Leonardo da Vinci's Anatomy Drawings

The veins and muscles of the arm drawn by Leonardo da Vinci. 

Photograph: Royal Collection Trust

Leonardo da Vinci’s notes on human anatomy remained largely forgotten until the mid-18th century when the Scottish anatomist William Hunter learned of them in the royal collection. A new exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland, called Anatomy: A Matter of Death and Life, brings some of these drawings together with a variety of objects and artwork from the Scottish Enlightenment to illuminate the frequently tense relationship between the furthering of anatomical knowledge, and the need of early anatomists to procure dead bodies.

Leonardo got around the problem by working with elite patrons and by assisting an academic professor of anatomy; later Dutch and Scottish anatomists often had to pull bodies from gibbets and graveyards. Modern medicine, the art of postponing death, is built on a foundation of this grave robbery, but had its origins in a more collaborative, consensual attitude typified by Leonardo.

It’s an approach that has now returned: the exhibition closes with a moving series of videos from Edinburgh’s current professor of anatomy, a medical student and a member of the public, each explaining the vital role of bequests by people who leave their body to medical science.

Some of this history is unavoidably grisly: the exhibition resurrects the story of Burke and Hare, two Irishmen of Edinburgh who obtained bodies for the anatomist Robert Knox through the simple expedient of murdering them.

Burke’s fate was to be anatomised: on my way to tutorials in Edinburgh’s medical school I used to pass his skeleton, and it was a surprise to see it across the road in the museum. Burke’s signed confession has been loaned from the New York Academy of Medicine, and some detective work has unearthed details of the lives of his victims.

There is Johan Zoffany’s painting of William Hunter lecturing, and from Amsterdam, Cornelis Troost’s three-metre The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Willem Röell – more ghoulish (and more accurate) than Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, painted almost 100 years earlier.

One particularly striking exhibit is an early 19th-century petition, signed by 248 medical students, asking for bodies to be made available to them through legal means.  READ MORE...

Hadrian's Wall

Hadrian’s Wall once marked the extent of the Roman empire in Britannia. Now it’s a pitstop on the way to Scotland’s capital, Edinburgh, or the country’s largest city, Glasgow. Things have changed over the past two thousand years.

But the 73-mile-long chain of walls, ditches, towers, and forts—which stretches across Great Britain, linking the North Sea and the Irish Sea—continues to fascinate. This year, 1,900 years after construction began, soldiers clad in Roman armor will once again patrol its length and the sounds of ancient instruments will float over its ramparts.


Writer Joe Sills and archaeologist Raven Todd DaSilva traverse a tricky section of the wall, just east of Sewingshields Crags. To the right lies Northumberland National Park—home of England’s cleanest rivers and darkest skies.PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID GUEST


These celebrations make now a great time to visit, and an even better time to hike its length. The wall’s most popular attraction, the sprawling hillside complex of Housesteads Roman Fort, sees some 100,000 visitors per year. But only 7,000 people hike the full length of the wall annually.


The reign of Roman emperor Hadrian (A.D. 117-138) coincided with the pinnacle of Roman power. An expansive emperor—Roman territory reached its widest extent when his reign began—he was known as a builder of monuments, from his opulent villa at Tivoli, near Rome, to the defensive fortifications marking the frontiers of his empire; both are UNESCO World Heritage sites.

Built under Hadrian starting in A.D. 122, the wall stretches through the counties of Northumbria, Cumbria and Tyne, and Wear. For hikers, this landmark near the Scottish border makes the perfect trail for those looking for a straightforward route that barely necessitates a map. Guided by stonework and hedgerows, its path blazes by sidewalks, meadows, woodlands, and crags in a line that has been beaten since ancient times.  READ MORE...