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In Elegant Anatomy Marieke Hendriksen offers an account of the material culture of the eighteenth-century Leiden anatomical collections, which have not been studied in detail before. The author introduces the novel analytical concept of aesthesis, as these historical medical collections may seem strange, and undeniably have a morbid aesthetic, yet are neither curiosities nor art. As this book deals with issues related to the keeping and displaying of historical human remains, it is highly relevant for material culture and museum studies, cultural history, the history of scientific collections and the history of medicine alike. Unlike existing literature on historical anatomical collections, this book takes the objects in the collections as its starting point, instead of the people that created them.
This Encyclopedia offers a fresh, integrated and creative perspective on the formation and foundations of philosophy and science in European modernity. Combining careful contextual reconstruction with arguments from traditional philosophy, the book examines methodological dimensions, breaks down traditional oppositions such as rationalism vs. empiricism, calls attention to gender issues, to ‘insiders and outsiders’, minor figures in philosophy, and underground movements, among many other topics. In addition, and in line with important recent transformations in the fields of history of science and early modern philosophy, the volume recognizes the specificity and significance of early mod...
Fleshing out surfaces is the first English-language book on skin and flesh tones in art. It considers flesh and skin in art theory, image making and medical discourse in seventeenth to nineteenth-century France. Describing a gradual shift between the early modern and the modern period, it argues that what artists made when imitating human nakedness was not always the same. Initially understood in terms of the body's substance, of flesh tones and body colour, it became increasingly a matter of skin, skin colour and surfaces. Each chapter is dedicated to a different notion of skin and its colour, from flesh tones via a membrane imbued with nervous energy to hermetic borderline. Looking in particular at works by Fragonard, David, Girodet, Benoist and Ingres, the focus is on portraits, as facial skin is a special arena for testing painterly skills and a site where the body and the image become equally expressive.
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This volume provides a series of illuminating perspectives on the timings of death, through in-depth studies of Shakespearean tragedy, criminal execution, embalming practices, fears of premature burial, rumours of Adolf Hitler’s survival, and the legal concept of brain death. In doing so, it explores a number of questions, including: how do we know if someone is dead or not? What do people experience at the moment when they die? Is death simply a biological event that comes about in temporal stages of decomposition, or is it a social event defined through cultures, practices, and commemorations? In other words, when exactly is death? Taken together, these contributions explore how death emerges in a series of stages that are uncertain, paradoxical, and socially contested.
This book examines literary representations of hyperlocal spaces that subvert the idea of grounded and organic spatial identities. Figures such as the pond, the scientific particle, and Wedgwood creamware often go unnoticed, but they exemplify important shifts in culture and aesthetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary Space argues that these objects, as well as locations such as alcoves in remote shires, city inns, and mountain retreats, were portrayed by writers in the late eighteenth and early-to-mid nineteenth centuries as gambits that challenged cultural hegemonies. It shows that the hyperlocal space or object, though particular, reaches beyond itself, affording an elasticity that can allow those things that seem beneath notice to reveal broader cultural significance.
Knowledge and Context in Tibetan Medicine is a collection of ten essays in which a team of international scholars describe and interpret Tibetan medical knowledge. With subjects ranging from the relationship between Tibetan and Greco-Arab conceptions of the bodily humors, to the rebranding of Tibetan precious pills for cross-cultural consumption in the People’s Republic of China, each chapter explores representations and transformations of medical concepts across different historical, cultural, and/or intellectual contexts. Taken together this volume offers new perspectives on both well-known Tibetan medical texts and previously unstudied sources, blazing new trails and expanding the scope of the academic study of Tibetan medicine. Contributors include: Henk W.A. Blezer, Yang Ga, Tony Chui, Katharina Sabernig, Tawni Tidwell, Tsering Samdrup, Carmen Simioli, William A. McGrath, Susannah Deane and Barbara Gerke
Introduction: picturing pregnancy -- Part I: Early printed birth figures (1540-1672). Using images in midwifery practice; Pluralistic images and the early modern body -- Part II: Birth figures as agents of change (1672-1751). Visual experiments; Visualizing touch and defining a professional persona -- Part III: The birth figure persists (1751-1774). Challenging the Hunterian hegemony -- Conclusion.
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the use of experimental approaches to the study of media histories and their cultures. Doing media archaeological experiments, such as historical re-enactments and hands-on simulations with media historical objects, helps us to explore and better understand the workings of past media technologies and their practices of use. By systematically refl ecting on the methodological underpinnings of experimental media archaeology as a relatively new approach in media historical research and teaching, this book aims to serve as a practical handbook for doing media archaeological experiments. Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Practice is the twin volume to Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Theory, authored by Andreas Fickers and Annie van den Oever.
Anatomy museums around the world showcase preserved corpses in service of education and medical advancement, but they are little-known and have been largely hidden from the public eye. Elizabeth Hallam here investigates the anatomy museum and how it reveals the fascination and fears that surround the dead body in Western societies. Hallam explores the history of these museums and how they operate in the current cultural environment. Their regulated access increasingly clashes with evolving public mores toward the exposed body, as demonstrated by the international popularity of the Body Worlds exhibition. The book examines such related topics as artistic works that employ the images of dead bodies and the larger ongoing debate over the disposal of corpses. Issues such as aesthetics and science, organ and body donations, and the dead body in Western religion and ritual are also discussed here in fascinating depth. The Anatomy Museum unearths a strange and compelling cultural history that investigates the ideas of preservation, human rituals of death, and the spaces that our bodies occupy in this life and beyond.
Almost every medical faculty possesses anatomical and/or pathological collections: human and animal preparations, wax- and other models, as well as drawings, photographs, documents and archives relating to them. In many institutions these collections are well-preserved, but in others they are poorly maintained and rendered inaccessible to medical and other audiences. This volume explores the changing status of anatomical collections from the early modern period to date. It is argued that anatomical and pathological collections are medically relevant not only for future generations of medical faculty and future research, but they are also important in the history of medicine, the history of t...