anatomy

Many of the objects held by museums of science and medicine are significant because they have been used in the production of knowledge and scientific enquiry. This blog post discusses how we might display such objects in ways that draw on their potential to generate scientific knowledge as well as their cultural history and materiality. […]

At the conference ‘Cultures of Anatomical Collections held in Leiden last month, several participants expressed worries about the fate of anatomical and pathological collection around the world. Following up on this, Ruth Richardson (King’s and Hongkong), Cindy Stelmackowich (New York Academy of Medicine and Carleton University), Rob Zwijnenberg (Leiden) and Rina Knoeff (Leiden) have drafted a […]

A luminous, fabric-draped box containing ten audience members clutching ten life-like baby dolls. An accompanying host of doll-figures in various states of sartorial and bodily undress, creepily moving (or moved) around the space. Two performers giddily flying through a fragmented set of scenes that invite the audience to sit with the tensions of being a […]

A couple of months ago, I announced a three day meeting titled ‘Cultures of Anatomical Collections’, which some of our good medical museum colleagues in Leiden were about to put together for mid-February 2012. Their aim was to explore anatomical preparations and collections as cultural heritage rather than scientific collections; they were interested in what the technical details of anatomical preparations tell us about […]

If you have watched the Norwegian movie, The Troll Hunter, you know how to beat trolls. Simply point a UV lamp at the troll and its body instantly turns to stone. According to the lead troll hunter, the “trolls’ adverse reaction to sunlight is due to their inability to convert Vitamin D into calcium, which […]