Are you missing our collections as much we are? You can always view some items in our digital image library and on the Internet Archive.
Now we’re inviting you to interact with our digital images in a brand new way! Inspired by the annual GIF IT UP! contest, we’re asking you to create original animated GIFs using select digital content from our image library.
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– by Wood Institute travel grantee Maureen Cummins*
I spent a fascinating week this past summer at the Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia conducting research for a limited-edition artist’s book, Commitment. Like many of my titles, Commitment is a double-entendre, referring both to a marital or romantic bond and hospitalization for insanity. Suffice to say, the project explores the connection between intimate human relationships and mental illness.
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– by Wood Institute travel grantee Heather Christle*
In 1906, Alvin Borgquist–a little-known graduate student at Clark University–published the world’s first in-depth psychological study of crying, and then appears to have vanished back into a quiet, private life in his native Utah. His study is moving, strange, detached, threaded through with the racist and colonialist assumptions common to this era (and, distressingly, our own). The questionnaire he crafted to solicit data on typical crying behaviors fascinates me, forming as it does a kind of accidental poem. Here, for instance, is Borgquist’s first question:
As a child did you ever cry till you almost lost consciousness or things seemed to change about you? Describe a cry with utter abandon. Did it bring a sense of utter despair? Describe as fully as you can such an experience in yourself, your subjective feelings, how it grew, what caused and increased it, its physical symptoms, and all its after effects. What is wanted is a picture of a genuine and unforced fit or crisis of pure misery.[1]
– by Jessica Sara Sternbach*
The frontispieces and title pages of early anatomical texts served as teasers for many Early Modern readers, offering the primary information necessary to engage with the text. Once the spine was cracked opened, the viewer would encounter these new medical ideas for the first time, whether it be the authority of a post-Vesalian anatomist as in the Anatomia reformata by Steven Blankaart (1695), the philosophical prowess and artistic pride of William Cheselden and Gerard van der Gucht’s Anatomy of the Human Body (1740), or the sublime awe of the embryology of Nicolaas Hoboken’s Anatomia secundinae (1675). The illustrations in these books drew upon existing visual language in order to decrypt the unfamiliar medical subject matter. Mastery was needed from both the artist and the anatomist, who were trying to comprehend and clarify what it meant to be human.
– by Wood Institute travel grantee Marieke Hendriksen*
As a historian of art and science, I am particularly interested in the exchange of knowledge and skills between visual artists and medical men in writing and practice in the 18th century. Last year, the F.C. Wood Institute at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia awarded me a travel grant to study the collaboration between artists and anatomists in Philadelphia in the first decades of the College (est. 1787). It has long been known that anatomists and visual artists worked closely together in the production of anatomical atlases and models in early modern Europe, and sometimes were even united in the same person. An extensive corpus of literature about anatomical preparations and illustrations exists, yet little attention has been paid thus far to the development, understanding and transmission of various other techniques for depicting the body among artists and anatomists. My research fills that gap by focusing on the development and exchange of techniques like plaster casting, wax, wood, and papier-mâché modelling among artists and anatomists. The practices and resources in the early decades of the College of Physicians in Philadelphia form a fascinating case for this research project as they developed in conjunction with similar practices in Europe, yet were in a sense also geographically isolated.