BOOK: Object Lessons - The Teaching Tools of 19th-century Life Science

[Ryan Goble]

Cool looking book for art, science, history and education buffs!

From The Guardian review:

If there is one takeaway message from Object Lessons it is that small, apparently undistinguished objects can also be spectacular, if only you stop long enough to look. Consider, for instance, a wild turkey that has been flayed of skin and feather and now helpfully presents its multicoloured innards to the world. The bird’s jaunty demeanour is explained by the fact that this isn’t the real thing, but rather a papier-mache anatomical model made by Dr Louis Thomas Jérôme Auzoux, a Normandy naturalist who cornered the market in producing what is, essentially, the stuff of nightmares – exploding animal carcasses. All Auzoux’s medical and veterinary models come apart so that, for the student, the experience was like working on a real dissection, but minus the smells and the squelching.

Squeamishness was just one of the reasons why the 19th-century medical schools moved away from “live” dissections to using paste and wax simulacra. Another was the shortage of remains: grave robbing was no longer a practical option, and the proliferation of institutions teaching science meant that there simply weren’t enough stiffs to go round. Crucially, too, nature was horribly wasteful. Once you had cut up a corpse, or a cow or even a plant, it wasn’t good for much besides the incinerator. An articulated model, by contrast, could be used to instruct generation after generation with only minimal wear and tear. Ironically, too, these representations of nature were frequently more legible than the real thing, which often turned out to be disappointingly lopsided or incomplete. With a Platonic ideal of a human torso or spikelet of winter wheat in front of you, there were no nasty surprises.

The book's official website is HERE.