Biomedical Ephemera, or: A Frog for Your Boils

A blog for all biological and medical ephemera, from the age of Abraham through the era of medical quackery and cure-all nostrums. Featuring illustrations, history, and totally useless trivia from the diverse realms of nature and medicine. Buy me a coffee so I can stay up and keep the lights on around here! Biomedical Ephemera by Arallyn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. See a random post!

[biomedicalephemera]

Waist Belts! Wear them at your own peril!

The greatest destroyer of health, life, and beauty in the civilized world!

[billyjane]

[mythologyofblue]

“I’ve been collecting anonymous photographs for many years. During a retreat on the Toronto Islands, I had all these pictures and thought about these lost identities.

Photography has this innate promise that we can take a picture of someone and keep it. But overtime, these pictures somehow become dislodged from their origins, and the people photographed are lost.

There’s a theory from ancient times that says, ‘To capture a memory is like trying to capture a bird in an aviary of birds.

Most of these works are made from cartes de visite, which is a 19th century photographic process invented by André Disdéri in France. They were visiting cards people would trade amongst family and friends – sort of the Facebook of its day.

During the Victorian period, photographers would go out into the world and use cameras to capture everything: animals, exotic people and places. At the same time, there was the capturing of exotic animals.

I started looking at this idea of how the camera aided colonization: our sense of entitlement over other beings and creatures without a critical understanding of what that entitlement meant. The camera, in a way, was an extension of that attitude.

By producing a human-bird creature, I’m marrying the history of what was going on in that period. I’m creating these hybrid beings that sit somewhere between the human and the bird, but also look at the natural history of that time.

All the birds that I photographed in the Royal Ontario Museum’s collection for this series are North-American and are  extinct or endangered. Other than the dinosaur, it was the first time that I ever sat in front of a creature that was extinct.

The image is almost life-size. The head of the person or bird is almost as big as your head. There’s a more bodily experience when you see the work in person. It has a different kind of presence.”

-Sara Angelucci, Aviary, 2013

with thanks to Wondereur

[currentsinbiology]

A little creepy but cool.

[ofpaperandponies]

Love it all.

[biomedicalephemera]

please admire these owlfolk

[biomedicalephemera]

QUESTION: Have you ever been pregnant? Has your neck gotten...big? I have read a LOT of old books that included pregnancy and birth, and none of them ever mentioned this weird sign...

[biomedicalephemera]

JOHN IS NOT REALLY DULL - He may only need his eyes examined

Back in the 1920s, my grandpa (of course also named John) was held back in first grade for seven years. Despite being able to recite poetry and do mental math very proficiently, he couldn’t read worth a ding dang half-rotten cabbage. When he was 12, though, his school instituted the first vision iteration of vision testing of students, and his parents found out that he wasn’t illiterate because of a disability an inability to comprehend written words, but because he couldn’t see the letters! And because he didn’t know this, he couldn’t have articulated that.

After he got glasses, he managed to not only catch up with, but surpass his peers - he graduated a year early, and became an accomplished engineer, serving his country in the Signal Corps in WWII, and going on to outfit many schools and other public buildings with modern power distribution centers.

Source: WPA Federal Art Project. 1936-1937.

ETA: I should have been more clear when I said “he wasn’t illiterate because…” - I repeated the story just as my grandma told it, but should have considered wording!

[biomedicalephemera]

Protip: Four-year-olds are generally kept most intact when they are NOT given fireworks to play with!

Images: Wisconsin Historical Society Digital Archives Works Progress Administration Archives at the Library of Congress

[biomedicalephemera]

JOHN IS NOT REALLY DULL - He may only need his eyes examined

Back in the 1920s, my grandpa (of course also named John) was held back in first grade for seven years. Despite being able to recite poetry and do mental math very proficiently, he couldn’t read worth a ding dang half-rotten cabbage. When he was 12, though, his school instituted the first vision iteration of vision testing of students, and his parents found out that he wasn’t illiterate because of a disability an inability to comprehend written words, but because he couldn’t see the letters! And because he didn’t know this, he couldn’t have articulated that.

After he got glasses, he managed to not only catch up with, but surpass his peers - he graduated a year early, and became an accomplished engineer, serving his country in the Signal Corps in WWII, and going on to outfit many schools and other public buildings with modern power distribution centers.

Source: WPA Federal Art Project. 1936-1937.

ETA: I should have been more clear when I said “he wasn’t illiterate because...” - I repeated the story just as my grandma told it, but should have considered wording!

[biomedicalephemera]

KEEP. YO. TEETH. CLEAN.

OR ELSE!

