Sunday, July 20, 2025
The Future of Pollination Artist's Talk for Manufactured Ecosystems
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
Rita Levi-Montalcini, from her clandestine WWII bedroom lab to Nobel Prize winning neuroscience
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| Rita Levi-Montalcini, linocut print, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2025. She leans on the incubator built by her brother, and holds an egg with her prized binocular compound microscope in her WWII secret bedroom lab. |
This is a linocut print of Italian neurobiologist and Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909 – 2012) who won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Stanley Cohen for the discovery of nerve growth factor. Hand-carved and hand-printed on delicate Japanese mulberry paper, each print is 11" x 14". She's long been on my radar as a possible subject for a portrait, being so well-known as a Nobel laureate and for many years, the oldest surviving laureate. Pictures abound online of her apparently living her best life, with a knowing smile and her signature swirled updo, often with a glass of wine
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| Rita Levi-Montalcini celebrating something |
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| via this paper |
The youngest of four, Rita (along with her twin Paola) was born to an Italian Jewish family in Turin. Her mother Adele Montalcini was a talented painter and her father Adamo Levi was an electrical engineer and mathematician. She had planned to be a writer but the death of a beloved nanny to cancer inspired her to pursue medicine. Her father thought university would disrupt his daughters’ lives as wives and mothers but Rita knew she was not cut out for domestic life. Eventually he came to support her aspirations. As an undergraduate she was inspired by neurohistologist Giuseppe Levi (no relation) to study the nervous system and she stayed on after med school graduation in 1936 as his assistant. Her research and Levi’s, both, were cut short by the Italian dictator Mussolini’s 1938 Manifesto of Race and the introduction of racist laws baring Jews from academic and professional careers.
In 1939 she left Italy for Brussels, Belgium, where her older sister Nina and her family lived, and she was able to do research which involved using fertilized chicken eggs as a source of material. The research environment was challenging and she missed her family terribly. Soon, nowhere in Europe felt safe; she wrote "the whole world was in danger." She opted to return to Turin in December of 1939 to at least be close to her family, living with her mother, painter sister Paola and architect brother Gino in her large childhood home. They were not allowed to take part in the workforce and once Mussolini joined forces with Hitler and declared war on Britain and France, the industrial city of Turin became a target of nighttime aerial bombings. She was disappointed by the forced interruption in her research but that changed after running into a former colleague from the University of Turin, Rodolpho Amprino, by chance. While not Jewish, he too had left the university after the introduction of the racial laws. He was disgusted with the unjust treatment of Giuseppe Levi and the promotion of the new director of the Institute (not for his mediocre scientific sills, but for his closeness to the fascist regime). Amprino went to work in Chicago but returned to Italy in 1940. When he learned Levi-Montalcini was idle due to being barred from employment he told her "you don't lose courage in the face of the first difficulties." He advised her to set up a small laboratory, reminding her that the famed neuroanatomist and Nobel laureate Ramón y Cajal had managed to do fundamental work in the sleepy city of Valencia, so she could work at home. With her family’s support, Rita transformed her bedroom into a a secret research lab. In the summer of 1940, she read an article by US-based German scientist Victor Hamburger about the development of the nervous system and how nerve cells accurately connect muscles to the brain. Rita called this a “conversion” moment for her research goals. Hamburger described the surgery he did on chick embryos the size and shape of a typed letter ‘f’ with a glass needle, investigating what would occur if he removed the limb bud target of a nerve; would nerve cells still grow towards the limb? Their absence post-surgery lead him to conclude the nerves never formed if he removed the limb bud. Her brother built her an incubator for eggs so she could use egg embryos in her investigations. She had a heater for melting wax in which to embed the embryos, so she could make paper-thin slices she could observe with her microscope. In December 1940, she made a a daring train trip to Milan to purchase a binocular compound microscope from Zeiss. In arguably the most Italian anecdote ever about the history of science, police spotted her with her cake-sized box and demanded to see what was inside, suspecting she had a contraband panettone only available illegally under rationing. Luckily they were uninterested in her microscope and did not suspect that she needed it for her clandestine bedroom research lab, because her heritage barred her from an academic research job in fascist Italy. It became her most precious possession. She lugged it with her, along with glass slides, when she needed to use to the bomb shelter. She ventured out into the bombed out city of Turin to fetch fresh eggs regularly. She repeated Hamburger’s experiments using a sharpened sewing needle for surgery, and expanded on his research, investigating chick embryos not just before and after surgery, but daily, counting thousands of nerves for for 2 to 19 days after surgery. She captured the development through time, rather than a simple snapshot. In August 1941, her former mentor became her assistant, having fled Liege, Belgium where he had been working until the Germans arrived. Levi-Montacini saw something unexpected (contradicting Hamburger’s understanding); Hamburger had thought it was the muscles like those in the limb bulb that told nearby cells to become nerves whereas Levi-Montalcini saw that nerve cells formed regardless of the existence of a limb bulb but would die when deprived of a target. This was a fundamental observation; cell death plays a central role in how our nervous systems form. She published her results in Belgium and in a Vatican science journal in 1942, where Jewish scientists were still able to publish. My portrait represents Levi-Montalcini in her bedroom lab in 1940, leaning on her incubator, holding an egg, next to her precious microscope. Next to her is an image of nerves she photographed through this microscope.
