VISUAL COMMUNICATION HISTORY BLOG

The opening of Japan in the 19th century after its isolationist Edo period caused an influx of foreign influence, including Western approaches to medicine. Woodblock prints from this era, often in the vibrant ukiyo-e style, captured this transition, with kabuki actors representing internal processes, and Buddhist deities battling cholera and measles. The University of California, San Francisco, has a particularly rich collection of over 400 o…

Published over the course of more than twenty years (1751-1777), the 32 volumes of the Encyclopédie include 21 volumes of text with more than 70,000 articles on subjects ranging from asparagus to the zodiac. The remaining 11 volumes contain beautifully engraved plates illustrating many of the articles. The Encyclopédie was the major achievement of the French Enlightenment whose aim, in Diderot's words, was to "change the common way of t…

The U. S. National Archives collection on Flickr is one of the greatest places to find visual communication history related material. 131 sets in total, and one of them is all about patent application drawings, mostly from the 19th Century - although there are a few contemporary prize gems (such as Michael Jackson's application for anti-gravity shoes) as well: View the full set  here >>> .

Very nice collection of Anatomical Illustrations, can be accessed from here: http://link.library.utoronto.ca/anatomia/application/index.cfm . The three plates below are from "Traité complet de l'anatomie de l'homme" by Marc Jean Bourgery (1797-1849). The book was published in Paris in 1831-1854. However, this is by no means the only book to be found here: The collection is huge, with ninety-five individual titles represented, …