Medical specimens and the erasure of racial violence: the case of Harriet Cole

This article analyses the complex narrative of Harriet Cole, a 36-year-old African-American woman whose body was delivered to the anatomy department of Hahnemann Medical School in 1888. The anatomist Rufus B Weaver used her preserved remains to create a singular anatomical specimen, an intact extraction of the 'cerebro-spinal nervous system'. Initially anonymised, deracialised and unsexed, the central nervous system specimen endured for decades before her identity as a working-class woman of colour was reunited with her remains. In the 1930s, media accounts began to circulate that Harriet Cole had bequeathed her remains to the anatomist, a claim that continues to circulate uncritically in the biomedical literature today. Although we conclude that this is likely a confabulation that erased the history of violence to her autonomy and her dead body, the rhetorical possibility that Harriet Cole might have chosen to donate her body to the medical school reflects the racial, political and legal dimensions that influenced how and why the story of Harriet Cole's 'gift' served multiple purposes in the century and a half since her death.

A historical review of the techniques of recovery of parasites for their detection in human stools

Since the early 20th century, the detection of intestinal parasites has improved with the development of several techniques for parasitic structures recovery and identification, which differ in sensitivity, specificity, practicality, cost, and infrastructure demand. This study aims to review, in chronological order, the stool examination techniques and discuss their advantages, limitations, and perspectives, and to provide professionals and specialists in this field with data that lays a foundation for critical analysis on the use of such procedures. The concentration procedures that constitute the main techniques applied in routine research and in parasitological kits are a) spontaneous sedimentation; b) centrifugation-sedimentation with formalin-ethyl acetate; and c) flotation with zinc sulfate solution. While selecting a technique, one should consider the purpose of its application and the technical-operational, biological, and physicochemical factors inherent in the procedures used in stool processing, which may restrict its use. These intrinsic limitations may have undergone procedural changes driven by scientific and technological development and by development of alternative methods, which now contribute to the improvement of diagnostic accuracy.

Assumptions of authority: the story of Sue the T-rex and controversy over access to fossils

Although the buying, selling, and trading of fossils has been a principle part of paleontological practice over the centuries, the commercial collection of fossils today has re-emerged into a pervasive and lucrative industry. In the United States, the number of commercial companies driving the legal, and sometimes illegal, selling of fossils is estimated to have doubled since the 1980s, and worries from academic paleontologists over this issue has increased accordingly. Indeed, some view the commercialization of fossils as one of the greatest threats to paleontology today. In this article, I address the story of "Sue"-the largest, most complete, and most expensive Tyrannosaurus rex ever excavated-whose discovery incited a series of high-profile legal battles throughout the 1990s over the question of "Who owns Sue?" Over the course of a decade, various stakeholders from academic paleontologists and fossil dealers to Native Americans, private citizens, and government officials all laid claim to Sue. In exploring this case, I argue that assumptions of authority are responsible for initiating and sustaining debates over fossil access. Here, assumptions of authority are understood as assumptions of ownership, or expertise, or in some cases both. Viewing the story from this perspective illuminates the significance of fossils as boundary objects. It also highlights the process of boundary-work by which individuals and groups constructed or deconstructed borders around Sue (specifically) and fossil access (more generally) to establish their own authority. I draw on science studies scholarship as well as literature in the professionalization, commercialization, and valuation of science to examine how assumptions of authority facilitated one of the most divisive episodes in recent paleontological history and the broader debate on the commercial collection of vertebrate fossil material in the United Sates.

