Date: Saturday, September 10
Time: 10 am to 2 pm EDT
Admission: $20
(FREE with purchase of Deluxe Edition of Frederik Ruysch and His Thesaurus Anatomicus: A Morbid Guide)

PLEASE NOTE: This lecture will be recorded and available for free for our Patreon members at $5/month and above. Become a Member HERE.

We hope you will join us for a special symposium to celebrate our newest book: Frederik Ruysch and His Thesaurus Anatomicus: A Morbid Guide, edited by our creative director Joanna Ebenstein and published by MIT Press!

So called “Artist of Death” Frederik Ruysch (1638–1731) was a Dutch anatomist, embalmer, botanist and physician. He is best remembered for his macabre, memento-mori-themed still-lives, in which he posed fetal skeletons as if alive in landscapes of preserved human and animal remains. He exhibited these in a museum he ran out of his Amsterdam townhouse home, along with his renowned embalmed specimens, celebrated for their lifelike nature. Famously, Peter the Great of Russia was so enchanted with one such specimen that he kissed it, before going on to purchase the entire collection.

Over the centuries, Ruysch’s work has continued to fascinate, making an appearance in a Balzac novel (La Peau de Chagrin, 1831) and inspiring a nineteenth-century literary fantasia about an encounter between the anatomist and his collection of dead children come back to life (Giacomo Leopardi’s “Dialogue between Frederick Ruysch and His Mummies,” 1827).

Frederik Ruysch and His Thesaurus Anatomicus: A Morbid Guide is the first English-language book devoted to the man and his work. Richly illustrated—including many never before published photos!—it features the first English translation of the Thesaurus Anatomicus, the self-published guide to the Ruysch’s home museum. It also contains essays by a variety of scholars, artists, and museum professionals which situate this man and his enigmatic work in historical perspective, along with a translation of Giacomo Leopardi’s “Dialogue between Frederick Ruysch and His Mummies,” 1827, with newly commissioned illustrations by anatomical artist Eleanor Crook.

This symposium will begin with introductory remarks by the Matthew Browne, who oversaw the project for MIT, and editor Joanna Ebenstein. It will also feature illustrated lectures by most of the contributors from the new book, including:

1. Richard Faulk, author, educator, and translator of Ruysch’s Thesaurus Anatomicus

2. Dr Stephen Asma, professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Columbia College Chicago, author of On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, on Frederik Ruysch: Philosopher of Divine Decay

3. Eleanor Crook, anatomical sculptor and wax modeler, with The Pervasive Spirits of Frederik Ruysch: A Sculptor’s Appreciation

4. Dr. Laurens de Rooy, historian of science and director of Amsterdam’s Museum Vrolik, on Enchanted Anatomists: From Frederik Ruysch to Louis Bolk

5. Willem J. Mulder, restorer of Ruysch specimens for the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera and former time keeper and curator of the Anatomy, Pathology, Obstetrics, and Ophthalmology collections of the Leiden Medical Faculty, on The Allegorical Compositions of Frederik Ruysch

6. Bert van de Roemer, lecturer in the Cultural Studies department of the University of Amsterdam, on The Remainders of a Reconstruction: Visualizing Ruysch’s Collection

7. Matthew Browne, Commissioning Editor at MIT

BIOGRAPHIES

STEPHEN ASMA is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Columbia College Chicago, where he is a Senior Fellow of the Research Group in Mind, Science, and Culture. Asma is the author of ten books, including The Evolution of Imagination; On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears; and Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums. He writes regularly for the New York Times and Aeon magazine.

ELEANOR CROOK is a sculptor and wax modeler who works with several international medical museums. She trained in sculpture at Central St Martins and the Royal Academy Schools, studying the body from an aesthetic and a medical viewpoint in parallel and working from life and as a medical artist in the dissecting room. She is artist in residence at King’s College’s Gordon Museum of Pathology and has worked on projects with the Vrolik Museum Amsterdam, the Museum Dr. Guislain in Ghent, Ghent University museum, the Anatomy Museum of Cagliari in Sardinia, the Florence Nightingale Museum, the Wellcome Collection, and the Museo La Specola in Florence. Her work is in the collections of the Gordon Museum of Pathology at Guy’s Hospital, the Museum of Pathology at the University of Padua, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society London, and the Hunterian Museum Royal College of Surgeons of England. Current projects include museum conservation of Ziegler and other historic wax models, a piece for the upcoming show “Anatomy and Beyond” at the Pauls Stradinš Museum for History of Medicine in Riga, Latvia, and a major bronze commission for the new Wellcome Galleries of the Science Museum London.

JOANNA EBENSTEIN is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, curator, graphic designer, and independent scholar. She is the creator of the Morbid Anatomy blog, library, and event series, and was cofounder and creative director of the recently shuttered Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn. Her books include Anatomica: The Exquisite and Unsettling Art of Human Anatomy (with Marie Dauenheimer); Death: A Graveside Companion; The Anatomical Venus; The Morbid Anatomy Anthology (with Colin Dickey); and Walter Potter’s Curious World of Taxidermy (with Pat Morris). Her work explores the intersections of art and medicine, death and culture, and the objective and subjective.

RICHARD FAULK is an author, educator, and intellectual magpie. He earned an MA in comparative literature from the University of California, Irvine, for his research on the intersection of science, magic, and political spectacle in the baroque era, work that he subsequently, and improbably, parlayed into two nonfiction books for young adults, Gross America and The Next Big Thing. He has also written on music, popular culture, medical oddities, time travel, and the science of cannabis. Recently he has been researching and lecturing on curse tablets and other forms of popular magic in antiquity, particularly as means of obtaining justice for women, slaves, the urban poor, and other marginalized classes.

WILLEM J. MULDER was keeper and curator of the Anatomy, Pathology, Obstetrics, and Ophthalmology collections of the Leiden Medical Faculty (1975–1991), as well as curator of the medical collection at Utrecht University Museum (1991–2002). From 2002 to 2016 he worked on the project of restoring Ruysch specimens for the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera.

BERT VAN DE ROEMER is a university lecturer in the Cultural Studies department of the University of Amsterdam. His fields of interests are the history of collections, the relationship between the visual arts and the natural sciences in past and present, cultural life in Amsterdam in the early modern period, and modern museology, especially current museum installations. He has published on the Dutch collectors Simon Schijnvoet, Frederik Ruysch, and Levinus Vincent, and the art theorists Samuel van Hoogstraten and Willem Goeree, among other subjects. Recently he worked on cultural industries in Amsterdam in the early eighteenth century and Dutch collections of natural history during the French period.

LAURENS DE ROOY is a historian of science and curator director of Museum Vrolik, the anatomical museum of the University of Amsterdam, located in the Academic Medical Center. He received his PhD in 2009 for a study of Amsterdam anatomist Lodewijk Bolk (1866–1930). He also published the book Forces of Form (2009) about the Museum Vrolik. In 2012 De Rooy refurbished the permanent exhibition of the museum, with more emphasis of the historical context of the collection. De Rooy also lectures in medical history. His current interest is in the history of physical anthropology.