April 28

1759



Mutiny on the Bounty: but I shall mark this as red, not amber, because I have already told the tale, the Captain Bligh story on September 29 of this blog, the Mutineers' story on my pages for Pitcairn Islands and especially Norfolk Island, both in TheWorldHourglass.



1701

Madeleine Françoise Basseporte, born today in Paris, "garden botanist and illustrator" according to the encyclopaediae, which is a bit like calling Michel Angelo "a house-painter". She taught anatomical illustration, to those splendid rosebuds the daughters of king Louis XV of France, inter alia. She was the first woman to occupy the office of "Peintre du Roy, de son Cabinet et du Jardin". She not only painted plants, but also studied their internal structures and designs, adding vastly to our understanding of the natural world. Lots and lots of her pictures, as well as her biography, here.

Among her students at the Jardin du Roi was one Marie-Marguerite Biheron, though her fame rests less on the plants than on the body, the body of her work that is, which was all about the human body, anatomy officially, but really it was the wax models that she constructed, selling and exhibiting them to support her more serious scientific endeavours as an anatomist - for which every article on the web that I have found requires institutional access, which I do not have: I shall quote the Yale site to give the sense of her importance, and hopefully you have the means of accessing the rest.
This chapter concerns anatomist Marie-Marguerite Biheron, who analyzed the human body, taking it apart in countless dissections to elucidate the hidden internal structures. It examines Biheron's "anatomie artificielle” that she fashioned, displayed, and taught with for decades in her private home museum. The chapter also looks at her models, made from a formula of her own invention that neither melted nor broke, which were said to imitate the human body with consummate precision. It reviews Biheron's study and dissection of actual corpses, too numerous to count and ongoing over decades, then mentions the first of three widely and wildly heralded anatomical demonstrations in the Académie des Sciences. The chapter then shifts to track how she grew up in the healing culture and forged her own independent but related medical path. Ultimately, the chapter examines the roles played by the renowned surgeon Sauveur Morand, gifted botanist and botanical illustrator Mlle Basseporte, philosopher Denis Diderot and the eclectic doctor Jacques Barbeu Dubourg in her study of human anatomy with the emphasis on modeling.

She moved to England because women in France were not allowed to teach anatomy. Long before Mme Tussaud’s, long before Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds.





Amber pages
Harper Lee (Nelle Harper), novelist ("To Kill a Mockingbird"), born today in 1926. Will I be able to write about her, and not talk about Dill being based on Truman Capote? Will I be able to write about her and not rant until the froth requires cartooning on the page, about the disgraceful publication of that book she had rejected, and which quite clearly she did not feel was worthy of publication, the one I cannot even bring myself to name? No chance with either of these.


 Several almanacs tell me that, today in 1945, 




                                    "Benito Mussolini, Italian dictator, shot" 

and I am taken by surprise, because my personal pubquiz bot, the part that gets minorly activated when University Challenge is on the television, is sure that he was necklaced to a lamp-post and left pendant there... or have the almanac writers jumped to a false assumption, seeing the word "assassinated" or "overthrown" or some-such... The full story can be read here; the video watched here. GER either way.

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