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An allegorical figure occurring frequently in medieval literature. Seen from the front she is beautiful; when she turns round, her back is a mass of decay, maggots, and noisome creatures. ... -- Frau Welt, The Oxford Companion to German Literature More--and image sourced-- here .

Following is a fascinating guest post about "The Ether Dome" and the world of pre-anesthesia surgery by Sarah Alger , director of the Paul S. Russell, MD Museum of Medical History and Innovation at Massachusetts General Hospital . You can follow her on Twitter at @slodoena . “The horror of great darkness, and the sense of desertion by God and man, bordering close on despair, which swept through my mind and overwhelmed my heart, I can never forget, however gladly I would do so ... I still recall with unwelcome vividness the spreading out of the instruments, the twisting of the tourniquet, the first incision, the fingering of the sawed bone, the sponge pressed on the flap, the tying of the blood-vessels, the stitching of the skin, the bloody dismembered limb lying on the floor.” Such was surgery before anesthesia, as described by George Wilson, who underwent an ankle amputation in 1843.  When Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston was designed in the early 1800s...

We are currently in the process of researching imagery related to popular anatomical display, anatomically themed panopticons, Anatomical Venuses, or eroticisized reclining female wax figures. If you have any suggestions, please email joanna [at] morbidanatomymuseum [dot] org ! Thank you! Image: Poster from the Roca collection. Collection Family Coolen, Antwerp/Museum Dr Guislain, Ghent, Belgium. More here .

Following is a guest post by Cristina Preda in which she interviews Matt Novak of the Paleofuture blog about one of her favorite books residing in the Morbid Anatomy Library : Corn and Horrigan's Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future . In 1984, the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. opened Yesterday’s Tomorrows, an exhibition showcasing hundreds of objects and ephemera from the American mid-century as they pertained to people’s visions of the future, and a book by the same name was published as a companion. Written by the exhibit’s curators, historians Joseph J. Corn and Brian Horrigan, Yesterday’s Tomorrows explores the communities, homes, transportation, weapons and warfare of our supposed future. Copies of the book eventually found their way into the Morbid Anatomy Library and into the hands of Matt Novak, writer of Gizmodo’s Paleofuture blog. I spoke to Matt recently about American retro-futures, collecting, and how an exhibit...

When in New Haven for the joint Medical Museums Association / American Association for the History of Medicine meeting, I was lucky enough to see, with Michael Sappo l and Eva Åhrén , the wonderful exhibition The Critique of Reason: Romantic Art, 1760-1860 at the Yale University Art Gallery . A fabulous and thought provoking exhibition drawing from the rich collections of The Yale Center for British Art , and intending to challenge "the traditional notion of the Romantic artist as a brooding genius given to introversion and fantasy. Instead, the exhibition’s eight thematic sections juxtapose arresting works that reveal the Romantics as attentive explorers of their natural and cultural worlds." Some highlights: (in order, top to bottom): a tempera painting by William Blake of the Madonna and Child from 1825; hand-painted pages from Blake's "America. A Prophecy," 1793; John Martin's "The Deluge," 1834; "A Lion Attacking a Horse," 1762, by...