Eventually the bombings and damage in Turin became too intense and the family, like most other residents fled the city for the country, making a home in Asti. During occupation she was in continuous contact with the partisan leaders of the Action Party (Partito d'Azione) and after Florence was liberated she volunteered her medical expertise for the Allied Health Service, treating the injured and refugees with typhoid and other diseases.
Hamburger read her article and invited her to the US after the war, to continue her research and collaborate as a research associate at Washington University in St Louis, where she ended up working for 30 years. Her research established fundamental role that cell death plays in the formation of nervous systems. Her ongoing investigation into how target tissues like muscles communicate with nerve cells so only those that find targets survive, ultimately led to her co-discovery with Stanley Cohen of Nerve Growth Factor (NGF) in 1952. NGF is a molecule taken up by nerves from their targets and it allows them to survive. She transferred bits of tumours to chick embryos and saw a halo of nerves grow around it "like rivulets of water flowing steadily over a bed of stones," unlike anything she had seen before. She hypothesized that the tumour itself was releasing a substance that was stimulating the growth of nerves; this was verified with Stanley Cohen's help. Foundational to neurobiology, this research was important to our understanding of neurodegenerative diseases. She became a full professor in 1958 and, missing Italy, opened a second laboratory in Rome in 1962, dividing her time between Rome and St. Louis.
She was director of the Research Center of Neurobiology of the CNR (Rome), from 1961 to 1969 and of the Laboratory of Cellular Biology from 1969 to 1978. She was appointed director of the Institute of Cell Biology of the Italian National Council of Research in Rome in 1977 and continued as a guest professor after her "retirement" in 1979. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1986. She wrote several books including her 1988 biography 'In Praise of Imperfection.' During the 1990s, she was amongst the first scientists to point out the importance of the mast cell in human pathology and she identified the endogenous compound palmitoylethanolamide as an important modulator of this cell. On 1 August 2001, she was appointed as Senator for Life by the President of Italy, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. She went on to found the European Brain Research Institute in 2002, and served as its president. She was active well into her later life, even attending the opening of the senate at age 97 and attending Pope Benoît XVI 's visit to Rome's main synagogue at age 100. She died in her home in Rome on 30 December 2012 at the age of 103 after many years as the longest living Nobel laureate.
References
Goldstein, Bob. A Lab of Her Own, Nautilus magazine, December 1, 2021.
Piccolino, Marco. Rita Levi-Montalcini's first intellectual emigration and her research in her laboratory "à la Robinson Crusoe": The Letters from Brussels and a "Whiggish" recollection. Multidisciplinary Research in Neurosciences. Conf. Cephalal. et Neurol. 2021; Vol. 31. N. 2:e2021016.
Rita Levi-Montalcini (b. 1909), Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis Missouri, 2007.
Rita Levi-Montalcini, Wikipedia, accessed May, 2025.
RITA LEVI-MONTALCINI. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach 2025. Thursday 12 June 2025.
