Three giveaways, three chances to win!

Posted on September 21, 2015 by nyamhistorymed

By Anne Garner, Curator, Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health

Cover of Annette Lucas’ La cuisinière, cordon bleu de la famille …Paris: E. Guérin, [1905].

Set your kitchen timer: the countdown to our October 17th festival, Eating Through Time, is less than a month away. We’re looking forward to seeing you there, along with Bryant Terry, Jacques Pépin, the Snowday food truck, and a host of other culinary personalities offering talks, demonstrations, and panels.

Today we’re announcing three chances to win two VIP tickets to the festival this month. The tickets will include entrance to hear the legendary Jacques Pépin.

First up are our friends at the Brooklyn-based Food Book Fair, who will be hosting an Instagram challenge on their excellent feed starting today, September 21. Follow them at @foodbookfair for details. In addition to the tickets, you’ll win a signed copy of Pépin’s new cookbook.

Website-with-wanderlust Atlas Obscura will also launch an Instagram contest on September 30th. The winning photo will be announced on Monday, October 5th. Follow them on Instagram and Twitter for more details. You’ll also win a year’s membership to our Friends of the Rare Book Room.

And finally, we’ll be hosting our own caption contest the week of September 28th. Pull out the stops to caption an image from one of our 18th-century cookbooks, and you’ll earn two free VIP tickets for October 17th. We’re @nyamhistory on Twitter and Instagram, and you’ll find us here on Facebook.

The full schedule of Eating Through Time can be found here.

We’ve featured a handful of images from our French cookbooks below, to put you in the mood. Bon Appetit!

Frontispiece from F.J. Mayeux’s Le petit cuisinier français contenant la cuisine, l’office, la patisserie …Bruxelles: Ferra aine, 1823.

Cover of Emile Dumont’s Le parfait patissier: recettes pour la ville et la campagne : entremets sucrés, patisserie, confiserie, glaces, liqueurs, vins en futs et en bouteilles, cidre et poiré. Paris: Degorce-Cadot, [188?].

Frontispiece and title from Louis Clerc’s Manuel de l’amateur d’huitres, ou, L’art de les pêches … : suivi des qualités alimentaires et propriétés médicales de ce mollusque, ainsi que de l’adresse des personnes qui les vendent. Paris: Chez l’Éditeur, Librairie Française Étrangère, 1828.

Frontispiece and title page from Mademoiselle Marguerite’s Le cordon bleu: Nouvelle cuisinière bourgeoise. Paris: Baudouin, 1828.

Join Us for Our Eating Through Time Festival on October 17

Posted on September 8, 2015 by nyamhistorymed

Every year, our public programs explore a different aspect of our collections, culminating with an all-day Festival. This year’s Festival on October 17 is the highlight of our 2015 Eating Through Time: Food, Health and History celebration of food, cookery, and health.

Join us as we welcome chefs, community activists, historians, and food enthusiasts to discuss the past, present, and future of food in society, culture, and policy. The festival will feature talks, panels, demonstrations, tastings, performances, book signings, food trucks, a pop-up bookstore and marketplace, historic cookbooks on display in The Drs. Barry and Bobbi Coller Rare Book Reading Room, and more. Food and science writer Evelyn Kim is guest curator for the event.

The program of speakers and presenters includes:

Chef Jacques Pépin on food memories
Cookbook author Bryant Terry in conversation on food, politics, and the power of culture
A Place at the Table documentary screening and Q&A with the producers
Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives with the Culinary Institute of America and Harvard School of Public Health
Talks by historians Ken Albala and Betty Fussell
Panels on food and its relationship to aging, the law, technology, the future, and community health
Workshops on topics from insect eating to aphrodisiacs

Online registration is available here with discounts for Academy Fellows and Members, Friends of the Rare Book Room, students, and hospital house staff.

Wrapping Up Our Performing Medicine Festival

Posted on April 10, 2014 by nyamhistorymed

By Lisa O’Sullivan, Director, Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health

Thanks to everyone who joined us on Saturday, April 5 for our Performing Medicine Festival, celebrating the intersections of music, dance, and theater with health and medicine.

Dr. Daniel Caplivski, center, and medical musicians from Mount Sinai. Photo: Charles Manley.

In the morning, medical musicians from Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine demonstrated how chamber music and jazz can improve medical students’ and physicians’ abilities to listen to their patients.

Then, Dr. Richard Kogan, clinical professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and artistic director of the Weill Cornell Music and Medicine Program, demonstrated his virtuosity as a pianist and physician. He explored the mental life of Robert Schumann with an extraordinary performance of “Carnaval” and incisive commentary on historical understandings of the connections between madness, creativity, and genius.

Dr. Richard Kogan. Photo: Charles Manley.

