Although the Internet can be a black hole of perversion and idiocy, it can also be a place of fascinating beauty and hidden information. For example, how else would I be able to look at anatomical texts from all over the world, conceived and illustrated in the 14th to 19th centuries? The US National Library of Medicine has a digital exhibition of said texts on their website entitled Historical Anatomies, allowing us to see how the human body has been portrayed in medical terms over the past seven centuries. It’s amazing to see the difference between a text written in 1390 and one in 1790 – from a more rudimentary, yet accurate, portrayal of our nervous and skeletal systems to a skeleton gracefully posing in front of a rhinoceros (?), or against a backdrop of marble and lush garden. These images would have once been restricted to a select group of scholars, and now are available to the entire world. Check out some of my favorites below the full texts here.
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