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Academia has seen remarkable progress in gender equality over the last 50 years, but has yet to achieve parity – particularly in economics and STEM disciplines. This column documents the participation of women in European academia from the first universities to the eve of the Industrial Revolution, with unexpected results. Of the 108 women who taught at universities or
At the end of the 17th century, working in Bologna’s hospital morgues, the Sicilian sculptor Gaetano Giulio Zumbo became the first artist to make anatomical teaching models using coloured wax. The head of an executed criminal, his mouth open and eyes frozen in the final spasm of death, is rendered in wax moulded over a real human skull, the epidermis removed to show the man as machine beneath. Until then, waxworks were largely confined to life-size effigies of saints and anatomical ex-votos, sometimes depicting limbs and organs. The art historian Aby Warburg thought that the individualised ...