Category Archives: Anatomy

Now up in Florence, Italy through February 12, 2011: a number of waxes and preparations from the amazing and elusive museum of the Institute of Pathological Anatomy; See images and video tour above to get a sense of what this collection has to offer.

More, from the Tuscan Traveler website:

For those visiting or living in Florence, only a short time is left to experience one of the most unique and wonderful exhibits for those interested in either the art of wax modeling or the science of medical-surgical pathology practiced in the 1800s.

The free exhibit, called Oltre il Corpo, L’uomo (Besides the Body, the Man), will end February 12, 2011.

...Whereas the anatomical wax models at [such museums as] Museo La Specola show the body in its perfect and healthy state, the creations at the Pathology Museum, from which curator Elisabetta Susani selected prime examples for Oltre il Corpo, L’uomo, are sometimes shocking representations of diseases that were treated in the 1800s. One of the most interesting is a the wax model side by side with the skeleton of a child with an incurable case of hydrocephalus...

The Pathology Museum was created in 1824 at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, built in 1288 by the father of Dante’s muse Beatrice. It wasn’t until 1742 when there was a move to create a medical academy to formalize the sharing of information among doctors and scientists.

It took another eighty years to establish the Florentine Medical-Physical Society. One of the first acts of the Society was to set up a Pathological Museum. It was not a museum for the public, but rather a repository for information about the pathology and medical-surgical treatment of diseases...

Due to the difficulty of ensuring correct conservation of the pathological materials, it was decided to have some duplicates fabricated in wax. The Museum’s model-makers studied the techniques practiced in the other wax-modeling laboratory in Florence, La Specola.

Surprisingly realistic models were fabricated, providing a fascinating glimpse of the major pathologies in the 19th century. The collection of anatomical wax figures includes numerous wax reproductions, mainly the work of Giuseppe Ricci, Luigi Calamai and Egisto Tortori.

A remarkable example of symbiosis between science and art, the wax models were important, above all, for their value in teaching, allowing professors to illustrate the most important diseases to future physicians without having to depend the dissection of cadavers or the preservation of diseased organs....

Osservatorio dei Saperi e delle Arti (OSA)
Open: Monday – Friday 10am – 5pm, Saturday 10am – 1pm (Free)
Ends: February 12, 2011
Address: Largo Brambilla 3, New Entrance of Careggi Hospital

Click here to read the full story and see more images. Images and video above drawn from the Tuscan Traveler website.

If you are free tomorrow night, why not come down to Observatory to take in a talk with James Walsh, artist behind the current exhibition The Arctic Plants of New York City, for a discussion about collecting, botanicals, and the artistic process?

Full details follow; very much hope to see you there.

An artist’s talk with writer and artist James Walsh
Date: Tuesday, January 18
Time: 8:00
Admission: $5

Artist and writer James Walsh will talk about the making of his current installation, The Arctic Plants of New York City, and its place in his larger project of discovering the surprising number of plants that are common to both New York City and the arctic. As an introduction to the project and a demonstration of how it evolved, Walsh will read selections from a series of letters he wrote to friend while his plans for the project were just beginning to form. After that, he will speak a little about how the plants, texts, and images he collected were distilled down into the present installation.

You can find out more about this event on the Observatory website by clicking here and can can access the event on Facebook here. You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

Image: Pressed Trifolium repens, or White Clover, by James Walsh

Some of you might remember Morbid Anatomy's coverage of last year's wonderful and amazing Congress for Curious People. I am now in the process of co-organizing this year's Congress, which will also serve as the launch event for my new exhibition at the Coney Island Museum entitled The Great Coney Island Spectacularium.

For this year's 10-day Congress--which begins on April 8 and ends on April 17th, 2011--Coney Island USA is keen to add a kind of arts, crafts, and curiosities fair featuring all things uncanny, unusual, or sideshow related.

Below is the official call for vendors. Please feel free to pass this along to interested parties:

The Congress of Curious Peoples is seeking unusual vendors for it’s Colonnade of Curiosities. April 8-17. High end, low brow and things in between. But your products must be interesting. Art, Jewelery, sideshow related items, the strange, the bizarre and the macabre...

Please email: congressvendors@gmail.com with a full description of your work and a link to a website and or photos. Due to the many submissions and limited space, we will contact only those we are considering.

To find out more, or if you would like to submit work, please email: congressvendors@gmail.com. To find out more about last year's Congress, click here; to find out about The Great Coney Island Spectacularium, click here.

Image: From Obscura Antiques and Oddities

Body voyaging through anatomical history this Monday at Observatory! Full details follow; hope to see you there.

An illustrated lecture with Kristen Ann Ehrenberger
Date: Monday, January 17th
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5

We human beings have a seemingly insatiable desire to experience the bodies underneath our skins. While many scholars have treated the subject of looking into or through bodies via medical imaging, one perhaps understudied trope is that of “body voyaging.” A few writers and artists have imagined what it would be like to travel inside a body, to be a searching body in a body as landscape. This presentation will use images and text from a few more and less well-known 20th and 21st-century “fantastic voyages” to ask questions like, Is the purpose of such “biotourism” to make these spaces foreign or familiar? What kinds of relationships between our bodies and ourselves are being promoted? And perhaps most pressing of all, could you really do that?

Kristen Ann Ehrenberger is a Doctoral Candidate in History and a Third-Year Medical Student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her primary research interests lie in the creation and circulation of scientific and medical knowledge in professional and lay communities, but she has also used her interdisciplinary proclivities to develop a theory of memory consolidation with some neuroscientists and an anthropologist (MIT Press, forthcoming). She is currently living in Dresden and researching her Dissertation, “The Politics of the Table: Nutrition and the Volkskörper in Saxon Germany, 1900-1933? with the support of a Travel Grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). She is thrilled Observatory has given her the opportunity to try out this project on an audience of the enthusiastic and curious.

You can find out more about this event on the Observatory website by clicking here and can can access the event on Facebook here. You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

Image: From Heumann Heilmittel, “Eine Reise durch den menschlichen Körper” (1941)

You’d better believe that my child will have this Animal Magic wallpaper in their room.

Animal Magic explores children’s fascination with the macabre in a light-hearted way by presenting a slightly sinister side of the traditional, benign family pet. We’ve printed the pet’s skeleton on top of its silhouette in a varnish of the same color. This means it shouldn’t show at night – so it’s not too scary when the lights are out. But it catches the light during the day when all the spooks are gone. So the children’s interest in the dark and scary can be indulged in an intriguing and still be beautiful way.

Designed by Paperboy and available at Wallpaper Collective for $185 per roll.

[via YoungandBrilliant]

Looking for other anatomically themed products?  Check out the recently opened Street Anatomy gallery store!

These crafty images were made by Jung von Matt for an advertising campaign for Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker. The message is a strong one— every 43 seconds someone dies from gun violence. The grenade may be the only slightly out of place image among the other guns, but violence is violence, and these images are a skillful representation of it’s consequences.

[via bldgwlf]

Correction: These images were originally created by artist, Francois Robert for his Stop the Violence series.  The independent advertising agency, Jung von Matt (Jvm), created the advertising campaign.  Thanks to Jamie for giving the correct credit.