[In process.] / Richtig beobachten: Zum zwiespältigen Verhältnis der Academia Naturae Curiosorum zu den Monstren.

The programme of the Academia Naturae Curiosorum (today the German Academy of the Sciences Leopoldina) was considerably revised less than twenty years after its creation, in 1652. At the heart of this reform lay the Miscellanea curiosa, the journal that ,,the Curiosi" now started publishing. The ,,epistemic genre" (Gianna PoMATA) they chose for the articles in the Miscellanea curiosa was the observatio. Writing an observatio implied singling out a nugget of experience and documenting it in writing. In the first half-century of its existence, rare things of nature figured prominently in the Miscellanea curiosa. Physicians from all over Europe sent in a seemingly endless stream of reports on monsters. This was increasingly considered as problematic by leading members and functionaries of the academy. Their reluctance to accept ever more observationes on monsters for publication in the Miscellanea curiosa can in part be accounted for by reference to the rarity paradox: preternatural phenomena, by definition rare, seemed to be almost ubiquitous in the naturalist discourse of the period. Furthermore, many of the manuscripts on monsters sent in for publication did not live up to expectations. Even more worrisome, the Curiosi could not but note that monsters were still often interpreted as prodigies bearing divine messages. They had the potential to cause unrest and disorder among the populace and therefore had to be handled with particular care.

The persistent image of an unusual centaur. A biography of Aldrovandi's two-legged centaur woodcut.

This article traces the biography of a particular scientific image in early modern natural history, that of an unusual, two-legged centaur. It begins by examining the preconditions for the emergence of this image in the work of the eminent Bolognese natural historian Ulisse Aldrovandi. I then analyse its various shifts in content and function as it re-emerged in different publications and, finally, the reasons for its eclipse around 1700. An examination of this trajectory yields valuable insights into the way in which Aldrovandi and other naturalists of the late Renaissance dealt with visualisations. It is reminiscent of their practices of excerpting and reusing textually represented bits of knowledge. The fact that authors like Aldrovandi borrowed and reproduced images from earlier printed sources on a variety of subjects - many aimed not only at naturalists - led to their wide circulation and contributed to the endurance of an older visual style. As a result, one notes a certain amount of inconsistency between the then dominant "epistemic virtue" and the visualisations used during this period: While natural historians heeded "natural particulars" much more than the usual productions of nature, their depictions of them, much like their descriptions, were often highly generalised. Particular phenomena did not have to be individualised ones.

[The individualisation of hermaphrodites in seventeenth century medicine and natural history]. / Die Individualisierung des Hermaphroditen in Medizin und Naturgeschichte des 17. Jahrhunderts.

Certain significant changes in the way in which human hermaphrodites were depicted and described in scientific texts occurred over the course of the seventeenth century: Around 1600, short notes about hermaphroditic individuals, and pictures thereof, circulated widely, between both erudite texts and more popular text genres such as the broadside or the Prodigy book, amongst others. They were usually rather short and, due to conventions that reached back over centuries, very similar in style. In contrast, articles published mostly by medical men in the new learned journals, between 1670 and 1710, typically provided the reader with a very precise description of an hermaphrodite who had been examined by the respective author. Both verbal descriptions and pictures now seem to be less constricted by convention and are more specific. Above all, they individualise the examined hermaphrodite: much biographical and anatomical detail renders the person in question as more than another example of a type shaped by learned tradition. The article shows how more general developments of the sciences led to this remarkable change.

Comparative proteomic analysis of neoplastic and non-neoplastic germ cell tissue.

A comparative proteomic analysis of neoplastic versus non-neoplastic seminoma identified glutathione S-transferase M3 as a differentially expressed protein. This expression difference could also be observed at the mRNA level, implying neoplasm-associated alterations in transcriptional or post-transcriptional mechanisms.