Paolo Boccone and the visual communication of pre-Linnean botany. A comparison between his Leiden herbarium, Paris autoprint and published Icones (1674)

This article addresses the development of visual practices in early modern Botany by focusing on the diverse strategies of graphic representation of plant species. Naturalis Biodiversity Center holds a historic herbarium of 169 sheets with specimens of Mediterranean plants collected by the Sicilian Botanist Paolo Boccone (1633-1704). Part of Boccone's dried specimens served as model for the etchings published in his Icones et descriptiones rariorum plantarum (1674) and part of them were used as matrix for at least one album of botanical autoprints kept in Paris. The exceptional survival of the three collections: the original dried specimens, their autoprint impressions and the etched illustrations of the book, offers a unique insight in the material and intellectual issues addressed in the process of visual representation of plants in early modern Botany. Here we present the first scientific comparison of these three valuable 17th century botanical collections. Visual comparison revealed that the Leiden collection provided 64 specimens to Icones, while 44 specimens show a perfect matching with the autoprint impressions. In nine cases the Leiden specimens appear both in the autoprints and in the Icones, thus showing the complete process of visual translation of the plant preliminary to its wider circulation in the scientific community.

Ludwik Karol Teichmann (1823-1895)

Ludwik Karol Teichmann was the last of gross anatomists. His magnificent work on the lymphatic system gained him appreciation of the whole current scientific world. Based on the unpublished materials authors wanted to commemorate one of the greatest Polish and world anatomists with special regard to coming soon 150th anniversary of Theatrum Anatomicum of Jagiellonian University Medical College.

Career, collections, reports and publications of Dr Francis Buchanan (later Hamilton), 1762-1829: natural history studies in Nepal, Burma (Myanmar), Bangladesh and India. Part 1

During his 20-year career as a surgeon-naturalist with the British East India Company, Francis Buchanan (later Hamilton, known in botany as Buchanan-Hamilton and in ichthyology as Hamilton-Buchanan) undertook pioneering survey explorations in several diverse regions of the Indian subcontinent. A naturalist at heart, his collections of plants and animals are often the first from such regions, notably Nepal, Burma (Myanmar) and Bangladesh. Buchanan had wide-ranging interests beyond natural history, using his talent for observation and meticulous recording to amass a huge body of information on the lands and peoples he encountered. However, much of this information remains unpublished in his survey reports, journals and other manuscripts, and so his role in the building of knowledge for these areas has been under-appreciated. Although a keen and able botanist, it is ironic that his multitudinous botanical discoveries are particularly poorly known, with the vast majority of his material on this subject languishing unpublished in archival collections. These include his original records and working notes which show the methods he used when dealing with 'information overload' and arranging his syntheses ready for publication. Notable is his experimentation with Jussieu's Natural System for classifying his Nepalese plants, and his recognition of biogeographic links of the Nepalese flora with Europe and Japan - both ahead of his fellow countrymen in Britain and India. The life of Francis Buchanan awaits the attention of a biographer who can do justice to his many interests, activities and influences. This is the first of two papers covering his life, providing an empirical baseline for future research and correcting misinformation that abounds in the literature. These papers outline Buchanan's professional career, concentrating on his activities in the exploration of natural history, and placing them in the wider context of botanical research in India.

[Divine cadavers: gender, medical discourse, and anatomical collections in the legend of Pedro González de Velasco]

This paper examines the relationship between the public image of Pedro Gonzólez de Velasco (1815-1882), famous for his anatomical collections and his Anthropological Museum, founded in 1875 in Madrid, and the popular legend related to the death, embalming and exhumation of his daughter Concepción. The doctor who is committed to the nation becomes a mad scientist, and his official biography is transformed into an urban legend. Beyond the merely anecdotal, I show how the aesthetics associated with female corpses and artificial women organize cultural imaginaries, bringing together medical discourses and literary and artistic representations.

The Coral of Death. Kunst- und Wunderkammern between Temporality and Allegory

The aim of this essay is to show the existence of a substantial discontinuity between the Kunst- und Wunderkammern phenomenon and the practice of both eclectic and specialised collecting in the 18th century. A more detailed examination of the cases of fossils and corals, particularly the way they wove in and out of the differing rationales of collecting in the 17th and 18th centuries, brings to light how elusive their relationship was with the history of the notion of temporality. Subsequently, Lamarck and Darwin were to provide a conclusion to the temporality debate when they completed the historisation of nature.

