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A Room With A View? Asylum Art in the 19th Century
by Sarah Chaney “A room without pictures is as bad as a room without windows.” So wrote a newspaper reporter in the Dumfries Herald in 1881, when commenting approvingly on the therapeutic...
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Buried on Campus: When Are Remains Human?
by Sarah Chaney Katie’s recent post on the ethics of displaying human remains in museums, along with the recent Grant Museum exhibition on the topic, raised some important questions about...
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Fit Bodies or Damaged Bodies? Reflections on the Petrie Exhibition
by Sarah Chaney The current exhibition in the Petrie Museum, Fit Bodies, often gives me a chance to reflect, with visitors, on what a “fit body” actually is. When we describe a body as being...
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Art and Psychiatry: Henry Scott Tuke
by Sarah Chaney Henry Scott Tuke was a student at the Slade School of Fine Art in the 1870s, winning a three-year-scholarship in 1877: sadly, this was twenty years too early for his...
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Art in History: A Representation of Reality or Political Tool?
by Sarah Chaney During the recent One Day in the City exhibition in the Art Museum, I had an interesting conversation with a couple of visitors who had popped in during the Marxism 2012...
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Man and Beast: Confinement and the Asylum
by Sarah Chaney Recently, I was lucky enough to be able to borrow a replica strait-jacket, which visitors to the Grant Museum were only too eager to try on, offering an interesting point of...
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Doctors, Dissection & UCL
by Sarah Chaney A visit to the current Museum of London exhibition, Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men (on until 14 April 2013), brought to mind the recent Buried on Campus exhibition...
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Sword Swallowing & Surgical Performance
by Sarah Chaney We know sadly little about the sword swallower’s sword that resides in the UCL Pathology Collection: not even how long it has been here. What we do know is that this performer...
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Diagnosing Foreign Bodies
by Sarah Chaney One of the most important diagnostic tools to assist in foreign body removal was the development of the x-ray. In 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen, a German physics professor, developed...
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Extraordinary Eaters: Swallowing Foreign Objects for a Living
by Sarah Chaney In 1935, Dr Isaac Lloyd Johnstone decided to publish a “case of unusual surgical and psychological interest” in the British Medical Journal. This concerned a patient he had...
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