Vintage Illustrations
neurophilosophy | March 23, 2010Click to enlarge images
ARTISTS employ a number of different techniques to represent implied motion in two-dimensional works. One of these, commonly used in posters, comics and animation, is the affine shear effect, whereby a moving object is depicted as leaning into the direction of movement. Cartoonists also use action lines to depict movement and speed, with straight lines conveying fast movements and wavy lines conveying slower ones. Motion can also be conveyed by superimposing several images showing the successive positions of a movement, or by a blurred image showing the different…
neurophilosophy | February 21, 2009
These gorgeous stipple-engraved plates come from The Anatomy of the Brain, Explained in a Series of Engravings, by Sir Charles Bell. The book was first published in 1802 and contained 12 plates, 11 of which were printed in colour; these come from an edition which appeared in 1823.
In the introduction to the book, Bell wrote:
In the Brain the appearance is so peculiar, and so little capable of illustration from other parts of the body, the surfaces are so soft, and so easily destroyed by rude dissection, and it is so difficult to follow an abstract description merely, that this part of…
neurophilosophy | December 24, 2008Merry Christmas to all my readers. (Or rather Happy Holidays, as many of you, being in America, might say.)
This card is one of a set by Ernst Haeckel which, when expanded, became Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms in Nature), the masterpiece of biological illustration.
neurophilosophy | December 14, 2008
These beautiful watercolour drawings of diseased brain sections come from a book called Reports on Medical Cases, Selected with a View to Illustrate the Symptoms and Cure of Diseases by a Reference to Morbid Anatomy, by Richard Bright.
Bright's book was published in 1827, but these illustrations appeared in a separate volume accompanying the second part of the work, which was published in 1831, and devoted to the pathology of the nervous system.
The complete work included approximately 300 plates. These illustrations are by Frederick Richard Say (1805-1860), a successful portrait…
neurophilosophy | November 14, 2008The current issue of Nature contains an interesting article about Sir Christopher Wren's contribution to neuroanatomy, by art historians Martin Kemp and Nathan Flis of Oxford University.
The article focuses on the anatomical illustrations produced by Wren for Thomas Willis's 1664 book Cerebri Anatome (The Anatomy of the Brain). This was a landmark publication in the history of neurology, not least because of Wren's detailed and accurate figures, which were among the very first modern images of brain anatomy. Even so, this aspect of Wren's work was overshadowed by his architectural designs,…
neurophilosophy | July 4, 2008The Kaibo Zonshinzu is a beautiful collection of 83 anatomical illustrations on two scrolls, by a doctor named Yasukazu Minagaki from the Kyoto area. Painted in 1819, they are based on the observations he made during his dissections of more than 40 executed criminals.
Minagaki adopted the style of illustrators such as Johann Adam Kulmus. His drawings were seen by Philipp von Siebold, the Dutch anatomist who is believed to have been the first European to teach Western medicine in Japan; he was so impressed by them that he made a complimentary inscription on the first scroll.
The collection…
neurophilosophy | June 9, 2008
Plate XIII: Encysted tumour of the brain, from Robert Hooper's Morbid Anatomy of the Human Brain (1828). 14 more plates from the book, and many other wonderful vintage illustrations, can be viewed at Images from the Past.
(Via where else but the excellent - and now 1-year-old - Morbid Anatomy?)
neurophilosophy | January 24, 2008The operation of Trepan, from Illustrations of the Great Operations of Surgery: Trepan, Hernia, Amputation, Aneurism and Lithotomy, by Charles Bell, 1815. (John Martin Rare Book Room at the University of Iowa's Hardin Library for the Health Sciences.)Trepanation, or trephination (both derived from the Greek word trypanon, meaning "to bore") is perhaps the oldest form of neurosurgery. The procedure, which is called a craniotomy in medical terminology, involves the removal of a piece of bone from the skull, and it has been performed since prehistoric times. The oldest trepanned skull, found at…