The Sick Rose front cover, © Thames & Hudson 2014.
Illustrated lecture with Morbid Anatomy Museum Visiting Scholar in Residence Richard Barnett, Engagement Fellow at the Wellcome Trust
Date: Thursday, April 17
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy
Copies of The Sick Rose will be available for sale and signing
Between the French Revolution and the First World War Europe and America witnessed a golden age of medical image-making. The first generation of mass-market anatomical and pathological textbooks and atlases offered crisp, detailed color illustrations of the human body in health and disease, and in doing so created a corpus of work that is beautiful and morbid, singular and sublime. Over the past year Morbid Anatomy Museum Visiting Scholar in Residence Richard Barnett has been writing about these images for The Sick Rose, the first in a new series of illustrated books made in collaboration with the Wellcome Library. In this talk, Dr. Barnett will tell the story of a revolution in medicine and art, and discuss the challenges in bringing these sometimes disturbing images to a wider audience.
Dr Richard Barnett studied medicine in London before becoming a historian. He has taught the history of science, medicine and evolutionary theory at the universities of Cambridge and London, and now holds one of the first Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellowships. His first book, Medical London: City of Diseases, City of Cures, was published in 2008, and was a Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4, and his next book – The Sick Rose, on anatomy and art in an age of revolution – will be published by Thames & Hudson in the UK and DAP in the US in May. He received the 2006 Promis Prize for poetry, and has made many appearances on BBC television and radio. His writing has also appeared in the London Review of Books, the Lancet, Strange Attractor, and the Natural Death Handbook (fifth edition). You can find him online at sickcityproject.wordpress.com, and on Twitter @doctorbarnett.