Posts tagged medicine
Beautiful Blue Bugs 2 is an original watercolor of various forms of streptomyces, a type of bacteria that form the basis of many antibiotics. Under a microscope, they look like beautiful snowscapes or islands with white-sand beaches. So they’re pretty and helpful: what’s not to like?
(via sciencelovesart)
The Dreadful and the Divine: An exploration of the surgical instrument - material and metaphor.
There is something fascinating about the tools which surgeons wield, they can invoke powerful associations: they inspire fear and awe, carry connotations of butchery as well as healing, and are synonymous with intricacy and skill – in manufacture as well as in use. They are the means to open the body and put it back together – instruments of a power simultaneously dreadful and divine.
Be sure to click through for more of the series.
(via abhorticulture)
What if you woke up tomorrow and you believed you were dead? Like really believed it? That’s Cotard’s Syndrome.
It’s almost a Camus-level existential mindwarp. Believing that you do not, in fact, exist. James Byrne writes about its history and recent work to uncover its cause at Scientific American:
The first described patient was presented in a lecture in Paris in 1880 by Jules Cotard as Mademoiselle X who presented with significant self-loathing manifested as a denial of the existence of god or the devil and several parts of her body. As she believed herself to be eternally damned and incapable of dying a natural death and so no longer needed to eat. She later died of starvation in what one must assume came as a shock to her at least.
The first large plastic 3D print of a tumor
Object Breast Cancer is a science/art project with the mission of giving a shape and form to an otherwise enigmatic danger. Caraballo-Farman sculpt shapes derived from 3-D MRI images of tumors, giving a “face” to a frightening enemy
From their website:
1.3 Million women in the world are diagnosed with breast cancer each year.
For most, the tumor has no image.
It’s an invisible monster, an unseen malignancy.
Erosion by Tamsin van Essen. Who knew parasitic invasion could be so beautiful?
van Essen on her project:
This work explores erosion and the disruption of form. Focusing on biological erosion, I wanted to convey the idea of a host being attacked and eaten away by a parasitic virus, highlighting the creeping spread of the infection as it corrupts the body. I have produced a series of angular porcelain forms, sandblasted to wear the surface and reveal inner strata. This aggressive process, contrarily, creates a delicate vulnerability in the shape. The translucency of the porcelain and the interruption of the surface make it possible to glimpse through to layers beneath, creating a tension between the seen and the obscured.
