Portraits of doctors and scientists use attributes of profession and discovery to construct identities: books for learned physicians and microscopes for laboratory researchers, plants for botanists, molecules for chemists and equations for mathematicians.1 Such accoutrements signal a sitter's claim to fame, but the less familiar items reveal the full story only once the beholder has had the pleasure of working out what they are and why they are relevant. Portraits that include esoteric accessories may thus fashion identities for both scientific experts and their research objects.2 Histories of these works allow us to explore the relations. Here I focus on embryologists and embryos, and specifically a marble bust by the Leipzig sculptor Carl Seffner of the anatomist Wilhelm His. Made in 1900, it stands today in the anatomical institute of his home town, Basel in Switzerland. The downcast eyes and crossed folds of the coat draw us to look at the object in his right hand. This is surely the only embryo ever sculpted in marble, and the medium contributes to a disorienting effect: the life-size His is holding not the fourth-week human specimen, which was just four millimetres across, but a highly magnified model. The work offers an intimate view of the founder of modern human embryology in the first portrait known to include a representation of an embryo. Because it was shown in contrasting settings -- the His home, art exhibitions and within anatomy and embryology -- it also invites us to imagine how various audiences responded to a potentially unfamiliar entity.
...MoreDescription Analysis of a marble bust made in 1900 of anatomist Wilhelm His holding an embryo.
Book
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Book
Wellmann, Janina;
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Die Form des Werdens: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Embryologie, 1760--1830
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Article
Hopwood, Nick;
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“Giving body” to embryos: Modeling, mecahnism, and the microtome in late 19th-century anatomy
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Article
Jean-Claude Dupont;
(2017)
Wilhelm His and Mechanistic Approaches to Development at the time of Entwicklungsmechanik
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Article
Hopwood, Nick;
Slípka, Jaroslav;
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“Embryologica 1866”: Discovery of Wilhelm His's notebook on the development of the chick in the egg
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Article
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Mediating Objects: Scientific and Public Functions of Models in Nineteenth-Century Biology
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Article
Brauckmann, Sabine;
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Cultures of Seeing Embryos and Cells in 3-Dimensions and Flatness
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Article
H. Buess;
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Article
Brauckmann, Sabine;
(2011)
Axes, Planes and Tubes, or the Geometry of Embryogenesis
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Article
de Santis, Dario;
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Maiden Voyage
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Chapter
Filippini, Nadia Maria;
(2002)
Die “erste Geburt”: Eine neue Vorstellung vom Fötus und vom Mutterleib (Italien, 18. Jahrhundert)
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Article
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(2009)
Iconographie des embryons et des foetus dans les traités d'accouchement et d'anatomie: du XVIème au XVIIIème siècle
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Article
Herbert, Francis;
(2008)
“Stanford's London Atlas Map of Switzerland”: künstlerische Geländedarstellung, Mehrsprachigkeit, Tourismus
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Book
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Cilag 1936--2006: Geschichte eines Schaffhauser Pharmaunternehmens
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Article
Tammiksaar, Erki;
Brauckmann, Sabine;
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Karl Ernst von Baer's Über Entwickelungsgeschichte der Thiere II and Its Unpublished Drawings
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Article
Hopwood, Nick;
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Visual Standards and Disciplinary Change: Normal Plates, Tables and Stages in Embryology
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Book
Davidson, Jane P.;
(2008)
A History of Paleontology Illustration
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Article
Maurizio Balistreri;
(2018)
La ricerca sugli embrioni umani alla luce dei nuovi scenari riproduttivi: considerazioni sull’individualità dell’embrione e sui limiti alla sperimentazione
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Book
Christian K. Kleinbub;
(2020)
Michelangelo’s Inner Anatomies
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Article
Heitzmann, Peter;
(2008)
Die ersten geologischen Karten der Schweiz, 1752--1853
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