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The anatomist whose name became a trademark for all that is high standard in medicine was more engaging and nuanced than his portrait suggests. Padua was the epicenter of the Italian Renaissance in the XVI century, a place of unparalleled artistic and intellectual attainments where Vesalius started the revolutionary road towards the development of medical knowledge.

Thomas Edison's phonograph was a landmark acoustic invention. In this paper, the phonograph is presented as a tool for education in acoustics. A brief history of the phonograph is outlined and an analogous circuit model that describes its dynamic response is discussed. Microphone and scanning laser Doppler vibrometer (SLDV) measurements were made on a homemade phonograph for model validation and inversion for unknown model parameters. SLDV measurements also conclusively illustrate where model assumptions are violated. The model elements which dominate the dynamic response are discussed.

At first glance botanical illustrations of the eighteenth century might be interpreted as being naturalistic portraits of living plants. A more detailed investigation, however, reveals that the pictures were meant to communicate typical features of plant species in the way of a model. To this end, botanists of the period gave botanical draughtsmen specialist training; copying earlier examples and standardised motives from drawing books was a common part of this training. The practice of copying elements of previously published drawings and integrating them into new pictures was also widespread. However, only carefully selected elements were taken over, and even these were improved in terms of their correctness and appropriateness to the new context. This procedure was a strategy that eighteenth-century botanists used so that they would present an illustration that met their own requirements more satisfactorily than existing depictions. From this perspective, botanical illustrations can serve as historical sources on the working practices of eighteenth-century botanists and draughtsmen, which are usually not mentioned in textual sources.

Objective: To present the cinematographic production of Arthur Van Gehuchten (1861-1914) and to put this collection into its medical and sociocultural context., Background: The arrival of Edison's Kinetoscope (1891) and Lumière's Cinématographe (1895) provoked the immediate interest of neurologists who foresaw the potential of motion pictures for illustration, research, and teaching., Results: Arthur Van Gehuchten, professor of anatomy and neurology at the Catholic University of Louvain, was trained as a microscopist and a cytologist. From neuroanatomy, he progressively broadened his interest to neurology. Van Gehuchten was an avant-garde teacher, eager to adopt new visual aids. In 1895, he attended the first cinematographic screenings. Medical cinematography was soon brought into disrepute in European academic circles, when films made by the French surgeon Doyen were copied and shown on fairgrounds. Nevertheless, in 1905, Van Gehuchten began to film neurologic patients. He used this technique extensively to demonstrate clinical signs, to illustrate neurologic diseases, and to document functional evolution following surgery. For decades, these films were screened for medical students by Van Gehuchten's successors to the chair of neurology. The original nitrate films (more than 2 hours) have been recently rediscovered. They have been restored by the Royal Belgian Film Archive, where they are the oldest Belgian films., Conclusions: At the beginning of the 20th century, Van Gehuchten built up a collection of moving pictures for teaching purposes. This was one of the first such undertakings. This unique set of films has miraculously survived, and serves as an important archive of nervous diseases and their manifestations prior to the advent of modern therapies.

The paper investigates how visual resources can be fruitfully used to study the history of science, medicine, and technology from a practical point of view. Two new international and interdisciplinary trends within recent historiography are reviewed: the history of visualisation and the history of popularisation. The results of both trends need to be combined in order to understand the ways in which images of science have been used to communicate science from its place of production within the laboratory to its users within the wider society. From the proposed perspective, visual representations of science (i.e. portraits, images of scientific instruments, measurement results and abstractions) are discussed as a distinct medium in which knowledge producers have transmitted and transformed their findings to the acquirers of knowledge. The paper introduces the wider historiographical framework for a discussion of the following four papers published in this issue of NTM.

In this article, the author presents an abandoned audiovisual technique: the "filmstrip". He is interested in connections between this technique and the health service, and more particularly in filmstrips produced by the "Sécurité sociale" in France.

Recent policy discussions about extending the system of legal deposit to material published in formats other than print, for example film, video, and television, offer an opportunity to reflect on the role of audio-visual sources in the contemporary history of health and medicine. In the course of the twentieth century, audio-visual media have become the means of communicating ideas and information about health and medicine to a mass audience. However, health and medical historians rarely draw upon film, television, or video as historical source material. This paper encourages a greater role for these sources by outlining different ways of approaching audio-visual material as historical source, and introducing a selection of research tools and tips for accessing our audio-visual heritage.

This article reviews additions to 3 ways of visually enriching verbal accounts of the history of psychology: illustrated books, slides, and videos. Although each approach has its limitations and its merits, taken together they constitute a significant addition to the printed word. As such, they broaden the toolkits of both the learners and the teachers of the history of psychology. Reference is also made to 3 earlier publications.

In a brief documentary report the role of the scientific teaching film is described. In this context Richard VOLKER is appreciated as film author.

From 1940 to 1970 Puerto Rico underwent a dramatic change in its economic, social, political, and medical characteristics. Schistosomiasis (known locally as bilharzia) persisted throughout this period as a nearly intractable problem. In 1954, staff from the Puerto Rico Department of Health, and the Puerto Rico Field Station of the U.S. Communicable Disease Center (now San Juan Laboratories, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) created a set of black and white 35 mm slides as a tool for community education. The presentation, titled "Hay Bilharzia!" ("There is schistosomiasis here!") is organized in four major sections (Introduction, Disease Cycle, Disease Prevention, Treatment). Each section consists of two to four sub-themes, with three to eight slides each. The slides were used extensively in public schools and community lectures. This set of slides is worthy of preservation as evidence of the bilharzia control efforts and the dismal living conditions widely prevalent in Puerto Rico in the 1950s. It is also an example of the educational programs that were produced at the time to stimulate community development and health.

The productions of the AORN Audiovisual Committee are best measured by their popularity. Enthusiastic audiences at Congress premieres and demands for bookings by chapters and individual instructors represent thousands of viewers for each film. A complete list of all films produced by the Committee is available in the archives, located in the AORN library at Headquarters. Readers may obtain a complete list of all perioperative nursing film topics produced by this program in the past 33 years from the author. The out-of-pocket costs for producing these films and videotapes during the past 33 years exceeds $33 million. Of even greater significance is the great number of hours devoted by the Committee members. Serving on the Audiovisual Committee is similar to taking an advanced college course. Selected for their specialized knowledge, members need to learn and apply the techniques of the cinema. Far more than just showing a surgical procedure, teaching films require the staging of the ideal method while explaining its superiority over the method it replaces. Films must be forceful enough to overcome the common attitude, "This is the way we've always done it." In the course of writing the scripts, which are critiqued by the Committee, authors must research the subjects and review the state of the art. They are challenged to improve on the past and remain current on changing techniques. Service on the Audiovisual Committee prepares members for further involvement in AORN activities. Twenty members of the Committee have been elected to the Board of Directors, and seven of those have served as AORN Presidents.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

The authors take out from oblivion the series of illustrated post-cards published in 1917 by the French under-secretariat of state for Military Health Service in order to promote the malaria control within the Middle-East French Army. They give some details on how these post-cards were originated, they also illustrate some principles of prevention against malaria made compulsory for the Armed Forces Personnel. The authors also demonstrate how that simple and easy to handle medium, fast vector of sanitary information, was able to support effectively the antimalaria Mission in the Middle-East French Army in its malaria prophylactic action.