plates & engravings
The Archive
Public-domain oddities from the history of medicine, curated and captioned. Click any plate to read more about it.
— ⁂ —
-
The Wound Man
A sixteenth-century surgical diagram cataloguing wounds, injuries and their possible treatments.
-
The Extraction of the Stone of Madness
A satirical surgical scene based on the belief that madness could be cured by removing a stone from the head.
-
Robert Liston’s First Ether Operation
Robert Liston performs one of England’s earliest public operations using ether anaesthesia in December 1846.