The Art of Medicine Maj 8 - Augusti 29 2010 The Art of Medicine 8 May - 29 August 2010 From Vesalius's muscle mannequins to Lennart Nilsson's photographs of the microcosmos. From whimsical 16th century bestiaries to original plates of injured soldiers from the American Civil War. Waldemarsudde and Karolinska Institutet are exhibiting illustrative art that has rarely, if ever, been on public display. In association with Karolinska Institutet (KI), Waldemarsudde is showing books and pictures from the treasuries of one of the world's leading collection of historical medical books - KI's Hagströmer Library. The library contains some 35,000 volumes and hundreds of thousands of illustrations and photographs. Now, to coincide with KI's 200th jubilee, the finest and most fascinating pictures have been selected for display in the Läke Konst (Medical Art) exhibition. "What we're putting on show to the public isn't just our cultural heritage, it's a medical historical world heritage," says Ove Hagelin, director of the Hagströmer Library and honorary doctor at KI. "These are pictures that, in the service of the medical arts, have changed our lives as a species." The two storeys and twelve rooms of the Läke Konst exhibition comprise illustrated books and volumes of prints from the 15th century to the present. They include hand-coloured woodcuts in 16th century herbiaries, 17th century anatomical atlases with magnificent copperplate engravings, microscope books from the 1700s showing the first images of objects invisible to the naked eye, and the most famous series of photographs in the history of obstetrics. The illustrations also reflect centuries of human fascination for the aberrant. Shown here are the most famous bestiaries from the 1500s and 1600s, and 19th century hand-coloured lithographs of skin diseases, tattoos and the anatomy of the eye. There is also a separate section dedicated to the history of medical photography, with original photographs of injured soldiers from the American Civil War, Darwin's studies of how humans and animals express emotions, and the very first X-rays from 1896. As well, of course, as Lennart Nilsson's celebrated photographs from inside the human body. "Many of these magnificent volumes of prints and engravings are the finest that were ever made, even if the motifs are not always that pleasant to look at. It's not just science," stresses Ove Hagelin, "it's art at the highest level."