"It is only fitting that the story of the brain should be a visual one, for the visuals had the ancients fooled for millenniums. The brain was so ugly that they assumed the mind must lie elsewhere. Now those same skeletal silhouettes glow plump and brightly colored, courtesy of a variety of inserted genes encoding fluorescent molecules. A glossy new art book, “Portraits of the Mind,” hopes to draw the general reader into neuroscience with the sheer beauty of its images." Slide Shows: The Beautiful Mind and Portraits of the Mind [more inside]
posted by zarq on Dec 2, 2010 - 6 comments

London Lives 12 London archives – digitised, marked up and tagged – to "create a comprehensive electronic edition of primary sources on criminal justice and the provision of poor relief and medical care in eighteenth-century London". The Lives page is a good place to start browsing. [related]
posted by unliteral on Jun 8, 2010 - 8 comments

Wellcome Images This collection of thousands of high-quality images includes anatomical images, rare books and manuscripts, posters, photos, and more. Also includes galleries on war, witchcraft, wellness, and other subjects.
posted by hortense on Aug 30, 2007 - 10 comments

Phisick - Beautifully presented historical medical instruments. Check out the French Nasal Rectificateur. Take a look these ear trumpets too: 1, 2, 3, 4. [Click on the images in the top strip for alternate views and close-ups]
posted by tellurian on Aug 18, 2006 - 19 comments

So my mum-in-law was visiting Dover Castle last week, when she spotted this 1940s replica postcard which she sent to me. It talks about how the stalwarts of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) supposedly took "bile beans" for things like nervous debility and "female complaints." This term always sounds (at least to me) so quaint and condescending; a search on it led me to the quackery of patent medicine, one of the prime purveyors of which was Lydia E. Pinkham (“Only a woman can understand a woman's ills.”). I'd feel smug and advanced about how far we've come if only it weren't for the resurgence of the term on herbal remedies sites. We may have come a long way baby, but we've still got some work to do in women's medicine, at home and abroad apparently.
posted by Zinger on Aug 8, 2006 - 23 comments

Medical histories of American Presidents - Washington "exuded such masculine power as frightens young women just wakening to the opposite sex." Jefferson had all his teeth when he died at 84. Wilson's handshake was described as "a ten-cent pickled mackerel in brown paper." Taft was once laid up for a few days after a bug flew into his eye. Facts & trivia about presidential health.
posted by madamjujujive on Sep 28, 2003 - 15 comments

The werewolf myth lives at this site, with essays, reviews, fiction and art, while the likely genesis of the werewolf mythos has its roots in folks like Larry Gomez, just your ordinary guy with congenital hypertrichosis.
posted by headspace on Oct 30, 2002 - 4 comments