A mirror for medicine : some resources of the Wellcome Institute Library an exhibition, Monday 19 October - Friday 18 December 1987.
- Wellcome Historical Medical Library
- Date:
- 1987
Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Credit: A mirror for medicine : some resources of the Wellcome Institute Library an exhibition, Monday 19 October - Friday 18 December 1987. Source: Wellcome Collection.
34/44 page 32
![ICONOGRAPHIC COLLECTIONS The paintings, prints, drawings and photographs exhibited in this case pro- vide a conspectus of the media represented in the iconographic collections. Two recent acquisitions are: the portrait of Sir Ivan Magill, received as a gift in 1984, and the painting of Florence Nightingale and the Bracebridges, purchased in 1985. In the cases opposite, items are arranged thematically, according to geographical areas (10-11), genres (12-13), and subjects (14- 15). Exhibits on the north walls (above cases 10-15 and opposite cases 1-5) are selected for their more general interest. 1. An operation for 'pierre de tete.' Lead pencil on vellum by Pieter Jansz. Quast, 1645. This spirited drawing of an operator making a savage incision in the head of an apparently compliant patient may appear to show part of the ancient and universal operation of trepanning, but its actual subject is unique to Nether- landish medicine, language, and arts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The operator is shown as an extractor of bladder-stones (one of them is shown dangling from his knife-handle). In depicting him as preparing to extract such a stone from the head, the author of the drawing alludes to a Dutch proverb 'he has a stone in the head', meaning 'he is mad'. The drawing bears the PQ monogram of Pieter Jansz. Quast [Amsterdam 1606- 1647] on the half-barrel on the left, together with the date 1645. 2. An artificial tomb in the museum of Frederik Ruysch. Engraving by Cornelius Huyberts, c. 1709. The engraving shows an exhibit on the second shelf of the eighth cabinet in the museum of Frederik Ruysch [1638-1731] in Amsterdam. Inside the tomb was the mummified body of a 5-month foetus born c.1689, whose opened skull, showing the dura mater, is seen protuding on the lower left. Above, the tomb is 'planted' with arteries and arterioles which were injected with red wax giving the effect, in the original, of a forest of coral. On each side is the skeleton of a twin 7-month foetus, who mourns his fellow in the tomb and wipes away his tears with a handkerchief of capillary tissue. The exhibit combines lessons from fields now regarded as separate and independent: embryology, anatomical technique, the moral tradition of the memento mori and the art of the baroque still-life. Ruysch intended it to remind us of the frailty of human life, but it also reminds the modern viewer of the frailty of the divisions between different branches of learning, a particularly apt lesson for the medical historian. - 32-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b20456852_0034.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
