December 2009
2 posts
September 2009
4 posts
“From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange...”
– W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
August 2009
3 posts
May 2009
11 posts
The archives of Joseph Lister are held in the Wellcome Library, beautifully folded, stored and wrapped in ribbon.
They give an insight into who Joseph was; a man who bought a lot of biscuits, gave money to the poor, sometimes forgot to take his library books back, moaned to his sister Mary about not having time to write.
His personal and surgical notebooks chart the development of his theories...
Watch‘The Last Teaspoon’ Simon Park and Anne Brodie
Watch‘Gold teacup’ Simon Park and Anne Brodie
Spoons and teacups, items of delivery to the internal body cavity yet always absent from the laboratory.
April 2009
12 posts
“A life accumulates a collection of people, work and perplexities. We are all our...”
– Richard Fortney, Dry Store Room No.1
The photographs below were all created using a bacterial light source. They are part of the medical contents of ‘Box7’, a box kept out of sight containing objects deemed unsuitable for showing or handling at the Old Operating Theatre in London.
Part of St Thomas Hospital, built in the roof space of St Thomas Church around 1822, the Operating Theatre was originally used to operate on...
Before 1867 every other patient carried into a hospital for surgical treatment, was carried out dead of blood poisoning, their wounds a stinking fester.
Joseph Lister, a young surgeon in Glasgow, smelled at the festers. They reminded him of sewage; and sewage reminded him of how the city of Carlisle was deodorizing its wastes—by carbolic acid. He slopped carbolic acid on the open wounds of...
March 2009
7 posts
‘We are not essential to the world which has an existance that is independant of us.It would exist had we not been born and continue to exist after we have died. And yet this world, as we perceive it, is only concievable in terms of our own existance. For us it exists only through our perception of it. Though we may sense it as alien to us, still it is only through our own sensibility which...
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February 2009
4 posts
Harvard bridge measures 364.4 smoots and 1 ear
A major influence on my work, including ‘Exploring the Invisible’ has been ‘Smoot’s Ear - the measure of humanity’ by Robert Tavernor, Professor of architecture and urban design and director of the Cities programe, London School of Economics.
In his book Tavernor urges us to look beyond the notion that measuring is strictly a scientific activity, divorced from human...
January 2009
3 posts
One of the very first practical demonstrations of the role of micro-organisms was undertaken in 1825, in a macabre experiment on the eerie light emitted by two discarded bodies in a London anatomy school. The luminous material was scraped off and was then used to make other corpses glow.
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