UNDER YOUR SKIN

-5-

 

In 2014 a deck was published by the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop from Cambridge to celebrate the 500th birthday of Andreas Vesalius. The illustrations are taken from his De Humani Corporis Fabrica. The deck was inspired by Paul Lopes Cardozo, a professor at Leiden University (Netherlands) and author of the Atlas of Clinical Cytology (the study of cells). It was created by his daughter Lida, who has also designed the typeface Emilida, which is used throughout the deck in the names of the different muscles and on the extra cards.

The cards can be used as regular playing cards, but the deck was meant to play the "special" Vesalius game with, which is in fact an ordinary quartet (happy families) game. The objective is to gather the 4 cards of a certain group of muscles and make as many quartets as possible. 
The combination of regular playing cards with a quartet game is not uncommon. Because there are 4 suits, each denomination can be used to group whatever the game represents. More than 350 Dutch towns and cities have commissioned decks like this with pictures from their town. Here the deck runs from head to toe, from A - 2. Of course in the actual body there are many more muscles in each group, but here only the four main ones are named and represented in red.

Maybe the deck will be a nice gift for someone who's studying medicine,
but we doubt that it will ever be used as an official study aid.

More cards on page 6.

-1-  -2-  -3-  -4-  -5-  -6-

XPOHOME