Being Disturbingly Informative. By Shane McCorristine
Last year I visited a fine old building nestled incongruously close to the skyscrapers and busy financial offices of Market Street in downtown Philadelphia. The building houses the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the oldest private medical organisation in the United States (founded in 1787). Today, Philadelphia’s heyday as the centre of medical and […]
The Diary of a Dissection: Jane Jamieson and the Newcastle Barber Surgeons. By Patrick Low
The recent furore in France, over the wearing of Burkinis, has shone a new light on an age-old societal problem; the female body. Nowhere was the shock of a woman’s form greater than on the c18th and c19th anatomists’ slab. The prospect of total exposure to the eyes of an uncaring crowd and the […]
Rest in Pieces: The story of a hanged woman and her journey to becoming a museum object. By Ali Wells
When referring to “skeletons in the cupboard” we rarely expect these to be literally true, but in the case of Mary Ann Higgins and the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry, it is. In the early 1970s the Herbert acquired an unusual and unique object – the head of the penultimate woman […]
Summertime, and the Gibbeting ain’t Easy… By Emma Battell Lowman
Today is officially the first day of summer, and I welcome the season this year particularly grateful for something that this time last year hadn’t even crossed my mind. Thank goodness Britain no longer practices gibbeting! Between the bouts of monsoon-style rain, the sun is bursting through here in Leicester making for uneven […]
The Bloody Business of the Bloody Code: Dissecting the Criminal Corpse. By Elizabeth Hurren
Imagine hearing local gossip that a notorious murderer was about to be executed, and that everyone in the vicinity of a homicide was planning to turn out to see the violent culprit punished in Georgian England. Getting to the gallows to secure a good spot would mean having to take an unpaid half-day off […]
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