Annals Of Medical History PDF Download

Excerpt from Annals of Medical History, 1921, Vol. 3 The formidable array of plaster casts of the heads of all sorts and conditions of men which decorated the railing surrounding the gallery of the Anatomical Museum is one of my earliest recollections of the Harvard Medical School in its old home at the head of North Grove Street near the Massachusetts General Hospital. Here was a frieze of startling, realistic appearance depicting all the vagaries of Nature's human offspring. The busts of the intellectual Cicero and Caesar and the death mask of the great Napoleon stood literally check by jowl with those of degenerates and celebrated criminals, it was not a haphazard collection of material but a series of casts of the heads of well-known individuals carefully selected and duly catalogued by the Boston Phrenological Society many years before. Few of its specimens are to be found on exhibition on the shelves of the Museum today, and the theories which it was intended to illustrate hove long since been sot aside in the advance of our knowledge of anatomy and physiology. Yet the work of Gall and of his pupil Spurzheim, over a century ago, exerted a strong influence upon the researches of the period - a period of rapid advance in medical science - and left a mark behind which time has not succeeded in obliterating. It is partly for the purpose of preserving one of the old traditions of the Harvard Medical School and for reviewing an almost forgotten medical theory that this brief account of the history of the collection and its relation to the Medical School has been prepared. John Caspar Spurzheim was born December 31, 1776, at Longvick, Germany, near the city of Treves on the Moselle river. He was educated at the University of Troves and when in 1799 that part of Germany was invaded by the French he went to Vienna to study medicine. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."