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This collection of essays comprises short "biographies" of a number of famous taxidermied animals. Each essay traces the life, death and museum "afterlife" of a specific creature, illuminating the overlooked role of the dead beast in the modern human-animal encounter through practices as disparate as hunting and zookeeping.
This title brings together curators and scholars to open up new perspectives on the past, present and future of medical museums in Europe and North America.
An in-depth study of the variety of collections of human remains in Britain in the long nineteenth century
A Smithsonian Book of the Year A Nature Book of the Year “Provides much-needed foundation of the relationship between museums and Native Americans.” —Smithsonian In 1864 a US Army doctor dug up the remains of a Dakota man who had been killed in Minnesota and sent the skeleton to a museum in Washington that was collecting human remains for research. In the “bone rooms” of the Smithsonian, a scientific revolution was unfolding that would change our understanding of the human body, race, and prehistory. Seeking evidence to support new theories of racial classification, collectors embarked on a global competition to recover the best specimens of skeletons, mummies, and fossils. As the ...
Comprising fifteen essays by leading authorities in the history of mathematics, this volume aims to exemplify the richness, diversity, and breadth of mathematical practice from the seventeenth century through to the middle of the nineteenth century.
The human body in scientific and artistic representations Around 1800 anatomy as a discipline rose to scientific prominence as it undergirded the Paris-centred clinical revolution in medicine. Although classical anatomy gradually lost ground in the following centuries in favor of new disciplines based on microscopic analysis, general anatomy nevertheless remained pivotal in the teaching of medicine. Corpses, anatomical preparations, models, and drawings were used more intensively than ever before. Moreover, anatomy received new forms of public visibility. Through public exhibitions and lectures in museums and fairgrounds, anatomy became part of general education and secured a place in popula...
Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain brings together historians with a wide range of interests to take a uniquely wide-lens view of how technology and the environment have been intimately and irreversibly entangled in Britain over the last 300 years. It combines, for the first time, two perspectives with much to say about Britain since the industrial revolution: the history of technology and environmental history. Technologies are modified environments, just as nature is to varying extents engineered. Furthermore, technologies and our living and non-living environment are both predominant material forms of organisation – and self-organisation – that surround and make us. Both have changed over time, in intersecting ways. Technologies discussed in the collection include bulldozers, submarine cables, automobiles, flood barriers, medical devices, museum displays and biotechnologies. Environments investigated include bogs, cities, farms, places of natural beauty and pollution, land and sea. The book explores this diversity but also offers an integrated framework for understanding these intersections.
Sir Charles Bell was among the last of a generation medical men who formed their careers, their research, and their publications through the private classrooms of early-nineteenth-century London; whose ambitions for reform were fundamentally about conserving something quintessentially British; and whose politics were shaped by the exigencies of developing a living through various kinds of patronage in a time when careers in medical science simply did not exist. Within a decade or two that world was gone. Professionalization and regularized educationthe ambitions of reformershad been realized, along with regular career paths. With that change, the classroom shattered, its functions divided among other spaces, each with its own audience and function: the laboratory, the clinic, the classroom. They are the spaces of modern medicine, the ones we recognize today, and we see them as the hallmark of medical science. Through Bell s story, artfully told by the author, we witness medical science and medical reform in London s classrooms at a time when modern medicine, with its practical universities with set curricula, staffed by medical professionals, was being born. "
Comprehensive overview of the University of Michigan's Museums, Libraries, and collections
'Useful Objects' examines the cultural history of nineteenth-century American museums through the eyes of writers, visitors, and collectors. Throughout this period, museums gradually transformed from encyclopedic cabinets to more specialized public institutions. These changes prompted wider debates about how museums determine what objects to select, preserve, and display-and who gets to decide. Drawing on a wide range of archival materials and accounts in fiction, guidebooks, and periodicals, this text shows how the challenges facing nineteenth-century museums continue to resonate in debates about their role in American culture today.