| One of the strengths of the NMHM's archives is it's trade literature / advertising material in the GMPI collection. Here's Steve Heller's Daily Heller blog pointing out the designer of Upjohn's Scope magazine | |||
5.31.13 / Will Burtin's Beauty | |||
 The May-June 1955 issue of Print magazine, co-edited by Leo Lionni, was pretty special. In addition to Lioinni's bi-monthly injection of art and art history into the editorial mix of the magazine, an insert written and designed by Will Burtin titled "A Program in Print: Upjohn and Design" is seamlessly folded into the magazine. | |||
"Skinless Wonders": Body Worlds and the Victorian Freak Show
Abstract
In 2002, Gunther von Hagens's display of plastinated corpses opened in London. Although the public was fascinated by Body Worlds, the media largely castigated the exhibition by dismissing it as a resuscitated Victorian freak show. By using the freak show analogy, the British press expressed their moral objection to this type of bodily display. But Body Worlds and nineteenth-century displays of human anomalies were linked in more complex and telling ways as both attempted to be simultaneously entertaining and educational. This essay argues that these forms of corporeal exhibitionism are both examples of the dynamic relationship between the popular and professional cultures of the body that we often erroneously think of as separate and discrete. By reading Body Worlds against the Victorian freak show, I seek to generate a fuller understanding of the historical and enduring relationship between exhibitionary culture and the discourses of science, and thus to argue that the scientific and the spectacular have been, and clearly continue to be, symbiotic modes of generating bodily knowledge.