v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Seba's Natural Curiosities

Albertus Seba at Bibliokept

From Strange Science blog:

Born in 1665, Albertus Seba decided, while still a young man, to apprentice as a pharmacist. His decision proved fortunate, both for him and for science. In familiarizing himself with medicinal plants, he took an interest in other natural phenomena, including mammals, birds, mollusks, insects and — his apparent favorite — snakes. His success as an apothecary afforded him the opportunity to pursue his real passion: collecting.

In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the practice of pharmacy couldn't be learned through books, but only through apprenticeship, often in a variety of locations. After his training was complete, Seba settled in Amsterdam, a port city with a bustling international trade. Seba knew that some of the best exotic specimens were found by sailors, so he frequently scurried down to the docks, ready to bargain, when ships arrived.

Plenty of well-off businessmen had collections in Seba's day, but many curiosity cabinets were eclectic collections of shells, coins, artifacts, and so on. Seba's tastes were more specific, and his collection could be characterized as material related to biodiversity: mollusks, other sea life from the shallows, bugs, and spirit-preserved snakes. By 1717, Seba's collection was big and varied enough to attract the attention of Peter the Great, who bought Seba's specimens. Peter promtly took the goodies home and placed the specimens into his own Kunstkamera — a collection of arts and curiosities — that he made freely available to his subjects. Seba meanwhile started building an even bigger second collection, and this larger collection, along with a few specimens in the curiosity cabinets of others, formed the basis for his next big project: Thesaurus.

He engaged several artists and engravers and the occasional assistant writer in a massive and expensive effort. The results were 446 sizeable plates, 175 of them double-page, spread out over four separate books. The engraving process Seba used produced mirror images of the illustrations, and for the most part, this wasn't a problem, except for the mollusks, whose shells ultimately coiled in the wrong direction. The initial publication was black and white, but this was troublesome for the animals and plants that couldn't be differentiated without color, so many of the books were actually hand-painted after publication. How accurate the hand-paintings were probably depended on the artists' ability to consult accurately colored books, and/or the original specimens because Seba's text didn't often elaborate on color.

Seba published the first volume of his Thesaurus in 1734, and the second in 1735. The next two volumes were planned for publication shortly afterwards, but Seba died in 1736, and clearing up his estate delayed publication of volumes three and four until 1758 and 1765. By the time the last two volumes were published, Seba's work had drawn some criticism, largely because it didn't reflect the new Linnaean system. Many critics overlooked the fact that the Linnaean system was only published in 1735, just a year before Seba's death. And even if the new Linnaean system didn't shape Seba's work, he apparently shaped Linnaeus, who cited the apothecary-collector's work 284 times.

Seba's Thesaurus was a beautiful publication, in a large part because the boundary between art and science was still pretty fuzzy. Animals posed artfully, and shells were arranged in decorative patterns. Some of the work was fanciful or even folly, such as the many electric-blue snakes and the seven-headed hydra, yet much of it exhibited an almost unprecedented attention to detail and accuracy.

Adult Skull

Partial Cross-Section of Adult Skull

Displaying the divisions of the ear and naso-pharyngeal cavity. As you can see, even though the skull has some pretty well-defined zones and areas, everything is a lot more inter-connected than most of us learn about in grade school. The close connection between the ear canal and throat is why, when you have a sore throat, many times earaches come along with it, and why when you have a sinus headache, the ears often feel “plugged up”. 

A Practical Treatise on the Diseases of the Ear Including a Sketch of Aural Anatomy and Physiology. D. B. St. John Roosa, 1884.

from Biomedical Illustration

Mollusca

n95_w1150 by BioDivLibrary on Flickr.

Natural history of Victoria. Dec. 6-10
Melbourne,J.Ferres, government printer;1885-90.
biodiversitylibrary.org/item/27160

"The beautiful objects popularly miscalled Paper-Nautili should not ever be compared with true shells, like that of Nautilus, to that which the inhabitant is fixed by organic attachments, without tearing which or destroying the life of the Cuttle-fish it would be impossible to separate them."  from Natural History of Victoria

from Scientific Illustration blog

Sight Impediments

from Biomedical Ephemra

Pterygium, staphyloma, scurrhius eye, and fistula lacrymalis figures, with suture diagrams.

A General System of Surgery. Dr. Laurence Heister, 1745.

Dandelion

n140_w1150 by BioDivLibrary on Flickr.

From University of Maryland Medical Center:

While many people think of the common dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) as a pesky weed, herbalists consider it a valuable herb with many culinary and medicinal uses. Dandelion is a rich source of vitamins A, B complex, C, and D, as well as minerals such as iron, potassium, and zinc. Its leaves are often used to add flavor to salads, sandwiches, and teas. The roots can be found in some coffee substitutes, and the flowers are used to make certain wines.

In traditional medicine, dandelion roots and leaves were used to treat liver problems. Native Americans also used dandelion decoctions (liquid made by boiling down the herb in water) to treat kidney disease, swelling, skin problems, heartburn, and stomach upset. Chinese medicinal practitioners traditionally used dandelion to treat digestive disorders, appendicitis, and breast problems (such as inflammation or lack of milk flow). In Europe, herbalists incorporated it into remedies for fever, boils, eye problems, diabetes, and diarrhea.

