conversations about medicine and life
Alan Roddick
In summer our feet are more often seen in public. Noticing my own sandalled feet recently has prompted me to think, and to write, about our shared history.
My feet may not be what you’d call shapely, but I think they are far from being misshapen from wearing tight shoes. Whatever shape they are in, it must be thanks to the care my mother took with our shoe shopping when my sisters and I were young.
Monica Carroll and Adam Dickerson
A description of a collaboration between a writer (Monica Carroll) and a philosopher (Adam Dickerson).
Through Husserl’s phenomenology we explored the idea of forms of writing that could be coherent with lived experience and with an experience of the body. We found that specialised forms of description, such as anatomical description, shaped and portrayed some parts of lived experience while leaving others parts unspoken. Our explorations in this field produced an artists’ book of loose-leaf folios that point towards unspoken areas of the body, both animated and lifeless.
Kezia Field
The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.” Leonardo da Vinci
For years, as as an art educator and artist, I’ve had an ongoing preoccupation with body parts, especially with anatomical systems and human organs as artistic imagery. This fascination has lead me to research a variety of vintage anatomical illustrations by scientific and medical artists such as Georg Stubbs, William Braune, Nicolas Henri Jacob, Anton Nuhn and Leonardo da Vinci.
These illustrators were professional artists with advanced education in both the life sciences and visual communication. I like the idea that these artists collaborated with scientists and physicians, and that they transformed complex visual information into visual images with potential to communicate to broad audiences. As digital photography and other digital media have come to dominate the medical illustration world, the demand for these artists has declined. So, I say to myself, perhaps my art can fill this void.
Dr Katherine Hall
In 1613, Johann Remmelin (1583-1632) published the first edition of his anatomy flap book. A 1667 edition, printed from the same printer blocks as the first, is held in the Health Sciences Library at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. Recently, with colleagues Dr Simone Marshall and K. John Dennison, I had the opportunity to study it closely.
Isabelle Lomax-Sawyers
Our cadaver is male. He was old when he died. I don’t remember his face.
There are maybe ten of us in our white coats. We crowd around the table where he lies in an open black body bag, his head resting on a block of wood. We drape a paper towel over his genitals. We have seen human remains before, single limbs unpeeled to varying degrees. He is whole. He is the first one that is ours.