftsmanship looking more life-like than real specimens whose natural colours may fade when stored in jars of preservation fluid over time. This highly illustrated lecture will give a fascinating insight to this collection housed at one of the major natural history museums in the world.

Miranda Loweis the Collections Manager of the Marine Invertebrates Division, Zoology Department, The Natural History Museum (NHM), London. Within Zoology Miranda specifically manages the Crustacea collections as well as the team of curators responsible for the Invertebrate collections. Darwin barnacles and the Blaschka marine invertebrate glass models are amongst some of the historical collections that are her interests and under her care. In 2006, she was part of the organising committee and invited speaker at the 1st international Blaschka congress held in Dublin. Miranda collaborated with the National Glass Centre, Sunderland, UK in 2008 to exhibit some of the Museum’s Blaschka collection alongside contemporary Blaschka inspired art. She also has an interest in photography, natural history - past and present serving on a number of committees including the Society for the History of Natural History (SHNH) and the Natural Sciences Association (NatSCA).

Image: © The Natural History Museum, London 2012. All Rights Reserved.

A Most Unexpected History of Blood Transfusion (1660 - 1820s)
Illustrated lecture with Paul Craddock
Date: Monday, May 14
Time: 8:00
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy
Those living in Britain (who owned a television set) about ten years ago might remember Sean Bean before he became a famous movie star. Apart from his appearance in Sharpe, he starred in a television advertisement for the National Blood Foundation, prompting people in his thick Yorkshire accent to 'do something amazing today'; 'save a life' by giving blood. The foundation's message is still the same, though Sean Bean has moved onto other projects such as Lord of the Rings. In any case, this illustrated lecture is about just that: the transfusion of blood and its many meanings. But it focuses on a much earlier (and stranger) period of transfusion history when saving a life was only one reason to transfuse blood - from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth.

The association between blood and life is a very easy one to make and seems to span all cultures and time periods, as does the very idea of swapping blood from one person to another. But what it meansto swap one being's blood with another's - and why this might be attempted - has radically changed. It is only very recently, (around the turn of the twentieth century), that blood was transfused in order to purposefully replace lost blood. For the majority of this history, this was most certainly not the case. In the seventeenth century, transfusions of lamb's blood were made to calm mad patients and, in the nineteenth century, blood was transfused in order to restore a portion of an invisible living principle living inside of it. This lecture explores from where these ideas came and the ways in which bits of them might linger in our own ideas of transfusion.
On one last note: Paul Craddock commissioned a medical instrument maker to produce some early nineteenth century transfusion equipment. He hopes to demonstrate them at work if he can get them past customs!

Paul Craddock is currently writing on pre-20th century transplant surgery and transfusion at the London Consortiumworking under Prof. Steven Connor (University of London) and Prof. Holly Tucker (Vanderbilt University, Nashville). After a brief time studying music and performing arts, living in rural China, and working for the National Health Service, Paul made the switch to cultural and medical history. He has never had a transplant and never received a transfusion - his interest in these procedures come from thinking about generally how we relate to the material world by making bodily transactions. He has lectured around the UK and Europe, and last year he spoke at the Observatory Gallery on skin grafting. Currently based in London, Paul is the Director of London Consortium Television, the audio-visual arm of the London Consortium (www.londonconsortium.tv).  He is also the Guests' Secretary for the University of London's Extra Mural Literature Association.  In another professional life, he produces films for medical establishments and museum exhibitions.