Today, dandelion roots are mainly used as an appetite stimulant, digestive aid, and for liver and gallbladder function. Dandelion leaves are used as a diuretic to stimulate the excretion of urine.

Woodpecker's Toungue

 
from Scientific Illustration  & Biomedical Ephemera

Woodpeckers have tongues almost as long compared to skull length as anteaters do. It’s very effective for scooping up bugs trying to escape your pecking beak!

The Hand; its Mechanism and Vital Endowments, as Evincing Design. Sir Charles Bell, 1854.

Destruction of the public

From The New Left Project, Mark Fisher writes:

The privatisation of stress is a perfect capture system, elegant in its brutal efficiency. Capital makes the worker ill, and then multinational pharmaceutical companies sell them drugs to make them better. The social and political causation of distress is neatly sidestepped at the same time as discontent is individualised and interiorised. Dan Hind has argued that the focus on serotonin deficiency as a supposed `cause’ of depression obfuscates some of the social roots of unhappiness, such as competitive individualism and income inequality. Though there is a large body of work that shows the links between individual happiness and political participation and extensive social ties (as well as broadly equal incomes), a public response to private distress is rarely considered as a first option.<sup>13</sup> It is clearly easier to prescribe a drug than a wholesale change in the way society is organised. Meanwhile, as Hind argues, `there is a multitude of entrepreneurs offering happiness now, in just a few simple steps’. These are marketed by people `who are comfortable operating within the culture’s account of what it is to be happy and fulfilled’, and who both corroborate and are corroborated by `the vast ingenuity of commercial persuasion’.

Psychiatry’s pharmacological regime has been central to the privatisation of stress, but it is important that we don’t overlook the perhaps even more insidious role that the ostensibly more holistic practices of psychotherapy have also played in depoliticising distress. The radical therapist David Smail argues that Margaret Thatcher’s view that there’s no such thing as society, only individuals and their families, finds `an unacknowledged echo in almost all approaches to therapy’.<sup>14</sup> Therapies such as Cognitive Behaviour Therapy combine a focus on early life (a kind of psychoanalysis-lite) with the self-help doctrine that individuals can become masters of their own destiny. Smail gives the immensely suggestive name magical voluntarism to the view that `with the expert help of your therapist or counsellor, you can change the world you are in the last analysis responsible for, so that it no longer cause you distress’ (p7).

The propagation of magical voluntarism has been crucial to the success of neoliberalism; we might go so far as to say as it constitutes something like the spontaneous ideology of our times. Thus, for example, ideas from self-help therapy have become very influential in popular television shows.¹⁵ The Oprah Winfrey Show is probably the best-known example, but in the UK programmes such as Mary, Queen of Shops and The Fairy Jobmother explicitly promote magical voluntarism’s psychic entrepreneurialism: these programmes assure us that the fetters on our productive potentials lie within us. If we don’t succeed, it is simply because we have not put the work in to reconstruct ourselves.

The privatisation of stress has been part of a project that has aimed at an almost total destruction of the concept of the public - the very thing upon which psychic well-being fundamentally depends. What we urgently need is a new politics of mental health organised around the problem of public space. In its break from the old stalinist left, the various new lefts wanted a debureaucratised public space and
worker autonomy: what they got was managerialism and shopping. The current political situation in the UK - with business and its allies gearing up for a destruction of the relics of social democracy - constitutes a kind of infernal inversion of the autonomist dream of workers liberated from the state, bosses and bureaucracy. In a staggeringly perverse twist, workers find themselves working harder, in deteriorating conditions and for what is in effect worse pay, in order to fund a state bail-out of the business elite, while the agents of that elite plot the further destruction of the public services on which workers depend.

Under your skin

from Scientific Illustartion

from Biomedial Ephemera:

Cranial sutures in relation to significant regions of the brain.

The “sutures” of the skull are actually fibrous joints. While the age of a deceased young child can be determined by the ossification of the metaphysis and fontanelles, the age of adults can be determined (within a somewhat larger age range and after racial features have been determined) by the surface and interior texture of the skull, and the complete fusion of the sutures, to the point of near-obliteration of any signs of their existence.

Applied Surgical Anatomy, Regionally Presented. Dr. George Woosley, 1902.

Death of a Bird

From Biomedical Ephemera:

Murder American (style)

From The Guardian:

Rennie Gibbs is accused of murder, but the crime she is alleged to have committed does not sound like an ordinary killing. Yet she faces life in prison in Mississippi over the death of her unborn child.

Gibbs became pregnant aged 15, but lost the baby in December 2006 in a stillbirth when she was 36 weeks into the pregnancy. When prosecutors discovered that she had a cocaine habit – though there is no evidence that drug abuse had anything to do with the baby's death – they charged her with the "depraved-heart murder" of her child, which carries a mandatory life sentence.

Gibbs is the first woman in Mississippi to be charged with murder relating to the loss of her unborn baby. But her case is by no means isolated. Across the US more and more prosecutions are being brought that seek to turn pregnant women into criminals.

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