Good morning or afternoon,

One of the several things I have found out today is that I can’t spell the word “miniatures” first time around without a spell check. I will add this to a list that includes “architecture” (only one “ch”!), “commitment” (only two “t”s!), and “achievement” (“i” before “e” except after “c” and sometimes except after a “ch” but sometimes also the rule holds after a “ch” and achievement is an example of this latter case, so)

Anyway, this newsletter is not about spelling but is instead about women who used modelling and miniatures to advance both forensic and medical science.

I really like how Frances Glessner Lee used a traditionally feminine craft – making tiny models, as for dolls’ houses – to move forensic investigation forwards. Enjoy, as I did, reading about her life and grim little scenes:

Despite these successes, however, Lee felt that more was needed to teach students the emerging art of evidence gathering. It was impossible to bring them to crime scenes, so Lee decided to create her own miniature crime scenes to use for training. She called her creations the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. “She came up with this idea, and then co-opted the feminine tradition of miniature-making to advance in this male-dominated field […] Like Sherlock Holmes, she was setting a scene and creating something like a character study of the victims, and she went about doing this very much from a detached investigator’s point of view.”

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/06/nutshell_dioramas_of_death_frances_glessner_lee_forensic_science_and_training.html

If you’ve been to Florence, you might have been to the Natural History Museum there. If you have not, I can’t recommend it highly enough – I went in expecting it to be a quick look at some things I already knew and leave after half an hour and instead I spent four hours absolutely entranced by wax models of increasing delicacy and depth showing every area of human innards. Really incredible. What I did not know at the time was that these were the work of a woman, Anna Morandi Manzolini:

When she married at 26, Morandi had been trained as a professional artist and could also read and write Latin, the language of academia. She entered into the world of the university as the wife of a professor of anatomy, and when he died of tuberculosis in 1755, Anna, a widow with two children, stepped into her husband's former teaching position at the University of Bologna, continuing his studies and establishing an anatomical laboratory that even caught the attention of Russia's Catherine the Great.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/the-lady-anatomist-18th-century-wax-sculptures-by-anna-manzolini/254515/

Happy weekend!

Alex.