*Apologies for cross-posting*
Making Visible Embryos, http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/visibleembryos/
An online exhibition by Tatjana Buklijas and Nick Hopwood, Department of
History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, with funding
from the Wellcome Trust.
Images of human embryos are everywhere today: in newspapers, clinics,
classrooms, laboratories, baby albums and on the internet. Debates about
abortion, evolution, assisted conception and stem cells have made these
representations controversial, but they are also routine. We tend to
take them for granted. Yet 250 years ago human development was nowhere
to be seen.
This online exhibition is about how embryo images were produced and made
to represent some of the most potent biomedical objects and subjects of
our time. It contextualizes such icons as Ernst Haeckel's allegedly
forged Darwinist grids and Lennart Nilsson's 'drama of life before
birth' on a 1965 cover of Life magazine. It also interprets over 120 now
little-known drawings, engravings, woodcuts, paintings, wax models,
X-rays and ultrasound scans from the fifteenth to the twenty-first
century. It displays the work of making visible embryos.
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