Stafford, Ned. Rita Levi-Montalcini, February 2013. BMJ 2013; 346 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.f804 (Published 11 February 2013)
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
The Future of Pollination - Manufactured Ecosystems
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| Our Fate Is Tied To That Of The Insects, linocut print, 16" x20", Ele Willoughby, 2025 Pollinator Week is a great time to share this print, which expresses the central theme of my work about the Future of Pollination for Manufactured Ecosystems. I have been working on a collection of 15 prints for this show for the last several months. Our food sources and ecosystems around us are dependent on pollinators (mostly bees & other insects, some birds & mammals) but insects populations have lost huge numbers and many species altogether. Our future will be linked to their fate. Each of the bees, moths, butterflies and beetles in my print are native species here. Next week our art show will open at Zavitz Art Gallery at the University of Guelph. Each of the visual artists has produced work on various themes in various media about our ecological future looking forward the wake of climate change and habitat loss and at what we can learn from nature. I’m really excited to see what the others have produced! I hope you’ll come see the show if you’re able. Photosynthesis Artist: Yulia Shtern @magical_zoo Soil Formation Artist: Lynx @amour.lynx Cultural Services Artist: Pablo Rios @the_amazing_world_of_redacted Biodiversity Artist: Melanie Barnett @melanie.barnett.ceramics Climate Regulation Artist: Amanda White @thetiniestseed |
Wednesday, March 5, 2025
Master Geng: Chinese Alchemist Geng Xiansheng, 'Refining Snow' or Using Mercury to Extract Silver from Snow
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| Geng Xiansheng, linocut 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2025 |
Mercury is the final prompt for #printerSolstice2425, which again made me think of alchemy. It is an element the alchemists favoured and felt was fundamental in their efforts to transmute base metals into precious metals, both in western and Chinese alchemy (from whence the more familiar western alchemy emerged). Chinese alchemy (煉丹術 liàndānshù), a name which literally means a method for refining cinnabar, or mercury sulphide (HgS) focused on longevity (and alignment with Tao) . It can be divided into the esoteric "inner alchemy" and "external alchemy" focused on making elixirs.
The earliest recorded woman in Chinese alchemy was Fang (Chinese: 方), who lived roughly the first century BCE and is credited with a method for turning mercury into silver. So little is known about her, and what little that is known is so tragic, that I opted for another woman alchemist associated with "turning" mercury into silver, ten centuries later.
This is my hand-printed linocut portrait of a woman alchemist known as Master Geng who flourished some time before the year 975 (Chinese: 耿先生; pinyin: Gěng Xiānshēng; Wade–Giles: Kêng Hsien-shêng). According to legend, this daughter of a scholar named Geng Qian (sometimes spelled Keng Chhien), was known from adolescence for her intelligence, curiosity and skill in alchemy. She appears in the writing of alchemist Wu Shu, in his book Chiang Huai I Jen Lu (or Records of Twenty-five Strange Magician-Technicians between the Yangtze and Huai River) written in 975. An expert in what was called "the art of the yellow and the white" (that is, alchemy), she distilled perfumes and was also known as a talented poet and magician. Her fame grew to the point that the Emperor Xuanzong (circa 846-859) invited her to the palace, where rather than being counted amongst the palace women, she was honoured as a scholar and given the title Master, as in teacher. She was eloquent, spoke with confidence and known for wearing green robes and for her skills in performing alchemical transformations in the Imperial Court. In particular, she was known for using mercury for "creating" silver. One story tells that she could even transform snow into silver. The Emperor wished to test her skills and noted that all her transformations employed fire and enquired whether she could perform a transformation without it.
"She answered, 'Let me try. It might be.' So the Emperor took some mercury and enveloped it in several layers of beaten bark-cloth, closing it with the [Imperial] seal; this she placed forthwith in her bosom. After a long time there suddenly came a sound like the tearing of a piece of silk. The Teacher [Geng Xiansheng] smiled and said: 'Your Majesty did not believe in my methods, but now you will see for yourself. Ought you not to trust me ever hereafter?' Then she handed the packet back to the Emperor who saw that the seal was unbroken and upon opening it found that the mercury had all turned to silver."
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| Song Dynasty scroll painting "Master Geng of the Southern Tang Dynasty refining snow'" |
In her personal life she was known for her love of wine and romantic liaisons.
