January 7, 2010

Antique Science Book Heaven

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

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The National Library of Medicine has just scanned six classic science and medicine books from the 15th and 16th centuries and posted them at Turning the Pages Online.

Check out Robert Hooke’s Micrographia… or Conrad Gesner’s Historiae Animalium… or the kinky dissections in Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica.

Each book is laden with gorgeous illustrations, many surprisingly accurate.

You can view each book as a book, turn the pages digitally, lean in and smell that heady perfume of vellum and binary code.

Plus there are audio files to listen to, and pop-up windows offering translations and interpretations. It’s awesome.

Okay, I’ll be back in a year or so. I’ve always wanted to read Johannes de Ketham’s Fasiculo de Medicina in Latin.

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We can afford to take that time because we don’t report to an oligarch or corporation with a special agenda. We report to you, and for you. That’s why we unabashedly pursue the truth and relentlessly shine a light into the darkness.

In this month’s Summer Membership Drive, we’ve got to raise $200,000 to support more crucial investigations. This is a pivotal moment in our nation, with democracy on the line, and we can only do this work because readers like you step up. Every donation, of any amount, makes a difference here. We cannot do this work without you.

So, we’re asking: Will you support independent journalism that demands those in power answer for their actions?

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