Anita Guerrini
I'm a historian of science and medicine... People and their stories, past and present, are what move me. I'm happiest sitting in a cafe or somewhere outdoors filling the pages of a Clairefontaine notebook (I buy them in bulk whenever I'm in France). My research interests range widely in time, from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, but tend to coalesce around anatomy, natural history, the history of animals, the environment, and the history of food, and around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Western Europe. Other things I'm passionate about include music, food, fiction, and politics.
Categories used most frequently by the blogger:
History of science History Anatomy skeletons natural history Books Medicine Animals Science Paris Museums illustration skeleton London eighteenth century art Food Environment seventeenth century articulated skeleton
“Stop, here is the empire of death”
24 October 2020
Ancient Romans buried their dead outside city walls to avoid contamination. Medieval Christians, in contrast, kept their dead close, in churchyards or even within church walls,...
The Dance of Death and the first printed skeleton
19 May 2020
The earliest printed image of a human skeleton is this cartoonish image from a German block book from the 1450s. [i] It is one of a series of skeletons in the popular genre known...
20 March 2020
When I gave a talk on fossils last year at the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden, my Dutch friends told me to be sure to include a mention of the Maastricht mosasaur, the most famous fossil...
24 February 2020
For the past few weeks, many news outlets have reported that the skull of Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus, ca. 23-79 CE), the Roman naturalist and statesman who died at Pompeii,...