The Eyes Have It

Will return October 6th.

“Dr. Kelly was a surgery resident at Mayo from 1949 to 1953 before practicing in Sioux City, Iowa as a general surgeon. As an extension of his interest in surgery, he developed over the course of several decades a book collection which represents four centuries of the history of anatomical illustration.

The books selected from his gift for display highlight the changes in both the formats and techniques employed in the dissemination of anatomical information. While there is evidence that the Greeks practiced human dissection as early as 300 B.C, scribes made errors in copying the illustrations done from these investigations. It was not until the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century that anatomical findings were documented and shared on a widespread basis.“

There’s not much in the way of explanation, and the layout isn’t particularly sophisticated, but many of the images in this collection are pretty amazing. And many are (as is to be expected given the subject matter) pretty disturbing. This is only one of the many, many projects undertaken Dr. Silvia Helena Cardoso of the State University of Campinas, Brazil.

[via G3RM]

Meant to mention this NYT article a while ago:

“The AIDS-prevention campaign was started two years ago with hard-hitting images: one showed a coffin, another a sidewalk strewn with cadavers. The lighter-hearted effort by the mayor’s office this year, including the distribution of 500,000 free condoms, is called “Paris Plasirs, Paris Capotes” (“Paris Pleasures, Paris Rubbers”). The posters are illustrated by Jean-Louis Cornalba. “

They “combine a cartoonish imagination with the French proclivity for sexy, semiotic irony. The wedding of prophylactics and historical landmarks has delighted both Parisians and the capital’s millions of tourists so much that the mayor’s office has received many requests for copies of them. This summer when the banks of the Seine are turned into an extravagant beachfront, the government plans to pass out more than 100,000 postcards of the designs.“

Great image resource from Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Anaesthetics.

“The departmental museum was collected by Richard “Dicky” Salt over many years, from a wide variety of sources in the UK and abroad. The collection had never been adequately listed, so in early 1997 it was professionally catalogued by Audrey Eccles. The whole collection was then photographed by Nick White of Oxford Medical Illustration. All the photographs (about 320 images on 35mm slides) were digitised, and stored as high resolution TIFF and low resolution JPEG files. Images can be browsed by category, or selected by searching for keyword(s). Items which match the search criteria are displayed as thumbnails. Clicking on the thumbnails in either mode results in a larger version of the image being displayed, with its full catalogue listing.“

26MB image files can be obtained by contacting the NDA. Licensing and usage information is available on the site.