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30th AEIMS Conference Anatomy & Beyond 2024Gordon Museum of Pathology, London, 3 Oct 2024
Registration link for the full day meeting
www.anatomy-and-beyond.com/events/30th-aeims-conference-anatomy-beyond-2024
Speakers
1. MICHAEL SAPPOL
Death, personhood, and specimens
Competing ethical claims and imperatives or Who and what are anatomical collections good for?
Michael Sappol lives in Stockholm, Sweden and is a visiting researcher at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in University of Uppsala. For many years he was a historian, exhibition curator and scholar-in-residence in the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine (USA). Sappol’s work focuses on the history of anatomy, death, and the visual culture of medicine and science in film, illustration and exhibition.
"Our medical museums are in crisis. Administrators and critics call for dispersal, repatriation, or destruction of old specimens like fetuses and skulls, which were collected without informed consent. These specimens reveal disease, decay, and violence, but also scientific progress and healing. They also highlight carelessness and exploitation. Modern bioethics argue against collecting such items now, so we must consider their value and treatment.
Sappol discusses the arguments for preserving historical medical collections, advocating for public ownership and open-access stewardship. These specimens are not just human remains but valuable artifacts of medical history, reflecting nation, colonialism, capitalism, race, gender, and more. Losing them would be a significant loss."
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2. FRANCIS WELLS
From Physiognomy to Neuroscience: A journey through the ages
Francis Wells is what you might call a Renaissance man. A successful heart surgeon at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus in Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom, he has also fostered a longstanding interest in art. He has supported several artists-in-residence within his clinical practice, and he has become one of the world’s foremost experts on Leonardo da Vinci.
Notable is Wells’s astonishment at the precision of da Vinci’s 16th century scientific drawings. An artist, philosopher, and natural scientist, da Vinci is a fitting person to bring Wells’s scientific and artistic sides together. Da Vinci had a keen interest in anatomy, and he described the heart's workings with a level of accuracy extraordinary for his day. Wells has researched Leonardo's anatomical sketches in depth, culminating in his book, “The Heart of Leonardo”.
For da Vinci, Wells says “the greatest function of the human soul was to understand the wonders of the natural world”.
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MORE INFORMATION ON ALL SPEAKERS WILL FOLLOW.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Hodgkin Building KCL, Hodgkin Building, Newcomen Street, London, SE1 1UL, United Kingdom,London, United Kingdom
