Coronavirus has prompted us to become more alert about health, medicine and science and in the last year we have learnt to navigate ourselves through entirely new words and terms, a scientific vocabulary we weren't acquainted with in the past but that is definitely enriching our experiences.
So, let's use the knowledge we are acquiring from this pandemic to get inspired by scientific and medical materials. Wonderful inspirations can indeed come from medicine as the Wellcome Collection always taught us. Sotheby's recently did an auction of scientific pieces including fossils, minerals and meteorites. One of the most intriguing (and scary as well) objects in this auction was a remarkable 19th century Spanish glass eyes panel, a medical rarity.
Consisting of 150 hand-made eye models, this medical antique piece made in 1861, depicted various ailments, illnesses, diseases and deformities that can occur in the human eye based upon the observations and work of the famous ophthalmologists Bourgery, Gimbernat, Scarpa, Magendie, Jacob, and Cruveilhier.
The panel had a story: it was commissioned by Dr. Ignacio Pusalgas, a Spanish professor of anatomy at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Barcelona. Each eye was hand-made with blown glass eyeballs (some of them pierced by surgical tools...) by glass artisan, Jose Fradera, and was set in hand-formed and painted terracotta eyelids and brows.
The eyes were then mounted together in neat rows labeled A-Y and mounted in a shadowbox that opened on hinges to allow up-close inspection. And while the piece could be used literally to create artworks or designs inspired by the eye theme, it could also be employed as a metaphor to remind us to always try and see beyond things or to be brave and study also those things that our eyes cannot see or directly observe such as dark matter.
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