Friday cephalopod: glass invertebrates

Rudolph and Leopold Blaschka, a father-and-son team, are famous for creating the glass flowers at Harvard mentioned by Marianne Moore in a poem. They also created about 800 glass sculptures of marine invertebrates both large and small. The octopus above is one of the Blaschka’s glass sculptures of marine life. Their techniques have been lost and their work can not now be duplicated.

Links to more information:

• Glass animals collected and cleaned
• Blaschka glass model project
• Rudolph and Leopold Blaschka
• Dublin Blaschka Congress in 2006
• glass marine invertebrates at Harvard
• glass marine invertebrates at Cornell
• William Warmus, photographer, has photographed the Blaschka marine invertebrates
• glass flowers at Harvard Museum of Natural History–more than 3,000 glass models of plants made over fifty years

Invertebrate snacks

The Urban Pantheist has made Ammonites in a Blanket. Follow the link for a larger photo.

They are made with hot dogs, but at first glance I thought the tentacles were beet stalks.

In 2006, Urban Pantheist has documented 365 urban species.

Book: The Woman with a Worm in Her Head by Pamela Nagami, M.D.

This is a book in the style of Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

I found it quite interesting and a little scary: it’s a reminder of the dangers that lurk in daily life. The doctor mentions being inspired at one point by reading Animals Without Backbones by Ralph Buschbaum, which is the original edition of my current science read, Living Invertebrates, AKA “The Big Book o’ Invertebrates.”

The sections of this book are

• Foreword by F. Gonzalez-Crussi, Emeritus Professor of Pathology
• Introduction - about the author’s medical training
• “Worm Hunt” - The man with a worm in his flesh. A man who visited Vietnam is struck by a strange illness, and the doctor must use her detective skills to discover the cause.
• “Wounded Heart” - The doctor deals with heart disease caused by bacterial infection - remember rheumatic fever?
• “Valley Fever” - A dust-borne fungus in California causes a local disease that can be a transient fever or a debilitating illness.
• “AIDS” - The AIDS crisis arises in a few mysterious infections; builds in susceptible young men, drug users, transfusion recipients, and others; and finally is slowed by the first effective treatments.
• “Maneater” - Flesh-eating Strep bacteria can attack anyone through an opening in the skin as small as a paper cut.
• “A Fever from Africa” - Tropical diseases, including malaria, take huge medical resources to fight.
• “Manju” - Some of the worst ills are slow brain diseases, apparently caused by imperfect virus particles or even twisted proteins.
• “The Woman With a Worm in Her Head” - Cysticerosis caused by the pork tapeworm from undercooked pork (”The Other White Meat”) or other foods
• “Septic Shock” - Staph infections can manifest in many ways from the deadly septic shock (including “childbed fever”) to scarlet fever and more.
• “A Case of Chickenpox” - Chickenpox in unvaccinated adults can kill, so it’s important to check immunity and be aware of the symptoms.
• “Call Me Spot” - Meningitis can cause purple spots under the skin. This is another case of bacteria that are ususally harmless getting into the wrong place or becoming virulent.
• Conclusion - a continuing battle against infectious disease
• Glossary
• Selected Bibliography
• Index

See also “Currently Reading: The Woman With a Worm in Her Head.

Currently reading: "The Woman with a Worm in Her Head and Other True Stories of Infectious Disease" by Pamela Nagami

This is my current non-fiction book (other than the Big Book o’ Invertebrates, which is at home). It was published in the U.S. in as “Maneater” but the text is the same. Dr. Nagami is a doctor at the University of California. She has dealt with all manner of mysterious and troublesome diseases from parasitic infections to Strep A and Valley Fever. She has a chapter on the first cases of AIDS and the subsequent AIDS crisis.

You can read a review here.