My portrait is inspired by Song Dynasty paintings including one scroll painting called 'Master Geng of the Southern Tang Dynasty refining snow' and illustrations of alchemists and their tools like the large three-legged ting furnace in which medicines were prepared.
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| Detail of Song Dynasty scroll painting "Master Geng of the Southern Tang Dynasty refining snow'" |
Sunday, March 2, 2025
Florence Bascom geologist
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| Florence Bascom, linocut print, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willougby, 2025 |
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| A portrait of Florence Bascom (Public Domain). Smithsonian Institution Archives Collection: Science Service Records, 1902-1965 (Record Unit 7091) |
Unusually for the time, she was encouraged to pursue university education. She was born the youngest of five children in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Her father John, Bascom was a teacher, then professor of oratory and rhetoric at Williams College and supporter of women's suffrage and coeducation. He became president of University of Wisconsin in 1874 and by 1875 he had opened the school to women. Her mother was a teacher, firebrand suffragette and women’s rights activist Emma Curtiss Bascom. Florence herself, a quiet, self-possessed, brilliant student, entered the University of Wisconsin in 1877 at age 15. Women still had limited access to the library, gymnasium and classes with full male enrolment. If there were not enough seats for men in attendance, women were asked to leave the classroom. Her interest in science was fostered by trips exploring the outdoors with her father, who maintained an observatory and laboratory at home. She completed both a BA (1882) in literature and a BSc (1884) in natural science, at the University of Wisconsin. She taught at the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University, 1884-1885), created post-Civil War to educate freed Black formerly enslaved students and Indigenous students. Homesickness brought her back to Madison, Wisconsin. During a drive with her father and family friend, Ohio State University geologist Dr. Edward Orton, discussing the formation of the landscape around them, she became fascinated. With some encouragement and cajoling from her father, she re-enrolled and completed her M.Sc in geology at the University of Wisconsin in 1887. She was frustrated that the field did not allow her to participate as fully as her male peers and was barred from taking part in fieldwork, which was (and often still is) considered a fundamental part of the training of geologists. She taught high school at the Rockford Seminary for Women (later Rockford College) for two years but craved a greater challenge. Her professors encouraged her to pursue her doctorate at John Hopkins University, then the premier geology school.
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| Florence Bascom holding a Brunton compass1. From: Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College |
Despite her multiple degrees and glowing letters of recommendation from several geologists and her university president father, she still had to argue her case to be allowed as the first woman enter the doctoral program at John Hopkins University. The university's founder and president Daniel C. Gilman vehemently opposed coeducation. One of the trustees called women "the foreign enemy within the walls." She petitioned for admission, arguing that she could not receive an equivalent education elsewhere, and was successful with support of her professors. But even then, she was not an official student, and was ineligible for scholarships or fellowships. She needed her family's financial support to attend. She was unhelpfully limited in her library and classroom access to protect her from the “rougher influences” of the young men. Many sources claim that Bascom was forced to sit behind a screen during lectures to shield her from the men and avoid distracting them, but other scholars point out there is a lack of primary sources to support this story; whether the story is true or apocryphal, she certainly found herself quite isolated and singled out, the subject of sexism and animosity. In 1891, her father wrote to her that "you better put a stone or two in your pocket to throw at those heads that are thrust out of windows," in response to those who would gawk at the lone woman. She was forbidden as a woman to participate in fieldwork through the university, but her supervisor, renown geologist George Williams, who believed strongly in equal education for women, insisted fieldwork was a necessary part of a geologist's training. He also worked for the United States Geological Survey (USGS) so, he took her on his USGS field excursions, bringing his wife along to avoid unwanted rumours about a male professor alone in the woods with his female student. Bascom fell in love with fieldwork. She did all the physical work of field geology, hiking and hauling tools and samples, as her male peers, in a high necked gown. In her isolation at the university she decided to focus on petrology and became expert in crystallography and mineralogy. She worked in these nascent fields, trained by the leaders and earliest pioneers. Her thesis “A Contribution to the Geology of South Mountain, Pennsylvania” is regarded as a major contribution to Appalachian geology and she published part of it in the first volume of the Journal of Geology in 1893. Though other some faculty denounced the very idea of women PhD candidates, Williams supported her research and publication efforts and cited her research in his own