Blink Ink Issue #10 is here, on the way out the door. I took these pictures for the issue, of Medical Artifacts. If you aren’t interested in medical history, that’s cool. I’m sure it can be a pretty boring topic. But it never was to me. When I was young, my mother worked at an old hospital, once the largest in the world, the same psychiatric center that once held Ginsburg.
Anyway, there were relics of old psychiatry, old books with notes on procedures, a hospital librarian gave me a few and if you read them you can really learn a lot about the way people used to be viewed with mental illness and what happened to them.
Same for all medical artifacts, when you look at forceps and speculums and all kinds of tools and tonics you can see- just to take an example- how women were treated by the medical world.
It gives us a glimpse into our past, and it isn’t very distant.
Lynn Alexander
Recent Comments