Sabina Carraro works as a a conservation/restauration specialist at the Museum of Wax Moulages, which is run jointly by the University of Zurich and the University Hospital Zurich. She first learned about the moulage technique during her professional training and immediately knew it was what she wanted to do. In this interview, she tells us all about the making of the wax moulages from the last Swiss smallpox epidemic.
Interview: Valentina Porfido, apprentice as information and documentation specialist at Main Library
Sabina Carraro at the Museum of Wax Moulages
Why were wax moulages of people infected with smallpox created?
Moulages have been made in Zurich since 1918. With this technique, body parts affected by a disease are reproduced three-dimensionally to preserve the clinical picture, for example for teaching purposes. The former Zurich Cantonal Hospital employed Lotte Volger as its first moulageuse. She was expected to enlarge the growing collection with wax moulages of diseaeses which had not yet been documented. At the beginning of the 20th century, smallpox was already a rare condition. Most people had been vaccinated. There were no smallpox moulages in the collection until the epidemic of 1921. Since the disease shows itself mainly through the skin, it was even more important to capture and preserve how it looks.
Lotte Volger lived and worked very close to the Cantonal Hospital. Thus, whenever necessary, she could go to the hospital to see the patients who served her as models. The basic rule was that moulages could only be painted in the presence of the patient and in daylight. This could be difficult because the skin usually changes over time.
Wax moulages at the exhibition “Smallpox in Zurich 100 years ago” in the Main Library – Medicine Careum
How are moulages made? What is the working process?
If we stick to the classic process for a face, it first requires plaster to create a negative. It is usually done in two parts, which are then joined together. This creates a small cast seam, which can be easily repaired. The next step is the making of the moulage mass, which is made from beeswax, dammar resin and four oil colors (red, blue, brown, yellow). This mass is then poured into the plaster negative. When the hot wax cools down to room temperature, it becomes solid again and you can remove the plaster negative. This results in the wax positive. Of course, this moulage does not yet have hair and eyes.
The next step is to paint the skin. This takes more than a day because of the time needed for drying. You have to allow some time after every new thin layer of paint. Then, using a warm knife, openings are cut into the form from the inside to insert the glas eyes. The last step is to add the hair by poking small holes for each hair. As a last finish, you use a varnish to create shiny spots on the skin to make the moulage look more realistic.
The finished moulage is mounted with a little bit of hot wax on a black wooden board and clothed with a white linen. The only difference between this traditional procedure and modern moulage production is that skin-friendly silicone is used instead of plaster.
What attracted you to this particular profession?
During my training at the Universtity of the Arts, the moulage collection at the University Hospital in Zurich was mentioned in my drawing class. I visited it out of interest in my free time, and actually, you could say it was love at first sight.
I have always had an interest in topics in between medicine and art. For me, this is exactly the place where both meet. In addition, I always wanted to work with my hands, but also have the scientific aspect to it. After my training as a restauration specialist, I was able to fulfill my dream. Restoring moulages is very exciting, diverse and complex, because the moulages always confront me with new questions to solve. Today, unfortunately, there is rarely enough time to make new moulages myself, but the fact that we still master this art in Zurich is of course very gratifying.
Scientists at the University of Zurich can now publish Open Access articles free of charge in journals published by Wiley from May 1, 2021. This offer is made possible by the conclusion of a Read&Publish agreement jointly financed by the University Library and the Zentralbibliothek Zürich. This agreement secures continued reading rights to the previously accessible journals and also enables the option of Open Access publication.
In order to use this offer the corresponding author of the submitted article must be employed at the University of Zurich or the affiliated hospitals and the article must be accepted by the publisher after May 1, 2021. A list of all eligible Wiley journals and a description of the submission process can be found on the UB website on Open Access Publication Funding under the respective publisher name.
Please note that the opportunity for free OA publication is limited due to an annual quota.
In addition to Wiley, Read&Publish agreements exist with other publishers. Information on the individual agreements and the conditions can be found on the UB website on Open Access Publication Funding. It is also possible to receive funding for publishing with other selected open access publishers. Find out more on the website or contact us at oa@ub.uzh.ch
Read&Publish agreements are an important step towards the aim of making all publicly funded publications available in Open Access by 2024 in Switzerland. Details can be found in the media release of swissuniversities.
If you have published a scientific article, chances are that you are receiving emails from “journals” congratulating on your work and inviting you to publish with them. The more often you took the role as corresponding author of a publication, the more your inbox is likely to overflow with these invitations.
While you might be flattered at first, at a second glance you’ll notice that these invitations seem suspicious – they claim to be interdisciplinary, offer fast peer-review and quick publication times. In this Coffee Lecture we show you what you have to look out for in order to identify predatory publishers. While you can’t avoid those annoying emails entirely, maybe you can just have a little bit of fun with them.