publications. Tragically, Williams, then only 38, contracted typhoid fever while in the field in 1894. Knowing Bascom would face barriers to publication as a woman, as his health worsened, he submitted her work to the USGS and succeeded in having it published as USGS Bulletin 136 before he died. She used the very recent geologic technique of petrographic microscopy to correct misconceptions about the formation of rocks at the northernmost tip of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She furthered understanding of the east coast of the US and redefined the recognized cycles of erosion in Pennsylvania. She published more than 40 papers - still relevant today - about the crystallography and geomorphology of the Appalachian Piedmont, in Maryland and Pennsylvania, including length USGS Bulletins and Folios. After teaching for a couple of years at Ohio State (1893-1895), she was recruited by women's college Bryn Mawr President James Rhoads. She founded the Geology Department at Bryn Mawr in 1895, working out of a small spaced boarded off in the storage area of the biology, chemistry and physics building. After his death, his successor Martha Carey Thomas did not think geology would appeal to women, and discouraged it. Nonetheless, she persisted, working tirelessly to establish their mineral and literature collection for teaching over the course of two years, developing a lab and field-based curriculum. She became a full prof in 1906, and took a year-long sabbatical to the University of Heidelberg to train with renown crystallographer Victor Mordechai Goldschmidt, who had studied alongside Bascom's supervisor Williams. Bascom and Goldschmidt became true friends, and Florence gained a second devoted mentor and confidant with whom she corresponded for many years. She continued to correspond with his wife Leontine after his death.
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| Florence Bascom (second from front, flat rather than pointy hat) on a field trip, possibly to the Grand Canyon, with students in 1906. Sophia Smith Collection (Smith College) |
Having benefited from great mentorship, Bascom followed suit and was an extraordinary mentor. A tough but innovative in teaching and a devoted mentor, she trained the next generation of women in geology, making one of the best geology departments in the country. She invited world-famous geologists to come lecture her students. She emphasized both lab and fieldwork for students. She argued fieldwork should count towards their physical education credit, clashing with university president Thomas who demanded that women wear appropriate apparel. The usual "athletic skirt" was not to be worn off-campus, and students would require walking skirts before being allowed in the field. In 1932, she wrote, "I have considerable pride in the fact that some of the best work done in geology today by women, ranking with that done by men, has been done by my students... these are all notable young women who will be a credit to the science of geology." In 1937, of the women who had been made Fellows of the Society of America, 8 of 11 had been her students at Bryn Mawr. Hired to do fieldwork by the USGS in the summers, she returned to Bryn Mawr in to teach after her field seasons and write up her research. Working at the USGS gave her access to more books, labs and colleagues. The university president used her passion for fieldwork and her USGS work to argue that the geology program should be dissolved, but Bascom won that battle too. The strain of her double career and teaching load made things difficult and put a strain on her mental health. But she loved her work and wrote, "one finds a joy that is beyond expression in 'sounding the abyss of science' and the secrets of the infinite mind.
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| Photo of Bascom teaching in the field around 1915. Bryn Mawr College Archives (Public Domain) |
She was the first woman: hired by the USGS in 1896; to present a paper at the Geological Society of Washington in 1901; and she was the second women elected to the Geological Society of America in 1924; and elected VP of the GSA in 1930. She was associate editor of the American Geologist, 1896-1905. In 1906 she the only woman added to the list of 100 most influential geologists by the American publication Men in Science; she was recognized by her colleagues as one of the leading figures in the field. Though future editions included many of the women students she trained, it remained "Men" in Science until 1971. A lover of animals as well as the outdoors, she was known for hiding her horse Fantasy around campuses, and bicycling to work when wearing divided skirts to do so was still rather scandalous. She never married, commenting that women were too often lost to science due to marriage and domestic duties - an issue we still see today. She cut her hair short and often did not bother styling it, having other priorities and working from dawn to dusk in the field. She wrote, "This is the life, to plunge into the welcome isolation of the field, to return to the stimulating association of Bryn Mawr, to observe and in part to clear up geologic phenomena, to return to the exposition and interpretation of geologic phenomena." She retired in 1928 from Bryn Mawr to the Berkshires in western Massachusetts but kept working at the USGS until age 74 in 1936. She died June 18, 1945, in Williamstown, where she was born. The USGS Florence Bascom Geoscience Center, and several geological features including a glacial lake, Venusian crater and an asteroid are named in her honour. She left behind a tremendous record of important geological research and excellent mentorship and training of future geologists.
