The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration

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It shows that while there is suffering in sickness there can also be fascination, understanding and sometimes beauty in it also. Exquisitely detailed illustrations from some of the world’s rarest medical books form an unforgettable and profoundly human reminder of mankind’s age-old struggle with disease.

The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration

Blake previously wrote Songs of Innocence in 1789 as a contrary to the Songs of Experience, and later published them both together in juxtaposition. The worm desires to fly not just at night but also when the tempest blows and there is tumult in the air. The poem might be read, slightly differently, as a take on Christian doctrine: ‘worm’ can also be a poetic word for ‘snake’ or ‘serpent’, and this conjures up the Garden of Eden (that bed of roses again?The serpent in this manuscript poem is the ‘worm’ of ‘The Sick Rose’, entering and defiling with its ‘poison’. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions.

The Sick Rose Book — Fred Aldous

It helps to show not only the successes and indeed the failures of humanity in it's endeavour to treat and cure sickness, treat illness and find the cause of mystifying infections.If you’re looking for a good edition of Blake’s work, we recommend Selected Poetry (Oxford World’s Classics) .

The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration

The book can be read, in a single afternoon, but would no doubt make a good coffee table tome, albeit certainly a morbid one. The pictures which fascinated me the most were a collection of hand-drawn Japanese pictures from the late 17th or early 18th century rendering three dimensional smallpox lesions.An invisible worm, that normally flies under the cover of night, and in the midst of extreme storm has entered into the bed of the rose. I found it really interesting to read short snippets of information about the big diseases of the 18th and early 19th century. It really illustrates how little the general populace, and all of humanity, understood (udderstood) disease.