How many woodcuts can a wood cutter cut if a wood cutter needs to illustrate a natural history encyclopedia? Okay, so it's a bad pun. But that fits the bad art. The Zoology Museum library has a copy of the very useful text "Hortus Sanitatis". Now, I had to admit, I would have difficulty drawing things like drawing dog headed people because I don't have that many examples close to hand. But rabbits? Getting employed as an artist for a natural history encyclopedia that can't dr

Once, women’s problems were often ascribed to a ‘wandering womb’. The organ would go walkabout in the abdominal cavity, and as it bumped into various other organs like the liver and spleen, may cause sluggishness, weakness, even vertigo and of course, hysteria. The physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia believed the womb “an animal within an animal,” an organ that “moved of itself hither and thither in the flanks.” I’d like to blame this purely on the ancient Greeks. (I love the de