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
Marie Meudrac, where the transition from alchemy to chemistry meets medicine, cooking and cosmetics: chemistry by a woman for women
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| Marie Meurdrac, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2025 |
This is my hand-printed linocut portrait of Marie Meurdrac (c. 1610-1680), one of the first chemistry textbook authors and the first woman to publish a book on early chemistry. Working right at the transition between alchemy and chemistry, in 1666 she published 'La Chymie charitable & facile, en faveur des dames' (Charitable and easy chemistry for ladies). I selected her for the #printerSolstice2425 prompt sodium, as for her, salt, "the father of generation" was the first of the 3 elements, salt, sulphur and mercury, from which all materials were made.
We do not know a great deal about her life for certain. Born to a land-owning family, in Mandres-les-Roses, now a suburb of Paris, to Vincent Meurdrac or Meurdrat, a notary, and Elisabeth Dove. Her younger sister Catherine, became the author and memoirist with the nom de plume Madame de la Guette. She married a military man. Her sister recorded his name as Monsieur de Vibrac, captain du château de Grosbois, where she moved after her marriage. He was commander of Charles de Valois, Duke of Angoulême (illegitimate son of Charles IX of France)'s guard unit. However the Abbot Sanson recorded that she married Guillaume de Brisset; but this discrepancy might be explained if Guillaume de Brisset succeeded his father Monsieur de Vibrac to both the fiefdom of Vibrac and the captaincy. In any account, living there, she became good friends with Countess de Guiche. She taught herself chemistry following the works and experiments of her contemporaries and reading books on chemistry and alchemy. She had her own lab where she tested all her remedies and recipes. She dared to write a handbook of practical chemistry, which helped popularize the subject throughout Europe, at a time when the very idea of scholarly women was ridiculed in France. The woman question ("la querelle des femmes")- or rather the question of whether women should be educated at all was widely debated. The book is dedicated to the countess; Meurdrac had access to a high temperature furnace which required permission of the king which she might have got thanks to the countess.
Chemistry had long been practiced by women in cooking in the kitchen, in making household remedies and cosmetics, but as sciences became formalized it became a man's world. Meurdrac had been keeping notes of all her experiments so as not to forget her results when she realized she had enough for a book as complete or more so than other available chemistry handbooks. The word “chymie” comes from 16th century Swiss doctor Paracelsus, and following in his tradition, she believed that matter is made of various quantities of 3 elements: salt, mercury, and sulphur, but unlike previous alchemist authors (including those she cites like Raymond Lull and Basil Valentine) her writing is clear and unpretentious rather than obscure. She wants to expose what alchemists would keep a secret for the select few. She omits the astrological conditions so come in alchemical recipes.
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| The Preface from Marie Meurdrac's 'La Chymie charitable & facile, en faveur des dames' complete with her argument "les Esprits n'ont point de sexe" |
She wrote about her uncertainty in daring to publish as a woman, concerned that it might be above her station and knowing that men scorn the products of women's minds but concludes that but minds "have no sex and that if the minds of women were cultivated like those of men, and that if as much time and energy were used to instruct the minds of the former, they would equal those of the latter.” Her words, "les Esprits n'ont point de sexe" appear in my print, as in her book. Knowing that bourgeois or even aristocratic women were denied formal scientific education in universities, she wanted to provide accessible chemistry, botany, pharmacology, medicine, as well as in cosmetics knowledge and hands-on training to women. As women could not legally practice medicine, providing free healing services and lessons was a sort of loophole for her, hence the word "charitable" in her title. She covered items such as lab techniques, properties of medicines, and cosmetics. She also had a table of weights and 106 alchemical symbols that were used in medicine at the time. The jars behind are marked with these symbols. She presents ingredients as "principles" rather than materials, in the manor of the alchemists and describes methods used both by alchemists and early chemists such as distillation, sublimation, rectification, calcination, cohobation and so forth, with specific vessels and fires to be used. She includes recipes which could be found in contemporary chemistry texts such as for Flowers of Bezoin, or Salt of Saturn. Following Paracelsus she writes about plants in medicine, as they believed them superior to other matter, created prior to animals according to Genesis and having survived the great flood. She was wary of using metals in medicine, viewing such treatment as more aggressive. She brought her knowledge to a wide audience, empowering women to make their own remedies and cosmetics safely, for instance, correctly warning of the dangers of using poisonous mercury sublimate to whiten skin as was done at the time.
