October 16, 2018
Excerpt from The Fate of Anatomical Collections, Chapter 2 Organ Music by Ruth Richardson
“The Museum shelves are strongly made. The old glass bottles with their thick wax seals bear ponderously down with their soft contents. Even the more modern plastic boxes are weighty with precious specimens and preserving fluids. But the impression is of lightness. Kidneys, livers, brains, spleens and other parts (often delicately tethered with tiny threads to glass splints so as to preserve the impression of levity) float in clear, opaque or ambered liquids; held in suspension like the pathological processes they exemplify – arrested growths, odourless suppurations, pain benumbed, decay forestalled..”
Source: The Fate of Anatomical Collections Rina Knoeff, Robert Zwijnenberg. Ashgate Publishing Company (2015)
ID: the-impression-of-lightness
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