JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 553
There are all sorts of famous seats: seats of wisdom, of power, of lameness, of government, of discontent, of honor, of learning, of war; there's the hot seat, the best and worst seats, a seat on the board, a seat on the bench, a seat at the bar; there are captain's chairs, endowed chairs, and famous chairs (like architectural gems/mules of Mackintosh, Wright, Saarinen, van der Rohe, Eames, Gehry, LeCorbu) and famous seats (at the original Yankee stadium or a Roman coliseum). The seat pictured at left, though, is anonymous and lonely, but it is full of a story.
Sometimes one discrete, odd image can tell you a lot of history or the story of its time: It might seem simple and benign, but once you stop to think about it just little, an entirely different story can emerge. Take for example this woodcut from Jacob Rueff's De conceptu et generatione hominis, et iis quae circa haeac potyissimum consuderantur (in six books), published in Zurich by Christoph Froschauer in 1554. It looks like it might be a seat straight out of an old WC, but it is actually a birthing chair. And it doesn't look particularly inviting (or not threatening) for the tasks to come; and such was the state-
of-the-art of birthing children in 1554. Well, earlier than that, really, because Rueff's work was an improved version of a still earlier work by Rosslin (Der swangern frauen). I look at this chair/seat, and I think, "oh dear god", even with an historian's sensibilities, knowing full well that it hadn't been changed much for hundreds of years prior to this publication. There's quite a bit in this book's 66 illustration to excite the historian of medicine, some of which are rather beautiful and demanding, like this astrological representation of anatomy (at right). But it is still the chair in all of these pictures that is the most powerful to me. When all of the medical advancements and distractions were boiled away, and the discussion of the two types of foreceps was eliminated, it all came down to a woman in an uncomfortable, stiff-backed straight-up chair. A chair with no cushion or throw or anything of any sort for the comfort of the woman, though there was an extensive dust ruffle flanking it. And as great as the advancements were in medicine in the first part of the 16th century, dealing with women in labor was still a Medieval practice.
I should also point out that the Rueff book, as old as it was, was reprinted, translated, into English with many of its ideas riding out time intact, published in London eight decades later. The chair was still there.
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