Year: 2019
-
Scoliosis
Augusta Zetterling was one of the first women in Sweden to make a living as a photographer. This photo is from a series she took of women and girls with a curvature of the spine called scoliosis. Whereas mild cases of scoliosis may have little effect on a patient’s life, more severe cases can cause…
-
Ether dome
The first operation using ether as anesthesia took place in 1846. This daguerreotype is not of that operation, but rather is a recreation of the event. The patient is unknown, but the surgeons include John Mason Warren, John Collins Warren, George Hayward, and Solomon D. Townsend. Following the first use of ether, the operating theater…
-
Christ at the bedside
Jesus sits by the bedside of the girl he has just raised from the dead. He is holding the girl’s hand and looks tenderly into her eyes. He has just truly affected a cure, unlike the physicians of old confined by necessity to the dictum of “guérir parfois, soulager souvent, consoler toujours”*—usually attributed to the…
-
Children at play in the East London Hospital for Children
The first hospital for children in London was established with ten beds in 1866 during a terrible cholera epidemic. It relied entirely on charity, was enlarged in 1875 and subsequently expanded, merged, and incorporated into larger facilities until it was closed after the introduction of the National Health Service in 1948. At the time it…
-
Sydney clinic
In the Australian state of New South Wales, a system of medical inspection of schoolchildren was organized in 1913 and arrangements were made to examine each child at least twice during their periods of school attendance, which was compulsory between the ages of seven and fourteen years. The inspections were conducted by a staff of…
-
The wax models of Clemente Susini (1752–1814)
Clemente Susini is remembered for creating what is probably the most extensive collection of anatomical wax works in the world. He first studied sculpture in Florence, but in 1773 became an apprentice there at the museum of natural history in a workshop recently established to produce wax models for teaching anatomy. Within a few years…
-
Fleas in art and medicine
Fleas cause itching and red bite marks on their hosts but are nowadays mainly a nuisance. This was not always so. In the Middle Ages they spread bubonic plague from rats to man, causing the Black Death epidemics that killed 25 million people—up to 50% of the Europe’s population. They also transmit the agents causing…
-
Opening the left ventricle
This image is from Henry W. Cattell’s 1905 Post-mortem pathology; a manual of post-mortem examinations and the interpretations to be drawn therefrom; a practical treatise for students and practioners. It shows the approach for opening the left ventricle after the heart is removed from the body. Highlighted Vignette Volume 12, Issue 4 – Fall 2020…
-
Four Women Dancing
The urge to move to music is universal. Dancing represents an essential part of human culture, and acts as a social unifier, increasing cohesion in a group. Collective effervescence, a concept created by sociologist Émile Durkheim, is what sits at the heart of dancing and gives it its unifying power. A more unified community is…
-
Sawing to the bone
This illustration, believed to be the frontispiece of one of the surgical texts by Walter Hermann Ryff, is perhaps one of the more realistic for its time. During this era, anatomical and medical texts tended to be fairly bloodless, portraying flayed human beings in states of repose. Here instead we see a leg amputation with…