Preparations, models, and simulations

This paper proposes an outline for a typology of the different forms that scientific objects can take in the life sciences. The first section discusses preparations (or specimens)--a form of scientific object that accompanied the development of modern biology in different guises from the seventeenth century to the present: as anatomical-morphological specimens, as microscopic cuts, and as biochemical preparations. In the second section, the characteristics of models in biology are discussed. They became prominent from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. Some remarks on the role of simulations--characterising the life sciences of the turn from the twentieth to the twenty-first century--conclude the paper.

[DRY PREPARATIONS OF ANATOMICAL LESIONS IN PATHOLOGICAL ANATOMY MUSEUMS]

Collection of pathological specimens began soon after the seminal description of autopsy by Giovan Battista Morgagni in Padoa in the second half of the 18th Century. Pathologists soon realized difficulties of preserving the form and to prevent decay caused by autolysis and attack by bacteria and parasites. The ancient procedures devoted to mummification were applied to the purpose, and a number of personal experiences were reported in the first half of the 19th century, mainly in Northern Italy and France, testifying a dedicated interest of the time in those areas. A combination of chemical fixation (with corrosive sublimate/mercuric chloride and/or tannic acid) and careful drying allowed to produce dry preparations, once very numerous in the Pathological Anatomy's Museums so much popular in the 19th and early 20th Century. In fact, it was the sole way to give visual evidence of disease and pathological processes. Only a limited number of these dry preparations are still present and visible in Pathology Museums, mainly in Universities of Northern Italy, while a few examples can be traced in the other European Country.

[Ludwik Karol Teichmann--a preparator]

Ludwik Karol Teichmann significantly contributed to the creation of modern techniques in the anatomical preparations. He was, next to Joseph Hyrtl, the most versatile among the anatomical preparators in the second half of the 19th century, successfully introducing modifications to existing methods, as well as striving for independent solutions in this field. His precision in performance, transparency and sustainability of the whole brain preparations, excellent osteological preparations, including small bones and cartilage, evoked and still evoke high admiration. He made his name, however, with preparations obtained by means of injection and corrosion techniques. The application of these techniques inthe lymphatic system's study, both the physiologically proper and the pathologically changed, earned Teichmann a permanent position in the history of anatomy. The developed by Teichmann mass for cold injections (the so-called Teichmann's cold mass) revolutionized the macro-and microscopic preparatory of that time, thus opening great new research perspectives still widely used during the interwar period.

[Opium alcaloids in toxicological medico-legal practice of Department of Forensic Medicine, Jagiellonian University Medical College]

Most likely, opium was the first narcotic substance discovered at the dawn of mankind. Contemporary drug abuse predominantly poses a social and clinical problem and encompasses among other aspects emergency procedures in cases of intoxication and treatment of addictions. On the other hand, this is also a problem of the judicial system, which implements the rule of apt punishment in criminal cases (rapes, robberies, drivers, production and trade in narcotic substances) and of the necessity of monitoring drug-associates deaths. In all drug-associated cases, investigative capabilities have increased with the introduction of extremely sensitive and specific analytical methods (GC-MS, LC/MS, HPLC/DAD) allowing for detection and identification of multi-component mixtures of xenobiotics found at low concentration levels in complex biological matrices. The history of the Krakow Department of Forensic Medicine dates back to the year 1877, since archival materials have been kept since that time. Isolated deaths resulting from morphine poisoning, mostly involving individuals employed in the health care sector, constituted the subject of medico-legal expert opinions starting at the beginning of the 20th century, but only the eighties did bring the need for multidirectional toxicological examinations of opiates and their metabolites in diversified biological and non-biological materials. The present report, in addition to the historical background of opiate addiction, discusses selected problems derived from published by Department reports on opiates, including cases of fatal intoxication, hair analysis of drug addicts in its various aspects, interactions in cases of poisoning and others.

