Biomedical Ephemera, or: A Frog for Your Boils

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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).