The Eyes Have It

“Black market LSD blotter generally bears art or a design printed on the paper. The paper is perforated into individual “tabs” or “hits” approximately 1/4 in. x 1/4 in. The sheets are then dipped in a solution containing a known quantity of LSD or have LSD applied with a dropper creating a relatively consistent dosage per tab.

“Below are scans and photos of more than 75 examples of blotter showing various designs and art. Some show entire sheets while others show only a few hits. Click on each thumbnail to see a larger image.”

Online companion site for an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.

“People have always sought better ways to illustrate and understand the structure and functions of the internal body. Before the discovery of x-rays in 1895, the only practical way to see inside the human body was to observe an operation or a dissection. Cultural and religious beliefs about dissection often made the practice illegal, and even when dissection was acceptable, cadavers were difficult to obtain.

“Moreover, lack of refrigeration meant that bodies decayed swiftly. Dissections had to be performed during the cooler months, and were impossible in warmer climates. Frustrated in his studies, a young French medical student devised an elegant solution — papier-mâché anatomical models.“

Site includes a brief overview of anatomical education methods and a gallery page with enough material to give a sense of how much detail the creators were able to squeeze from this decidedly low-tech raw material.

The FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) website offers this collection of marketing ephemeria related to the patent medicine industry at the end of the 19th century. These are the kinds of products that gave us the phrase “snake oil salesmen”. It’s a little sad to see that many of our culture’s obsessions (and the rhetoric used by the unscrupulous to cater to them) have changed so little over the hundred years. [via medpundit]

Maintained by the Society for Developmental Biology, the Developmental Biology Cinema “…grew out of a breakfast meeting at the 13th International Congress of Developmental Biology held in Snowbird, Utah, July, 1997. The aim of this project is to get video sequences of developing embryos (organisms), and experimental techniques, from the developmental biologist’s lab to the eyeballs of interested individuals in a user-friendly and inexpensive form.”