The afterlife of the slide: exploring emotional attachment to artefactualised bodily traces

In this paper I explore the role of the slide, not as familiar scientific object, but rather as a fixed remnant that testifies to the lived experience of an individual. Returning to the scene of the public scandal that surrounded the unauthorised retention of children's organs and tissues at two British hospitals in the late 1990s, I investigate the emotional significance that here came to be attached to archived slides. In so doing I draw attention to the ways in which the facticity of the slide--its ability to testify to the fact, or the existence, not only of the person from whom it is drawn, but also, when created for histopathological reasons, the disease that ultimately killed them--acts to efface their presumed ephemerality. In the final section of the paper I turn to consider how the events that I describe have come to shape the ways in which this kind of highly artefactualised bodily material is now accommodated in the institutional setting of the tissue bank and with what implications for research and the wider dissemination of scientific knowledge. Specifically, I explore how and why slides have come to acquire a "personality" and, with it, something akin to legally constituted "personality rights" including rights relating to publicity and privacy.

Histopathology slides from medical research to medical practice in interwar Strasbourg

Histopathologists have been interested in cancer since the beginning of cellular theory. Rudolf Virchow and Julius Cohnheim defined cancer as a disease due to specific changes in tissues; cancer was thus considered a "pathologist's disease." Virchow emphasized the principles of biopsy and its value in the diagnosis of malignant tumours, but he himself did not promote it as an instrument for diagnosis. In the nineteenth century, in fact, cancer was a pathologists' disease in research only, not in diagnosis. By the mid-twentieth century, pathologists figured in medical practice as mediators between alternative therapeutic solutions. Histopathology entered a new arena, medical practice. In this paper, the process through which microscope slides moved from histopathology research to medical practice will be explored in detail with the aim of understanding how medical research integrates routine medical practices. The quasi-inherent character of scientific knowledge as relevant to medical practice is not taken for granted here. Through a study of medical school laboratory records from the interwar period in Strasbourg, I argue that pathologists could direct patients to specific forms of therapy on the basis of microscopic slides of cancer cells because they had defined (and re-defined) cancers by contributing to establishing radiation therapy practices.

Sex on a slide: Antoine Lacassagne and the search for a microscopic definition of masculinity and femininity

In 1919, the French pathologist and pioneer of radiotherapy of cancer, Antoine Lacassagne, studied the case of a young man of indeterminate sexuality (a condition later named "intersex," and recently renamed, "disorders of sexual development"). Lacassagne's argument that the patient was a "true" hermaphrodite, that is, an individual who possesses at the same time male and female sexual glands, was grounded exclusively in his study of microscopic preparations. Such preparations were seen as the definitive proof of the "true biological sex" of a given person, seen as a fixed entity. On the other hand, Lacassagne's definition of biological, or rather histological sex, was dissociated from sexuality, sexual orientation and sex/gender identity. In the 1930s, the isolation of sex hormones made it possible to modulate specific sexual traits, thus destabilizing the concept of a fixed biological sex. It did not undermine, however, the central role of histological proofs. Sex on a slide continued to be seen as definitive evidence of the "true" sexual identity of an individual, but from the 1930s this proof was valid only for the time when a given microscopic preparation had been manufactured.

[Evelopment of Krakow's pathological collection in 19th century]

With the evolution of pathological anatomy in the nineteenth century arose the need to create separate collection of preparations, which were used for teaching and studying important anatomical changes. Collections were built on wet preparations (mainly preserved in alcohol), dry, wax models and plaster casts usually taking form of the permanent sets. In this paper are shown, based on the analysis of the preserved documentation and reports, ways of the development of such collections which lead to the formation of the Pathological Museum of the Jagiellonian University. At the same time research is made to clarify a number of doubts and confusion which accompanied this process, which lasted a total of a few decades.

Changing the scale: slides and electron microscopy at the Virus Laboratory of the Pasteur Institute

Slides are material objects, the daily existence of which cannot be diassociated from the practice of microscopy. But what happens to slides when the examination tool is no longer an optical apparatus but an electon microscope? This is the core issue this paper examines. The answer it proposes is that electron microscope slides are not slides in the classical sense of the word but complex arrangements of materials including plates, cards, photographs and notebooks, which constitute an imaginary "slide," an assemblage the status and existence of which is defined in reference to the heritage of optical microscopy. To illustrate this argument, the paper follows the experimental work of Odile Croissant, the first electron microscopist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris during the 1940s and 1950s when the practices of the new microscopy were introduced and calibrated.