Image: An early blood transfusion from lamb to man, ca 1705. From "Tryals Proposed by Mr. Boyle to Dr. Lower, to be Made by Him, for the Improvement of Transfusing Blood out of One Live Animal into Another," Mr. Boyle

 
The Hidden River Expedition: A Re-Exploration of the Post-industrial Wilderness along Philadelphia's Rivers
An Illustrated Lecture and Film Screening with Allen Crawford (aka Lord Whimsy)
Date: Friday, May 18
Time: 8:00
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

In August of 2011, Allen Crawford (aka Lord Whimsy) left his house to embark on a three-day, forty-mile solo kayak trek from Mount Holly, NJ to Bartram's Garden, in West Philadelphia. This May 18th, Crawford will present a video using footage shot from his kayak during this trek. He will also give a slideshow presentation, highlighting the strange history along these rivers he traversed: fugitive slave enclaves, floating churches, Civil-War era submarines, and derelict aircraft carriers all await you. This expedition was a re-exploration of Philadelphia's landscape, and an investigation of how its built and grown environments have affected each other over time. This landscape is not pristine, but it is wild--and perhaps most important, it's new. The "local frontier" exists!

Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy(a.k.a. Victor Allen Crawford III), After twenty long years, has at last achieved his dream: unemployability. He is an artist, designer, author, re-explorer, failed dandy, tin grandee, gentleman trespasser, bushwhacking aesthete, parenthetical naturalist, pseudo-intellectual, and a middle-aged dilettante. Having taken a solemn vow to do as little in life as possible, Whimsy was dismayed one morning to discover that he had accidentally wrote, designed, and illustrated The Affected Provincial’s Companion, Volume One(Bloomsbury 2006), which has been optioned for film by Johnny Depp’s production company, Infinitum Nihil. His face and his words have graced the hallowed pages of The New York Times, Interview, Frieze, Vice, Tin House, and Art in America. He and his wife are proprietors of the design and illustration studio Plankton Art Co. Their most notable project to date is the collection of 400 species identification illustrations that are on permanent display at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Ocean Life. A devoted enthusiast, lower-case adventurer, and explorer of what he calls “the local frontier,” Whimsy spends most of his time among the nooks and margins of the forgotten, the curious, and the speculative that is found beneath, around, and between the everyday. He smells like gusto.

More on all events can be found here.

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Tonight at Observatory! Hope to see you there.

The Odditorium: The Architecture and Allure of Extremes
Illustrated lecture and booksigning with Melissa Pritchard, author of The Odditorium
Date: Monday, May 7
Time: 8:00
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

Tonight, please join--Melissa Pritchard, award winning fiction writer, essayist and journalist--for an illustrated lecture on some of the more extreme and unusual historical personalities and architectures featured in her highly praised new collection of stories, The Odditorium. From the enigma of the German feral child, Kaspar Hauser, to St. Pelagia, Russian "holy fool," to Robert Ripley of Believe it or Not fame and the Wild West Show's sharpshooter Annie Oakley, Pritchard will discuss her own fascination with the bizarre, the haunted, the fantastic and the grotesque, including short excerpts from several stories while asking of herself and her audience the bigger question: What lies behind our cultural obsession with extremes, from the tragic to the sublime, from the monstrous to the transcendent?

Melissa Pritchardis a Flannery O’Connor, Janet Heidinger Kafka, and Carl Sandburg Award-winning author. She has also been an embedded journalist in Afghanistan, where she befriended Ashton Goodman, a young soldier she memorialized for O, The Oprah Magazine, and authored a biography of Virginia Galvin Piper that US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’ Connor called “a delight to read.” Founder of the Ashton Goodman Fund and a member of the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, helping to promote literacy and education for Afghan women and girls, she teaches at Arizona State University.

More here.

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'Grey's Anatomy' stars Ellen Pompeo and Patrick Dempsey have signed up for two more seasons of the show.

Ellen, Patrick, Sandrah Oh, Justin Chambers, James Pickens Jr. and Chandra Wilson have reportedly put pen to paper on new two-year deals that will see the ABC medical drama continue through the 2013/14 season, taking the programme past a 10th series, according to TVLine.

'Grey's Anatomy' - which is currently in its eighth season - attracted 9.25 million viewers in the US last week, and the show looks set to become one of the longest-running medical dramas in TV history.

