![The Public Domain Review](/static/pdr-logo_2x-a9aa17abb46a7af84cd791867a6031ec.png)
EssaysScience & Medicine
![“You Are My Friend”: Early Androids and Artificial Speech](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/early-androids-and-artificial-speech/talking-machines-feature.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
“You Are My Friend”: Early Androids and Artificial Speech
Centuries before audio deepfakes and text-to-speech software, inventors in the eighteenth century constructed androids with swelling lungs, flexible lips, and moving tongues to simulate human speech. Jessica Riskin explores the history of such talking heads, from their origins in musical automata to inventors’ quixotic attempts to make machines pronounce words, converse, and declare their love. more
![Professor Megalow’s Dinosaur Bones: Richard Owen and Victorian Literature](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/richard-owen-and-victorian-literature/megalow-thumb.jpeg?w=600&h=1200)
Professor Megalow’s Dinosaur Bones: Richard Owen and Victorian Literature
Richard Owen, the Victorian scientist who first named the “dinosaurs”, claimed that he could identify an animal, even an extinct one, from inspecting a single bone. Richard Fallon revisits other Owen-inspired fictions — by R. D. Blackmore, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Charles Kingsley — and finds literature layered with scientific, religious, and political interventions, spurred by the discovery of prehistoric life. more
![From Snowdrop to Nightjar: Robert Marsham’s “Indications of Spring” (1789)](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/from-snowdrop-to-nightjar/marsham-thumb.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
From Snowdrop to Nightjar: Robert Marsham’s “Indications of Spring” (1789)
What can we learn from observing the progression of spring — a hawthorn’s first flowering, the return of birdsong on a particular day? Hugh Aldersey-Williams explores the lifelong calendrical project of Robert Marsham, the Norfolk naturalist considered Britain's first phenologist. more
![Radioactive Fictions: Marie Corelli and the Omnipotence of Thoughts](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/radioactive-fictions/radium-thumb.jpeg?w=600&h=1200)
Radioactive Fictions: Marie Corelli and the Omnipotence of Thoughts
Outselling books by Arthur Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells in their day, Marie Corelli’s occult romance novels brim with fantasies of telepathy, mesmerism, and radioactivity. Steven Connor revisits The Life Everlasting (1911), where the recent discovery of radium shapes the mechanics of phantasmal machines and psychic forces able to pass through all impediments. more
![Marvellous Moderns: The Brothers Perrault](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/the-brothers-perrault/perrault-feature.jpeg?w=600&h=1200)
Marvellous Moderns: The Brothers Perrault
Charles Perrault is celebrated as the collector of some of the world’s best-known fairy tales. But his brothers were just as remarkable: Claude, an architect of the Louvre, and Pierre, who discovered the hydrological cycle. As Hugh Aldersey-Williams explores, all three were able to use positions within the orbit of the Sun King to advance their modern ideas about the world. more
![The Ether Dreams of Fin-de-Siècle Paris](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/ether-dreams/ether-featured.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
The Ether Dreams of Fin-de-Siècle Paris
Those who sipped or sniffed ether and chloroform in the 19th century experienced a range of effects from these repurposed anaesthetics, including preternatural mental clarity, psychological hauntings, and slippages of space and time. Mike Jay explores how the powerful solvents shaped the writings of Guy de Maupassant and Jean Lorrain — psychonauts who opened the door to an invisible dimension of mind and suffered Promethean consequences. more
![Troubled Waters: Reading Urine in Medieval Medicine](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/troubled-waters/uroscopy-feature.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Troubled Waters: Reading Urine in Medieval Medicine
From cabbage green to coarse meal, medieval manuscripts exhibit a spectrum of colours and consistencies when describing urine. Katherine Harvey examines the complex practices of uroscopy: how physicians could divine sexual history, disease, and impending death by studying the body's liquid excretions. more
![Beast in the Blood: Jean Denis and the “Transfusion Affair”](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/beast-in-the-blood/jean-denis-thumb.jpeg?w=600&h=1200)
Beast in the Blood: Jean Denis and the “Transfusion Affair”
During the late 1660s in Paris, transfusing the blood of calves and lambs into human veins held the promise of renewed youth and vigour. Peter Sahlins explores Jean Denis’ controversial experiments driven by his belief in the moral superiority of animal blood: a substance that could help redeem the fallen state of humanity. more
![Picturing Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/figuring-the-womb/birth-figures-feature-thumb.jpeg?w=600&h=1200)
Picturing Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe
When the womb began to appear in printed images during the 16th century, it was understood through analogy: a garden, uroscopy flask, or microcosm of the universe. Rebecca Whiteley explores early modern birth figures, which picture the foetus in utero, and discovers an iconic form imbued with multiple kinds of knowledge: from midwifery know-how to alchemical secrets, astrological systems to new anatomical findings. more
![Displaying the Dead: The Musée Dupuytren Catalogue](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/musee-dupuytren-catalogue/dupuytren-ribs-featured-thumb.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Displaying the Dead: The Musée Dupuytren Catalogue
When Paris’ infamous museum of anatomical pathology closed its doors in 2016, a controversial collection disappeared from view. Daisy Sainsbury explores the history of the Musée Dupuytren, and asks what an ethical future might look like for the human specimens it held. more