Induction of visibility: reflections on histological slides, drawing visual hypotheses and aesthetic-epistemic actions

This paper focuses on histological slides and on the strategies of visual transformation of Santiago Ramón y Cajal. His practices and concepts reveal that not only the slides as such and their images have cognitive and aesthetic values crucial to the epistemic gain about the original material, but also the processes that unveil and reassess these values during observation and imaging. Therefore, considering the nature of these processes contributes to--besides the inquiry about the slides themselves--disclosing their role as epistemic and cultural objects in the history of the life sciences. To be beneficial to this inquiry, however, a closer definition of these processes is needed. I propose to define these operations in terms of the notion of "induction of visibility," which specifies general concepts of "visualisation" or "making something visible" as an instrument generating and transporting visual knowledge. Processes of visibility induction, I argue, constitute a category of visual action in their own right, which derives from and generates aesthetic and epistemic operations likewise. For this category, I propose, therefore, the concept of "aesthetic-epistemic action".

[Development of forensic thanatology through the prism of analysis of postmortem protocols collected at the Department of Forensic Medicine, Jagiellonian University]

When assessed based on the analysis of postmortem protocols, the successes of forensic thanatology appear to differ from those that might be assumed using as the foundation a review of publications and textbooks. The greatest achievements date back to as early as the 18th and 19th centuries, when the morphological changes observed in the majority of types of deaths resulting from disease-associated and traumatic causes were described. Within the past 130 years, however, or in other words, in the period when autopsy protocols were written that are today collected in the archives of the Krakow Department of Forensic Medicine, the causes and mechanisms of death became understood even when the said factors were associated with discrete postmortem changes only or no no such changes whatsoever were left. At the end of the 19th century and for a long time afterwards, a difficult problem was posed by sudden deaths, where the postmortem examinations demonstrated solely atherosclerosis and the cause of death was described as "heart palsy". As it turned out, a great portion of such deaths represented individuals with myocardial infarction; in spite of its evident macroscopic presentation, the diagnostic management of the disease was progressing very slowly. Myocardial infarction, known at least since 1912, was associated by forensic medicine with the phenomenon of sudden death only in the forties, and the ability to detect myocardial infarction in practice developed only in the fifties of the last century. The achievement of the present dissertation is the formulation of a theory ascribing such a long delay in macroscopic diagnostics of myocardial infarction to forensic medicine specialists being attached to and fond of employing the "in situ" autopsy technique, which was unfavorable from the viewpoint of heart examination, since the organ was not dissected free and removed from the body in the course of a postmortem examination. When autopsies started to concentrate on hearts dissected free from large vessels, within several years, the number of diagnosed myocardial infarctions increased several times, what gave rise to a theory of a myocardial infarction epidemics formulated in some centers. A proof supporting the theory postulated by the author is a sudden increase in the number of deaths resulting from pulmonary embolism observed in the same several-year period; this diagnosis was also not facilitated by the "in situ" autopsy technique. Another cause of death, which - although undoubtedly common - was for years interpreted as "heart palsy" was alcohol poisoning. Evolution of methods used in chemical examinations for the presence of alcohol, and especially the use of blood tests rather than gastric contents tests allowed in time for determining alcohol poisoning as the cause of death and demonstrated the true extent of the phenomenon. Here, a milestone was the introduction of the Widmark method, what in turn resulted in changes in the toxicology theory, such as for example the use of a new term of "lethal concentration" in addition to the formerly employed notion of a "lethal dose", which is useless in the case of alcohol. Of lesser importance with respect to the number of cases, but of much greater significance in view of its association with homicides were the achievements in diagnostic management of strangulation. Choking and strangulation, as well as hanging--in spite of the fact that their fundamental features were known as