Time: 7 pm EST
Admission: $8 - Tickets HERE
This lecture will take place virtually, via Zoom. Ticket sales will end at 5 pm EST the day of the lecture. Attendees may request a video recording AFTER the lecture takes place by emailing proof of purchase to info.morbidanatomy@gmail.com. Video recordings are valid for 30 days after the date of the lecture.
Ticketholders: a link to the conference is sent out at 5:30 pm EST on the day of the event to the email used at checkout. Please add info.morbidanatomy@gmail.com to your contacts to ensure that the event link will not go to spam.
PLEASE NOTE: This lecture will be recorded and available for free for our Patreon members at $5/above. Become a Member HERE.
On this Valentine's day, sculptor and medical artist Eleanor Crook invites you to consider what would you risk for love - and what it meant, before the invention of penicillin, to lose everything you had - reputation, sanity and large chunks of your skin cartilage and nervous system - in the pursuit of carnal communion?
From its mysterious migration across the Atlantic in the Renaissance period to the invention of (at last!) viable treatment in the 1940s, the eerie, disfiguring and tormenting bacterium that causes Syphilis was the secret shame and terror of millions, respecting neither status nor virtue, appearing as a sudden plague and later becoming entrenched in the population as an endemic venereal disease which partied in the human body with dramatic, visible and terrifying creativity. Not content with ravaging skin and flesh, it sculpted and burrowed inside the brain to ruin or intensify the lives of generations. Eleanor admires its creativity as she charts its voyage to Europe, its changing pathologies across the centuries and offers some curious evidence for its influence on art, expression and even philosophy during its majestic reign in the cities of the 19th century.
This richly and luridly illustrated lecture tells the story of the sufferers who traded a night with Venus for a lifetime with Mercury chemotherapy (later arsenic, bismuth, potassium iodide ) from first hand descriptions, medical reports, the documentary work of medical illustrators and the artistic interpretations of poets and writers of the period including Charles Baudelaire, Alphonse Daudet, Edvard Munch, Friedrich Nietzche. We will savour notions of sin and corruption, shudder at misguided medical interventions, gasp at decadence and degeneracy, before asking the big question: was Syphilis out to destroy us, or did it want to entwine inside us and collaborate?
Eleanor Crook is a sculptor and painter who makes work about anatomy and mortality. She studied Classics and ancient art history which instilled a fascination for statues, effigies and mummies which she found was better explored by making them. Whilst studying sculpture at Central St Martins and the Royal Academy Schools she learned anatomy from medical museums and sculpting from Victorian textbooks, adopting neglected techniques. Later she trained as a medical sculptor alongside medical students at Guy’s Hospital. She is artist in residence at the Gordon Museum, teaches classes and workshops for Morbid Anatomy and Camberwell School of Art, and works internationally with medical museums such as the Science Museum London, Vrolik, Amsterdam, La Specola, Florence, GUM Ghent, Hunterian London, and various wax collections. She has a special interest in learning the expressive techniques of former times whilst employing contemporary visual language and materials to bring her creatures to a kind of life. Her current exhibition is at the Riga Anatomy Museum in Latvia in the group show "Anatomy and Beyond".