She is surrounded with books, tools, supplies and plants she would have used including scales, glassware, tongs, and a furnace, inspired by the frontispiece in one of the several editions of her book. The plants are rosemary, which she describes as a universal antidote to all sorts of illnesses, and tansy, used to facilitate childbirth. The book was popular for more than 50 years, with five editions in France, six in Germany, and one in Italy. She encouraged her readers to follow her lead and use their skills to freely treat the poor. Recognizing the cost of materials and tools she offers her readers some more accessible alternative suggestions and offers advice on finding the more rare ingredients. She even offers to answer readers' questions or even make demonstrations in person. Writing about chemistry for women, when it was claimed by men for men, was transgressive, and she defends her ability to do so with her strong feminist argument. She made hands-on training in chemistry, botany, pharmacology, and medicine, as well as in cosmetics accessible to generations of women.
References
Bulletin du bibliophile, Volume 24, Techner, 1859. pp. 252-253
Rayner-Canham, Marelene F.; Rayner-Canham, Marelene; Rayner-Canham, Geoffrey (2001). Women in Chemistry: Their Changing Roles from Alchemical Times to the Mid-twentieth Century. Chemical Heritage Foundation. pp. 4–5. ISBN 9780941901277.
Tuesday, February 18, 2025
Neon, as in Nixie tubes and Copper as in blue-blooded horseshoe crabs
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| Nixie Tubes, 8" x 8" linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2025 |
I wasn't sure what to make for the #PrinterSolstice2425 prompts neon because it's a famously un-reactive noble gas. It does play a role in stellar nucleosynthesis, but that was the subject of my last print. Copper on the other hand has such a long history and huge role in art and science that I didn't know where to begin. I opted for Nixie tubes and horseshoe crabs.
Nixie tubes, also known as or cold cathode display, are electronic devices used for displaying letters or numerals or other information using glow discharge. Introduced in 1955, they are prized today for their vintage aesthetics. Inside a glass tube, there's a wire-mesh honeycomb-shaped anode, and if you look carefully you can make out the multiple cathodes shaped like alphanumeric characters (here printed in silver). When a cathode is powered it becomes surrounded with an orange glow discharge. The tube is filled with a gas at low pressure, usually neon with a small amount of argon.
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| Horshoe crab, 8" x 8" linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2025 |
My hand-printed horseshoe crab (Tachypeus gigas) is hand-printed in grey, blue-bronze and dark brown on 8" x 8" cream-coloured Japanese paper with bark inclusions. They get their name from their horseshoe like shape but they are not crabs; they are chelicerates, more closely related to arachnids and they are "living fossils" which have changed very little since they first appeared in the Triassic. The textured sandy paper is meant to look like sand on a beach. They actually swim with their underside up, but prefer to stay on the sea bottom.
There are four species of horseshoe crab which are still living. T. gigas is a species from the Indo-Pacific. The blood of horseshoe crabs (like most mollusks) contains the copper-containing protein hemocyanin rather than hemoglobin (the iron-containing protein), which is the basis of oxygen transport in vertebrates. Colourless when deoxygenated hemocyanin turns dark blue when oxygenated. In circulation, the horseshoe crab's blue is grey-white to pale yellow, but if exposed to air when they bleed, it turns dark blue. Hemocyanin carries oxygen in extracellular fluid, unlike the oxygen transport in vertebrates by hemoglobin in red blood cells.
Tachypleus gigas inhabits seagrass meadows, sandy and muddy shores at depths to 40 m (130 ft) and is the only horseshoe crab to have been observed swimming at the surface of the ocean. It lives in both marine and brackish waters in tropical South and Southeast Asia.