early as in the 19th century--were really understood and the ability to diagnose these phenomena was achieved only in the interwar period. Such a long delay resulted from the autopsy technique that did not include examination of the organs situated in the neck, as well as from difficulties in acquiring experience in examining the type of homicide that was very uncommon. On the other hand, for many years, the erroneous theory of the fluidity of blood in a corpse as an indicator of violent strangulation resulted in dubious opinions on strangling by blocking the respiratory orifices of the victim, especially in cases of infanticides. Another erroneous theory, which was obligatory in forensic thanatology, was the theory of thymolymphatic state, which used thymic hypertrophy to explain deaths of young individuals resulting from a small injury or even strong emotion. Statistical tests and development of general medicine allowed for disproving the theory. In the diagnostics management of death from hypothermia, despite the fact that its most important features--Wischnewski spots and the loss of liver glycogen--had been known for a long time, they were regarded useless for several score years. At this time, cases of death from hypothermia were included into the category of "heart palsy". Despite several changes of the authorities, a review of autopsy protocols prepared in the Krakow Department of Forensic Medicine provided the author with a wealth of information of significant historical value. Protocols dating back to the period of Nazi occupation allowed for documenting and analyzing the types of torture employed by the Gestapo, but also for discovering a surprisingly large number of postmortem examinations of bodies of occupation functionaries who were sentenced to death by the Polish Underground State. After World War II, the Department examined numerous victims originating from both sides of skirmishes fought at the time by the then authorities and the armed underground movement, or even individuals murdered in the course of interrogations. The archives of autopsy protocols became a valuable source helpful in estimating the number of victims of the Soviet Army that was stationed in Poland, and later provided the only supply of information needed for evaluation of the number of fatal accidents among the builders of the Krakow district of Nowa Huta. Based on the autopsy protocols it may be concluded that the number of victims of anti-Jewish riots that sparked off in Krakow soon after World War II was over, was most likely lower than that assessed by the historians; on the other hand, the number of victims of similar riots occurring after World War I was higher than the historians believed. A great span of time over which the protocols were written allowed for following some socioeconomic changes. In the period before Poland's regaining independence, a significant social problem was posed by deaths of infants entrusted to foster care to "angel makers" After independence was regained, a similar problem emerged, consisting of deaths of young females due to complications of illegal abortions. In the post-war period, such a social problem was found in deaths due to fatal alcohol poisoning; the annual number of such cases increased almost tenfold within the past 50 years. In addition to obvious cases associated with the war, the Nazi occupation was characterized by a sudden, manifold increase in the number of methanol poisonings and an unexpectedly high increase in the number of victims of fatal traffic road accidents, especially those involving trains and streetcars. Over the past 130 years, there were significant changes in the selection of poisons used for suicidal purposes. In the beginning of the analyzed period, suicides were committed by ingesting caustic substances that damaged parenchymatous organs--these poisons were very brutal in their action, but easy to detect. As new pharmaceuticals--central nervous system depressants--were being introduced to therapeutic management, they gradually replaced caustic and parenchymatous poisons. In contrast to the early phase of the analyzed period, poisoning with such medications cannot be detected on autopsy, yet their introduction promoted the development of forensic toxicology. Nevertheless, for several score years, the heaviest toll was taken by carbon monoxide from the municipal gasworks, which appeared in 1905 and disappeared in 1982, killing as many as in excess of 50 individuals per year. In the collection of more than 60 thousand autopsy protocols, the author managed to find hitherto unknown, interesting cases, e.g. that describing a victim of a fatal accident in a stone quarry, witnessed by Karol Wojtyła during WWII, a victim of an unknown assassination attempt on the life of Bolesław Bierut, as well as protocols of postmortem examinations of bodies of the People's Republic of Poland intelligence agents who died while posted abroad.