The afternoon focused on the patient experience, beginning with Brian Lobel’s humorous and touching performance about his changing responses to his experiences as a cancer patient, cancer survivor, performer, and educator, and featuring his prowess with a hula hoop. Then David Leventhal and Pamela Quinn of Dance for PD® and PD Movement Lab explored how dance can tell stories about health, identity, and illness and help people with Parkinson’s find community, beauty, and movement.

Pamela Quinn and David Leventhal of Dance for PD®. Photo: Charles Manley.

The day ended with the performers in discussion with Dr. Danielle Ofri, editor-in-chief of the Bellevue Literary Review, with topics ranging from the connections between physicians and music to questions about how to embed the arts in hospitals.

Throughout the day, behind-the-scenes tours introduced visitors to the work of our book and paper conservators and to collection highlights with a musical theme.

Save the date! On October 18, we will hold our second-annual Festival of Medical History and the Arts, this time in celebration of the 500th anniversary of the birth of anatomist Andreas Vesalius. The day will be another extravaganza of lectures, performances, workshops, and demonstrations exploring art, anatomy, and the body. Keep an eye out for updates and details over the summer.

View more photographs from the day-long event on our Facebook page.

Item of the Month: Jacques Gamelin’s Nouveau recueil d’osteologie et de myologie

Posted on March 6, 2014 by nyamhistorymed

By Lisa O’Sullivan, Director, Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health

This is one of several posts leading up to our day-long Performing Medicine Festival on April 5, 2014, which will explore the interrelationships of medicine, health, and the performing arts. Register for the festival here.

O Quanto ci deve dare pensiere (O, how it should give us thought). Table 5. Click to enlarge.

The musical skeletons featured in our Performing Medicine design look cheerful enough. However, the text beneath the flautist’s feet, “O Quanto ci deve dare pensiere,” or “O, how it should give us thought,” makes it clear that they are a memento mori, reminding viewers of the inevitability of death. The skeletons come from Jacques Gamelin‘s Nouveau recueil d’osteologie et de myologie (A New Collection of Bones and Muscles, Drawn from Life).

Artists studying anatomy, title page, v.2. Click to enlarge.

The Nouveau recueil d’osteologie et de myologie is an opulent and eccentric work, published in Toulouse in 1779 and paid for with financing from Gamelin’s patron, Baron de Puymaurin, and an inheritance from Gamelin’s father. The volume’s 41 full-page engraved plates and ten etchings are by turns witty and fantastical while maintaining a high level of accuracy and anatomical detail. Jacques Gamelin trained as a painter and engraver and designed the work to be of use to artists as well as anatomy students. The first section of the book is dedicated to bones, the second to muscles, and throughout the book allegorical scenes and tableaux highlight warfare, battles, and death.

Local authorities in Toulouse gave Gamelin access to the corpses of executed criminals, and he produced sketches based on his dissections. He then worked with two engravers, Jacques Lavalée and an artist known only as Martin, to produce prints from these drawings (“Lavalée Inc. 1778” and “Gamelin fec.” (Gamelin fec[it] – or Gamelin made it) are both found on the musical skeleton image). Production of the 200 copies of the volume, which took two years, bankrupted Gamelin, and many copies were subsequently pulped.

Skeleton figure responding to Trumpet call on day of resurrection

Surgite mortui, et venite ad judicium (Arise, ye dead, and come to the judgment). Table 6. Click to enlarge.

Find more information at Gamelin’s Marauding Skeletons and Écorché Crucifixions and Princeton’s Graphic Arts blog. More images from the book can be found on the National Library for Medicine’s Historical Anatomies on the Web.

Announcing Our Performing Medicine Festival

Posted on February 6, 2014 by nyamhistorymed

Join us on April 5, 2014 to explore the interrelationships of medicine, health, and the performing arts with a day-long festival of actors, dancers, doctors, and musicians. Register here.

Performers will include Dr. Richard Kogan on the mental life of famous composers; Brian Lobel and his comedic adventures as a cancer patient; David Leventhal and Pamela Quinn on dance and Parkinson’s disease with DANCE FOR PD® from Mark Morris Dance Group/Brooklyn Parkinson Group; the medical musicians of Mount Sinai on the art of listening; with discussions, musical interludes from Weill Cornell’s Music and Medicine Initiative, and more.

Throughout the day there will be guided behind-the-scenes tours of our Coller Rare Book Reading Room and and Gladys Brooks Book & Paper Conservation Laboratory. Spaces are limited to 20 people per tour; make sure to get your tickets early!

This will be the first of two festivals in 2014 exploring the connections between medicine, health, and the performing and visual arts. In the fall our main festival, Vesalius 500: Art and the Body, will celebrate the 500th anniversary of the birth of Andreas Vesalius and the impact of his De Humani Corporis Fabrica or The Fabric of the Human Body. Like our 2013 Festival, the day will feature multiple strands of programs, performances, workshops and interactive events.

Books, Health and History

The New York Academy of Medicine

Tag Archives: festivals