From synesthetic auras and skeletal tableaux to brainwashing machines and truth-revealing diseases; from laughing gas and cocaine-fuelled poems to Byronic vampires and petty pirates — together these fifteen essays chart a wonderfully curious course through the last five hundred years of history.

Adam Green
Introduction

Joseph Nigg
Olaus Magnus’ Sea Serpent

Charles McNamara
In the Image of God: John Comenius and the First Children’s Picture Book

Luuc Kooijmans
Frederik Ruysch: The Artist of Death

Bert van de Roemer
Redressing the Balance: Levinus Vincent’s Wonder Theatre of Nature

Simon Werrett
Picturing Pyrotechnics

Ben Merriman
Piracy at the Old Bailey

Raphael Calel
The Founding Fathers v. The Climate Change Skeptics

Mike Jay
Illustrations of Madness: James Tilly Matthews and the Air Loom

Mike Jay
“O, Excellent Air Bag”: Humphry Davy and Nitrous Oxide

Andrew McConnell Stott
The Poet, the Physician, and the Birth of the Modern Vampire

Stassa Edwards
The Naturalist and the Neurologist: On Charles Darwin and James Crichton-Browne

Abigail Walthausen
Moonblight and Six Feet of Romance: Dan Carter Beard’s Foray into Fiction

Benjamin Breen
Victorian Occultism and the Art of Synesthesia

Richard Millington
Wild Heart Turning White: Georg Trakl and Cocaine

Ed Simon
Ghostwriter and Ghost: Thee Strange Case of Pearl Curran and Patience Worth