Retrospective on the early development of cryoelectron microscopy of macromolecules and a prospective on opportunities for the future

Methods for preserving specimen hydration in protein crystals were pursued in the early 1970s as a prerequisite for protein crystallography using an electron microscope. Three laboratories approached this question from very different directions. One built a differentially pumped hydration chamber that could maintain the crystal in a liquid water environment, a second maintained hydration by rapidly freezing the protein crystal and examining it in a cold stage, and the third replaced the water of hydration by using glucose in the same way as one had previously used "negative stains". Each of these early efforts succeeded in preserving the structures of protein crystals at high resolution within the vacuum of the electron microscope, as demonstrated by electron diffraction patterns. The next breakthrough came in the early 1980s when a technique was devised to preserve noncrystalline specimens by freezing them within vitreous ice. Since then, with the development of high stability cold stages and transfer mechanisms compatible with many instrument platforms, and by using commercially provided low dose imaging techniques to avoiding radiation damage, there has been an explosion of applications. These now include single particles, helical filaments, 2-D arrays and even whole cells, where the most exciting recent applications involve cryoelectron tomography. These achievements and possibilities generate a new set of research opportunities associated with increasing the reliability and throughput with which specimens can be studied by cryoEM.

Authenticity in ancient DNA studies

Ancient DNA studies represent a powerful tool that can be used to obtain genetic insights into the past. However, despite the publication of large numbers of apparently successful ancient DNA studies, a number of problems exist with the field that are often ignored. Therefore, questions exist as to how reliable the conclusions of many of the published studies are. In this paper we outline first the problems associated with aDNA studies, and secondly present potential guidelines designed so as to enable non-specialist readers the opportunity to critically assess the quality of aDNA publications.

What did William Hunter know about bone?

This article examines William Hunter's specimens on bone in the Anatomy Museum at the University of Glasgow. By referring to students' notes taken at Hunter's lectures and to the Manuscript Catalogue of his anatomical specimens, we attempt to answer the question, "What did William Hunter know about bone?" Hunter seems to have been particularly interested in the relationship between vascularisation and ossification and many of the specimens illustrate this. He provided his students with reasoned arguments on a number of issues: that the marrow serves as a fat store and not to produce synovial fluid or to keep bones supple; the periosteum serves as an attachment for tendons and ligaments; the rationale for the presence of epiphyses is not readily defined; that bones form by intramembranous and endochondral ossification and that, in the latter, cartilage is replaced by bone. William Hunter narrowly failed to realise that in long bones new bone is laid down by the periosteum and at the epiphysial plates, and is remodeled. These discoveries were to be made by his brother, John.

A social biography of Carnegie embryo no. 836

A tiny, sectioned embryo specimen known as Carnegie no. 836 has served as the prototype for Stage 13 (28-32 days) since the 1910s. Recently digitalized and reanimated for the 21st century, this singular specimen is now being used to develop 3D and 4D visualizations. Yet the social origins of the specimen have been largely forgotten. This essay traces the biography of 836 from its origins in a young woman's life, through sectioning and transformation into a scientific specimen, to its contemporary manifestations as a symbol of life. By reuniting the specimen with its story, we can appreciate how cultural attitudes toward embryo specimens have changed over the past century.

A treasure house of comparative embryology

The Embryo Collection of the Hubrecht Laboratory is a treasure house of comparative embryology. It is the largest and most important collection of its kind in the world, and consists of thousands of vertebrate embryos stored in alcohol, or prepared as histological sections. Many elusive species are included in the collection, some represented by complete developmental series. The accompanying archives offer a remarkable insight into the methods used to collect embryos form wild animals, as well as the motives behind the founders of the collection. Carefully maintained, documented and catalogued, the collection is available for study by all interested scientists. We argue that this collection is one of the greatest biodiversity resources in existence.

Some historical aspects of urinals and urine receptacles

In the history of mankind the first receptacles for urine were made and employed for diagnostic purposes and developed over centuries to a sophisticated matula. In ancient Greek and Roman history, chamber pots existed and urine was collected to bleach sheets, but it was only in the late medieval and renaissance times that a real urine receptacle or urinal for daily use was developed. We give a short description of the materials used, including clay, pewter, copper, and silver, but more sophisticated receptacles made of china, such as the bourdaloue, and of glass, such as the Kuttrolf, were also developed for use during long church ceremonies. Less known are the wooden "pipes" from Turkestan, used to keep babies dry. In the long history of mankind, urinals sometimes became very original objects.