Earlier this year, Katherine Heigl admitted she wants to return to the show, despite leaving in a storm of controversy in 2010 after criticising her character Dr. Izzie Stevens.

She previously said: "I've told them I want to (return). I don't know ... Being a showrunner and being a writer of a TV series like that is so complicated that I mean she's got how many characters are there now? There's a lot and so she's balancing about 40 different storylines, so I don't know if it fits in to their sort of vision for this season or next or however many seasons it goes."

Series narrator and lead female star Ellen - who has played Meredith Grey since the show started in 2005 - insisted she would be happy to continue portraying the surgical resident.

She explained: "If I hear from the fans that they want us to keep going, then I would continue because we owe them everything."

Continued here:
Grey's Anatomy stars sign on for more

Leonardo da Vinci's 500-year-old illustrations of human anatomy are uncannily accurate with just one major exception: the female reproductive system.

That's probably because Leonardo had a tough time finding female corpses to dissect, explains Peter Abrahams, a practicing physician at the University of Warwick Medical School in the United Kingdom.

Abrahams, a clinical anatomist, has lent his knowledge to an audio tour of the exhibit of Leonardo's anatomical drawings that opened May 4 in Buckingham Palace.

The Italian Renaissance artist learned anatomy as a way to improve his drawings of the human form, but he also brought a scientist's eye to the discipline.

"He wanted to understand how it worked," Abrahams told LiveScience. "He looked at humans like a mechanic would do. Most of that work is very, very relevant today." [Anatomy Meets Art: Da Vinci's Drawings]

Anatomists in Leonardo's time often dissected unclaimed bodies, such as of drunks and vagrants, and those bodies were more likely to be male, Abrahams said.

"It was definitely harder to get female bodies to dissect, and he didn't have many opportunities," Abrahams said.

Advances in anatomy By Leonardo's time, few advances in human anatomy had been made since the second-century work by the Roman anatomist Galen, whose discoveries were largely based on animal dissections. Leonardo da Vinci had the advantage of access to human cadavers.

Abrahams says studying them would have been obnoxious work. "It must have been horrible, because they didn't have any form of embalming," he said. "Within two or three days that body decomposes."

Leonardo's sketches reveal a deep understanding of how the body worked, much of it still up-to-date. Modern anatomists have only begun in the last 60 years to look at the muscles and tendons of the finger in the detail that da Vinci did, Abrahams said. Leonardo was the first to draw the human spine with the correct curves. He also came tantalizingly close to understanding how blood moved through the body, a mystery that wouldn't be fully solved until 1628, more than a century after his death.

More:
The anatomy that Leonardo couldn't copy

Anatomy course creates hands-on learning environment for inner workings of humans

Pushing back the wet, steel-gray hair, Madison Tollisons lab partner revealed a bony face etched with wrinkles and weathered with age. Eyes closed, the cadaver did nothing but draw silence from the lab group.

The face represented an emotional milestone within OUs human anatomy course. Through examination of a persons face, an ordered collection of cells, organs and tissues became someones relative.

This is the person theyve been working with the whole semester, course professor Cindy Gordon said. [The face] brings back those initial feelings at the beginning of the semester.

And while the students have survived the demanding course, the cadavers have completed a trek of their own.

It all begins with a phone call, said Kayla McNeill, director of the University of Oklahoma Health Science Centers Willed Body Program.

The Willed Body Program, along with the Oklahoma State Anatomical Board, meet academic needs by providing cadavers for medical research and education.

Knowledge of the Willed Body Program usually passes by word of mouth, McNeill said. Once the potential donors are aware of the criteria they must meet, they eventually request and complete donor forms.

Upon the death of the donor, the family contacts the office, and the body is screened for any problems, which could include infectious disease, recent unhealed surgery or extreme obesity, McNeill said. The mortuary service picks up the accepted body and takes it to the programs facility. After a special type of embalming, the cadaver goes into storage and awaits transportation to an academic or research institution.

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Anatomy course creates hands-on learning environment