Flipping Through the Pages of an Educational Anatomy Book from 1661 | From the Stacks

[Music] so hi i'm heidi nance i'm the director of the historical medical library here at the college of physicians of philadelphia and today we're going to be looking at kleiner welt spiegel which is a book of anatomy and it was published in 1661 what's really exciting about this one is that it's like an example of book arts and paper arts and how they were used to show anatomy and to provide instruction to students on what to expect in all the layers of the human body this can be used as an educational tool and could also show multiple parts so turn his head oh he has two heads so you can see the circulatory system all that oh you can even go under the circulatory system see here and then the musculature and then you have oh is there another one oh my goodness all the way under the musculature oh and they numbered are they noted which muscles and which organs so that people could see so you can imagine how long i can't imagine how long it took someone to make this oh the mowing cloth is here for his dignity okay and then i guess this is what people did when you didn't have tv let's see how many more layers oh my goodness there's more there's a spine wow oh yeah that's just tremendous so many different layers that's the end i don't want to push it any further that is definitely the end in the back it's a tailbone do you have the leg this makes me want to sing that the tailbone is connected to the jawbone song oh and then you see the feet and i think it's a world showing the world the world at his feet so i'm going to try to put these back in a way that's not going to crush any of them especially on camera there you go and if you move over on the page then you can see his partner presumably let's see how deep she goes so we have her circulatory system see if they're in the same order her musculature also labeled oh that one actually there's even it's you can't really see it but there's even a label underneath in handwriting there's more labels move this one out of the way this reminds me of paper dolls yeah so this is the writing i was talking about i wonder if someone was labeling the pieces and how to put them together it reminds me of paper dolls you've been so annoying if you dropped one oh my gosh or tore one can you imagine all the way down to the bones and just when you think you've reached the bottom of the layers oh i don't know if that one goes through i think it doesn't i don't know well that one looks like it got crushed yeah i probably should leave that one alone you can tell these haven't been moved in a while oh there's a person there's multiple people there's like an angel like a cherub and then that oh that looks like a pope or some member of clergy and then that looks like the devil oh that's not good or something a demon maybe something not like a pulp that's very interesting cut they're all over the page oh that's the eye how many so they all have so that one has how many layers it has one two three i think it has i think each of them have four or five oh my gosh there's so many layers six seven seven go down to the end oh it looks like there's a it's a person actually from the top so you can see at the top it's the brain that cloud that looks like a brain and there are different faces and then if you go down you can see the anatomy of that center person a little small tongue part oh it looks like they took smaller pieces of the body and expanded them into individual pieces so you could see more closely and there's the heart it's also interesting to think about how they got this anatomy which is trying to imagine someone dissecting someone on a table making notes for the cutouts there's a baby there's a fetus and so that's one page and then there's the ear up the top the ear went there so these smaller ones don't have as many layers that is really cool this makes me want to crowdsource the translation hold those labels that is german and then this guy looks like he was smooshed at one point so this is exhibit a on what not to do with books that have cut outs and we should probably not open him up oh what's the b there's a nice beat what is that that is that looks like a brain that's scary or the lungs it does look like a brain and then there are also the intestines it's interesting too that you have the christ on the cross and then you have the snake underneath so he's crushing he's crushing the snake next to it looks like they're trying to make it let's take that back actually the way it was and we can repair it we can repair it later so turn this very carefully looks like they're trying to make anatomy fun by telling a story well an anatomy was very teaching anatomy was very controversial um and so it was also sometimes hard to get corpses to practice on so i imagine they were trying to make it less controversial so that looks like the brain but it oh and then there's the mouth so it's the top of the brain it's a cranium and then there's a snake going through it generally not recommended for mental health oh that's quite possible i would find that traumatic scary look how all of those little pieces i'm just imagining someone with the equivalent of exacto knife wow i know i'm scared to push those up too much further yeah put that one you can see and then there's this one up over here on the side of the page oh that one has a lot of layers that looks like scales maybe not maybe someone on social media knows what that is that looks like intestines oh yes so i'm not sure how that would be associated with the scales but we've got a lot of snakes here so maybe that's it i think that might be oh she has so many layers i think this is the last page too is that the last one maybe one more no that's it oh that's so it's so dark it is very dark it's amazing how much darker that print is than the rest of it and then we are finished at the end thank you for joining us we hope this was as much fun for you to watch as it was for us to play with the layers and if anybody wants to analyze any of the text on the side we would certainly welcome that in the comments so thanks for joining us and we'll see you again soon [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia

Views: 5,424

Keywords: mutter museum, college of physicians, college of physicians of philadelphia, medical history, museum, medical oddities, medicine, anatomy, book, library, educational book, medical school, anatomical drawings, pop up book, layers, flip through, page turning, heidi nance, historical medical library, johann remmelin

Id: fK_wKE1WySE

Length: 10min 27sec (627 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 27 2022