Läke Konst (Art of Medicine)

From 8 May until 29 August 2010 Waldemarsudde Museum, Stockholm

Marking the 200th anniversary this year of Stockholm's Karolinska Institute — Sweden's leading medical university — are more than 100 rare medical illustrations from its historic collection, on display at Stockholm's Waldemarsudde Museum.

From Andreas Vesalius's anatomical depictions to digitally enhanced visualizations of the human body by photographer Lennart Nilsson, the exhibition Läke Konst (Art of Medicine) highlights beautiful and unusual medical images dating from the fifteenth century to the present day. Drawn from the 35,000 rare books held by the institute's Hagströmer Library, many of the illustrations have not been exhibited before.

A sixteenth-century cure for a squint. Credit: G. BARTISCH/ OPHTHALMODOULEIA, DAS IST AUGENDIENST (1583)/PHOTO: HAGSTRÖMER LIB., KAROLINSKA INST.

On show are hand-coloured woodcuts from sixteenth-century botanical books; copperplate engravings from seventeenth-century anatomical atlases; and eighteenth-century plates of microscope views, revealing objects that are invisible to the naked eye. Developments in obstetrics, surgery, pathology and ophthalmology are explored, as well as social issues such as the depiction of people with certain conditions as 'monsters'.

One woodcut is particularly striking: a sixteenth-century child's eyes peer out from behind a green mask (pictured), worn as a cure for squinting. The boy is depicted in Ophthalmodouleia, a text on eye surgery published in 1583 by George Bartisch, the founder of modern ophthalmology. With its pages delicately hand coloured and finely bound by Jakob Krause, a famous German bookbinder of the Renaissance, this special edition “is probably a presentation copy”, explains curator Ove Hagelin, director of the Hagströmer Library. Once belonging to aristocrat and politician Peter Vok of Rosenberg in the Kingdom of Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), the book was brought to Sweden in the seventeenth century when his extensive library was claimed as booty following the Thirty Years' War.

“Like an archaeological object, each copy of an old book is unique and can tell the attentive researcher a lot more besides the author and his text,” Hagelin concludes.