Hello everyone, and thank you so much for subscribing! To kick this off, I thought I’d chat a wee bit about what I was up to at the end of 2023.
The autumn was insanely busy for me, so here are a few of my highlights. The first was a conference in the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave in Leiden, discussing medical collections in museums. I talked about Surgeons’ Hall, and from this photo appear to have been wearing a bustle while doing so!
I especially loved Evi Numan’s incredibly thoughtful presentation which talked about the medical museum as a place of productive conflict which could interrogate our thoughts about life and death. The trip also gave me a chance to revisit the anatomical collections of both the Boerhaave and the University. The Boerhaave Museum is named for Herman Boerhaave, a hugely influential physician who popularised the idea of ‘bedside medicine’ at the turn of the eighteenth century. This was the idea that diagnosis should be based on a combination of theoretical knowledge and direct observation of the patient - at the bedside. Here in Edinburgh, those who founded the Medical School in 1726 had studied under Boerhaave. It also gave me a chance to visit Amsterdam. I somehow have never been to the city before, so I spent a night on a boat and took a visit to the magnificent collection at the Vrolik Museum. The less positive part of the trip was picking up covid while I was there. October saw me in London where I’d been invited to speak at the Royal Society of Medicine. My topic was the way that preserved human remains and anatomical models developed as a way to accompany dissection in the study of anatomy - one of my favourites. If that wasn’t exciting enough, the following night found me at Highgate Cemetery talking about Frankenstein as part of London Month of the Dead. A friend pointed out that this is my equivalent of getting a gig at Wembley. After the talk we were all led up to the Egyptian Avenue in the dark, a slow, funereal procession with the only thing to guide our way being a hand on the shoulder of the person in front. It was a magical experience.
November found me in Italy, where I was giving a talk with the fabulous Giovanni Magno of the Morgagni Museum about connections between Edinburgh and Padua illustrated through their anatomical theatres. The venue was the Archiginnasio in Bologna, which houses arguably the most beautiful anatomical theatre, which I’ve written about before on my blog (https://thesewanderingbones.wordpress.com/2019/05/08/a-home-for-dissection/). I’ve also used this picture of me at the dissection table in many a talk!
While in Bologna I returned to the Palazzo Poggi, where I took a lot of photos - and immediately backed them up to the cloud. Not long after I was here in 2016, I had a wee accident involving my phone and a bottle in my bag which I hadn’t put the top on properly, leading to the death of my phone and the loss of most of the photos I’d taken. One of the star attractions of the Palazzo Poggi is the collection of wax anatomical models produced in the eighteenth century ‘lady anatomist’ Anna Morandi Manzolini. She’s something of a hero of mine, and it was amazing to see her self portrait in wax once again. She stands there with a head in front of her, opened to expose the brain. She claimed to have dissected more than one thousand cadavers in the workshop she and her husband ran from their home. I’ve just submitted a chapter about her for a forthcoming book on anatomical teaching, but if you want to know more, I’d highly recommend Rebecca Messbarger’s excellent biography The Lady Anatomist
There was also Surgeons’ Hall’s first Museums at Night event where I got to talk to many (horrified!) people about parasites. It was a lot of fun, and if you’re in Edinburgh and want to hear more I’ll be doing a lunchtime lecture on the subject in February
It hasn’t all been work - Dan and I managed to finally have a covid-delayed trip to Cawood Castle, just south of York, where Maisie settled into the four poster lifestyle very nicely
While in Cawood we got to see a rather fine skeleton tomb, the memorial to the memory of Sir John Hotham in St Mary's Church, South Dalton. Hotham was an English member of parliament who was beheaded along with his son in 1645 during the civil war. It shows him reclining in the finery of his position as a baronet on the upper level, supported by figures representing the cardinal virtues, while below he is a skeleton stripped of worldly goods
When I was studying forensics at university, my number one textbook was Simpson’s Forensic Medicine, and I can’t say how fascinating I found Keith Simpson’s autobiography, which accompanied me on some of these travels.
I also had a wee trip to Portugal, where I was able to indulge my ossuary addiction very nicely. One of the things I love about my little interests is the way they take me to all sorts of out of the way places that I wouldn’t otherwise see. The ossuaries were - of course - beautiful, sad, and endlessly fascinating, but I also get to treasure other memories, like vino verde and cheese in a wee taverna across the street, and the breeze in my hair as I looked across the sea from the church steps. There were also divinely surreal moments - in Faro, the back window of the ossuary opens onto the yard of a nursery school, so as I stood there contemplating mortality, I could hear the children playing behind me. It seemed appropriate.
There are other things I could talk about, but that’s probably enough for now. Please let me what you think of this, or if there’s anything else you’d like me to talk about. There are some exciting things happening this week, but that is for next time…
Cx
Damn that is a FINE transi tomb. How do you fit everything into your life? and then write about it. In awe