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News and musings from the UCL Culture team
By ucwehlc, on 18 January 2019
Stop press! This week we are revisiting an old specimen of the week to bring you breaking dinosaur news.
Don’t worry, we didn’t break it, specimens of the week is…
LDUCZ-X185 a one armed cast of skeleton of Hypsilophodon foxii
By Subhadra Das, on 11 January 2019
Today’s specimen of the week comes from UCL Pathology Collections. The Collections are displayed at the UCL Pathology Museum at the Royal Free Campus of the UCL Medical School in Hampstead. The museum includes a medical teaching collection of nearly 3,000 specimens of human remains illustrating the history of disease. To open up these specialist medical displays to a wider audience, we’ve developed a trail of 10 specimens of well known diseases. As the museum only opens to the public for special events, we’re sharing the trail as part of the Specimen of the Week series.
All of the entries for the UCL Pathology Collections Top 10 Medical Trail have been written by Nazli Pulatmen, who worked with us for her MA Museum Studies placement in the summer of 2018.
This week’s specimen is a lung belonging to a person who worked in soft coal mines in Wales for almost 50 years and died aged 62 from haemoptysis – coughing up blood in laymen’s terms.
LDUCPC-RFH.J32.1 Lung in coal worker’s pneumoconiosis tuberculosis
By Graham Isted, on 4 January 2019
Hello and welcome to the next installment of Object of the Week: Petrie Museum Edition. I am delighted to say that my first UCL Culture blog post will also be the first of 2019. I have chosen a set of 3 objects which are truly out of this world. Something ‘extra-terrestrial’!
The contemplation of space and the cosmos would not have been an ‘alien concept’ by Ancient Egyptians who painted, carved and wrote about the sun, moon, stars and planets. They even went so far as to work with material which had travelled through space. This isn’t science fiction, this is science fact.
I would like to introduce you to three Meteorite Beads (UC10738, UC10739 and UC10740).
Fig.1 Meteorite bead UC10738.
Fig.2 Meteorite bead UC10739.
Fig. 3 Meteorite bead UC10740.
By Christopher J Wearden, on 14 December 2018
Good morning to our readers, on behalf of everyone here at the Grant Museum I would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas. Today we are looking at an animal which is better known for delivering presents to children around the world than the fascinating aspects of its anatomy. This animal first became associated with a certain bearded-man-with-a-red-hat in 1823, when Clement Clarke Moore wrote the poem ‘A visit from St. Nicholas’(1). Since then the reputation has kind of stuck. Hopefully today’s blog will demonstrate that there is much more to love about these animals than just the work they do on Christmas Eve. Without further ado let us introduce our festive friend all the way from the North Pole, it’s our very own…
LDUCZ-Z2828. Reindeer Rangifer tarandus
By Subhadra Das, on 7 December 2018
Today’s specimen of the week comes from UCL Pathology Collections. The Collections are displayed at the UCL Pathology Museum at the Royal Free Campus of the UCL Medical School in Hampstead. The museum includes a medical teaching collection of nearly 3,000 specimens of human remains illustrating the history of disease. To open up these specialist medical displays to a wider audience, we’ve developed a trail of 10 specimens of well known diseases. As the museum only opens to the public for special events, we’re sharing the trail as part of the Specimen of the Week series.
All of the entries for the UCL Pathology Collections Top 10 Medical Trail have been written by Nazli Pulatmen, who worked with us for her MA Museum Studies placement in the summer of 2018.
This extreme case of alcoholic fatty liver was taken from a 30-year-old patient who died from liver failure. According to the patient’s clinical history, he consumed on average 1 to 2 bottles of vodka each day for 15 years.
The liver of a 30-year-old who died from liver failure
By Christopher J Wearden, on 30 November 2018
Our blog this week is from Katie Davenport-Mackey, Museum Visitor Services Assistant at UCL Culture.
This week’s blog focuses on a figurine of a hippopotamus (UC16780) on display in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. This is one of several figurines excavated by Sir William Mathew Flinders Petrie in 1889-1890 at the town associated with the pyramid of King Senwosret II. This figurine was treated with some attention and carefully honed into the shape of a hippopotamus but its original function is a matter of debate…
Figurine of a hippopotamus (UC16780) illustrated by Antonio Barcellona
By Andrea Fredericksen, on 23 November 2018
UCL Art Museum’s Object of the Week is by Lucy Waitt, Curatorial and Collections Assistant
When I began reading about Slade artists and the First World War to prepare for UCL Art Museum’s ‘Armistice Pop Up’ (November 9th 2018) I had not expected to become intrigued by William Orpen in particular. Other Slade artists such as CRW Nevinson, David Bomberg and Paul Nash have arguably produced more famous representations of the conflict, but what interested me about Orpen was not so much the work he produced -which is considerable and varied, but his attitude to his war art and ultimately what he did with it after the war.
William Orpen, Three Studies of a Female Figure, and Study of the Leg, c.1899
By Christopher J Wearden, on 16 November 2018
This week’s blog is written by Lisa Randisi. Visitor Services Assistant at UCL Culture.
In my first month at the Grant Museum I learned that I, like many before me, had made a mistake. A rather… colossal mistake. Under a large glass bell near the flying lemur (which is neither a lemur nor can fly, but that’s a story for another time) lies a specimen that, for sheer size and improbability, I’d always assumed to be a fake. A plastic replica made for teaching, perhaps. Little did I know that I was actually looking at a real…
African bush elephant heart, LDUCZ-Z639
By Subhadra Das, on 9 November 2018
Today’s specimen of the week comes from UCL Pathology Collections. The Collections are displayed at the UCL Pathology Museum at the Royal Free Campus of the UCL Medical School in Hampstead. The museum includes a medical teaching collection of nearly 3,000 specimens of human remains illustrating the history of disease. To open up these specialist medical displays to a wider audience, we’ve developed a trail of 10 specimens of well known diseases. As the museum only opens to the public for special events, we’re sharing the trail as part of the Specimen of the Week series.
All of the entries for the UCL Pathology Collections Top 10 Medical Trail have been written by Nazli Pulatmen, who worked with us for her MA Museum Studies placement in the summer of 2018.
This week’s specimen is the collapsed lung of a small child. As with all our specimens from children, this blog comes with a warning that its content relates to child death.
RESP.C.8: Acute lobar collapse caused by obstruction by a foreign body.
By Anna E Garnett, on 2 November 2018
Over the last year, Olivia Foster (MA student in the Institute of Archaeology, UCL) worked as a valued member of the Petrie Museum team as collections volunteer. During this time, Olivia has undertaken a range of work on collections care, documentation and object loans, and in this blog she discusses one of her favourite objects in the Petrie Museum collection.
This small and unassuming model boat in the Petrie Museum collection (UC10805) was recovered from a tomb in Abadiyeh during Flinders Petrie’s excavations in the late 1890s. The decorated pottery object has been dated to the Naqada I period and the original function of the item is unclear.
UC10805
Objects such as this are important when it comes to understanding Predynastic Egypt, as they represent technology that has not survived in the archaeological record. Despite the important economic and symbolic role that boats are thought to have played in the Predynastic, no complete vessels have been found and archaeologists must instead rely on the art of the period to learn about their construction, size and function. This object and others like it also played a pivotal role in the heated debates between Petrie and his contemporaries as they discussed what exactly was being depicted in the decorated pottery of the era.
