By Michael Sappol Originally published in Hidden Treasure: The National Library of Medicine, 2011. In the early decades of the twentieth century a modernizing imperative took hold. Suddenly it seemed that a new age was dawning—an era of new technologies, fashions, and political philosophies—modern times. In the aftermath of the Great War (1914–1918), with the […]
Tag Archives: anatomy
Erdheim’s Autopsy: A Silent Film Fragment
posted by Circulating Now
Circulating Now welcomes guest bloggers Tatjana Buklijas, Birgit Nemec, and Katrin Pilz whose recent essay “Erdheim’s Autopsy: Dissection, motion pictures, and the politics of health in Red Vienna” on the NLM website Medical Movies on the Web discusses a fragment of silent film in the NLM historical collections: Herr Professor Doktor Jakob Erdheim, 1933, which […]
“Wrapped in flesh”: Views of the body in East Asian Medicine
posted by Circulating Now
Circulating Now welcomes guest blogger Yi-Li Wu. Dr. Wu is a Center Associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, and a Research Fellow of EASTmedicine, University of Westminster and an organizer of the recent workshop Comparative perspectives on body materiality and structure in the history of Sinitic and East […]
A Portal of Death
posted by Circulating Now
By Elizabeth Mullen Are you ready to walk and talk with the skeletons? It’s Halloween again. As the nights get longer and leaves turn and fall, many will spend the dark evening communing with spooks, specters and skeletons and pondering frightening images of death. The ‘portal of death’ above is the Frontispiece from Bernardino Genga’s […]
The Mysterious Case of Petr Anokhin, Soviet Scientific Cinema, and the Conjoined Twins
posted by Circulating Now
Circulating Now welcomes guest blogger Nikolai Krementsov. Dr. Krementsov is Professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology of the University of Toronto. He is the author of several books and numerous articles on the history of biomedical sciences in Russia and the Soviet Union. In 1957, the USSR Academy […]
The Human Body in Pictures—Jacob Sarnoff
posted by Circulating Now
Circulating Now welcomes guest blogger Miriam Posner. Dr. Posner is the Digital Humanities program coordinator and a member of the core DH faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her Ph.D., from Yale University, is in Film Studies and American Studies. She is one of the confirmed participants in the upcoming April 2016 workshop […]
Physiological Ads for the Modern Self
posted by Circulating Now
By Michael Sappol Fritz Kahn (1888–1968), a German-Jewish physician-author, was the first great exponent of the conceptual medical illustration—illustrations that go beyond the representation of human anatomy to visually explain processes that occur within the human body. His published works, aimed at a mass readership, contain thousands of imaginative images, produced by a cadre of […]