From the WPA Federal Art Project, 1938.

[biomedicalephemera]

What’s up, fam? How’ve you been?

My external hard drive is dead forever. :( That’s where almost all of my files were. Maybe I’ll get a new one and make more posts, but who knows? I love writing about this weirdo stuff, but it takes time I don’t have these days.

ANYWAY. I have a kitten now! She was born under the compacted cardboard pallets behind the store I help manage. Her name is Mouse. She is a monkey and a monster and my old boy Pickles is the epitome of an exasperated uncle with a 3-year-old niece. Bless his heart for putting up with her.

Peace and pangolins to y’all, Arallyn

[biomedicalephemera]

Position in extracting a tooth from the right upper jaw.

Fun with dentistry!

There are a LOT of different tools that are used for extraction. There was one tool that could do all the different teeth (the dental key), but it was not as effective as having forceps specialized for each area of the mouth.

Atlas and Text-Book of Dentistry Including Diseases of the Mouth. Gustav Preiswerk, 1906.

[biomedicalephemera]

“Sit STILL!”

[nemfrog]

Fig. 48. Digestive system of grain-eating birds. La vie : physiologie humaine appliquée à l'hygiène et à la médecine. 1874. 

Internet Archive

[ronwurzer]

Sign at Uyghur dentist office,  Xinjiang Province, China, 2002.  

[biomedicalephemera]

Secretary bird - Sagittarius serpentarius

I love me some secretary birds. They’ll up and stomp a snake just for gettin’ in their territory. And don’t come at them when they’ve got eggs! Breeding season is year-round depending upon food supply, so you never know when you’ll be smacked down!

Their name is thought to be because of their quill-feathers, resembling a secretary with a quill pen behind their ear, as was common at the end of the 18th century, when the bird was first described by a European.

While they’re one of only two terrestrial birds of prey (the Caracara of Central America and northern South America being the other), secretary birds fly easily. They’re about 4.5 ft (1.4 m) tall, and primarily hunt small animals. Mice, hares, crabs, and lizards make up the bulk of their diet, but they’ve been known to hunt snakes, tortoises, baby gazelle, and even baby cheetah at times.

Album of Abyssinian Birds and Mammals. Entries by Louis Agassiz Fuertes. Published by the Field Museum of Natural History [Chicago]. 1930.

[biomedicalephemera]

Osteosarcoma, before and after operation

Osteosarcoma are cancerous bone tumors found in immature bone, most often in those over 10 and under 25 years old. This particular case is in a man named Robert Penman, who was twenty-four. 

These days, in those whose tumor is non-malignant (has not spread beyond its original tumor site), the five-year survival rate is about 75%. Back in 1839, I cant imagine this lad was quite as lucky, but it appears that at least the primary tumor was removed for a time.

Case of Osteo-sarcoma of the lower jaw, as operated upon Robert Penman, aged twenty-four years. 1839.

[biomedicalephemera]

Ecchondroma of the ilium

Chondromas are benign cartilaginous tumors, which are formed by errant chondrocytes (cartilage-creating cells) creating encapsulated lobular growths either within bones (enchondromas), or outward from the bones (ecchondromas). Ecchondromas are much more uncommon than cartilage tumors which grow from within the bone.

American Text-Book of Surgery. Edited by J. William White and William W. Keen, 1894.

[biomedicalephemera]

A small selection of ToothpasteFish.

Irrelevant to everything.

[biomedicalephemera]

The varied offerings of Charles Lentz & Sons

There isn’t a lot of history available about the Charles Lentz & Sons company, aside from their various catalogues. They offered all manner of medical apparatus, as well as zoological and biological equipment. They were based out of Philadelphia, PA, and were one of the first United States medical equipment companies to ship “worldwide” (as it were in 1915).

Illustrated catalogue : and price list of surgical instruments, hospital supplies, orthopedic apparatus, trusses, etc. Charles Lentz & Sons, 1915.

[biomedicalephemera]

These damn vibrators look like a cross between an egg beater and a telephone and would probably wreck you with their nonsense.

EDIT: meant to reblog to my personal blog but it stays because TRUE.

[biomedicalephemera]

The varied offerings of Charles Lentz & Sons

There isn’t a lot of history available about the Charles Lentz & Sons company, aside from their various catalogues. They offered all manner of medical apparatus, as well as zoological and biological equipment. They were based out of Philadelphia, PA, and were one of the first United States medical equipment companies to ship “worldwide” (as it were in 1915).

Illustrated catalogue : and price list of surgical instruments, hospital supplies, orthopedic apparatus, trusses, etc. Charles Lentz & Sons, 1915.