Do not Unsubscribe from the mailing list. That might just give them a confirmation that your account is active and result in even more unwanted emails.
Since May 2020, PubMed has been available via a new search interface on a completely new technology platform. The modern design enables more intuitive and easier navigation and is responsive to all end devices.
In order to use all possibilities in PubMed, one should work with a personal account (one-time registration necessary).
The National Center for Biotechnology Information NCBI will be changing the login option in June, so anyone who already has an account should link it to either the university login or a personal Google, Microsoft, Facebook or ORCID account:
go to your account settings and choose linked accounts
search with zurich and select
successful linking
Benefit from the added value of a personal account!
Highlighting Using this option, the search terms are highlighted in color and thus the relevancy of a hit can be captured very quickly. PubMed often adds additional terms to the search in the background using the Automatic Term Mapping algorithm, these are clearly visualized with highlighting.
Personal filters Are you repeatedly interested in reviews, clinical studies or medical literature for a specific age group? Select up to 15 filters in your personal account and you will see your result lists filtered directly according to these criteria
find the most often used filters here
here you find all available filters
any search query can be defined as a custom filter
click on the filter to limit your results
Create an alert Have you developed a good search strategy for your research topic and want to stay updated? Then create an alert. New records added to the database will be matched with your specific search query and you will regularly receive an email with the new hits.
Dimensions offers an alternative way of searching for scientific information and is one of the largest multidisciplinary databases for scientific publications and research data.
Compared to Web of Science and Scopus, Dimensions is characterized by the following properties:
It lists journal articles, preprints, books and book chapters.
Many publication types such as working papers, reports, conference proceedings, dissertations and reviews are searched.
Research data is extracted from data repositories and linked to the corresponding publications.
Project funding is presented with amounts and research funder.
Open Access publications are extracted from Unpaywall and categorized according to openness (gold, bronze, green, ..).
Professor Elisabeth Stark was elected as the new Vice President Research at UZH in January 2021 and is thus also responsible for the Open Science office, among other things. The topic of Open Science is now becoming more important than ever among researchers, not least because of UZH’s future Open Science Policy.
Elisabeth Stark, Professor of Romance Linguistics (Image: Sandra Stamm)
Within the area of Open Science, Vice President Stark identifies three important tasks that her Office will need to address: First, to drive forward the strategic decisions for the university in close collaboration with services and the Office of Vice President Faculty Affairs and Scientific Information; second, to clarify and secure the financial resources for the implementation of Open Science goals; and third, to provide support to early-career researchers in the growing demands for Open Access publishing. “It is important that young researchers can publish where it is advantageous for their career,” says Vice President Stark. And to ensure that young researchers are not left behind, the required Open Access standards must also be recognized by university decision-makers, whether in the appointment committee for a new professorship or in the awarding of grants.
For her term in office, Vice President Stark would particularly like to see networked cooperation between the offices of the Vice Presidents and the service units, for example with the main library. Especially since the topic of Open Science not only affects her own office and research, but also affects the promotion of young scientists, scientific information, faculties, teaching and students. Because of the main library has a wealth of experience with publishing and knowledge of the diversity of the disciplines, it is an important source of information for researchers in order to support them in the area of Open Access and Open Data, while it can also take into account the differences between the disciplines. At the same time, Vice President Stark also sees the library as an active player that negotiates read-and-publish agreements with publishers, thus enabling UZH researchers to publish Open Access in certain journals of the most important publishers. It is often the case that these journals are not yet “pure” Open Access journals. It is therefore important to note that the offer to publish Open Access is limited. On the one hand, this is due to an agreed quota for Open Access publications per journal and, on the other hand, because not all journals of a publisher are included in the packages. “For researchers, the topic is very complex; the main library can make a fundamental contribution in explaining the current changes in the publication landscape to researchers,” Vice President Stark is convinced.
Communication in all directions is essential so that UZH’s Open Science stakeholders can work toward a common goal and involve researchers in the process. However, communication must also be sought with external stakeholders – such as the smaller, specialized publishers in the humanities.
If you’re a chemist, you’ll most likely answer with yes. To scientists of other disciplines, however, this literature database and intuitive search tool is hardly known. In this Coffee Lecture, we demonstrate how you’ll greatly benefit from SciFinder-n, no matter whether you’re a researcher in the life sciences, medicine, physics, earth sciences, geography, or even history of science / medicine!
What is SciFinder-n?
A comprehensive database of literature references and scientific research information.
Contains references (from journals, patents, preprints and many more) linked with substances (including materials, mixtures, biosequences, etc.), chemical reactions and interdisciplinary concept terms.
Maintained by CAS (Chemical Abstracts Service – a division of the American Chemical Society) and the content is manually curated by PhD scientists.
How do you use SciFinder-n?
As an affiliate of the University of Zurich you can sign up for an account via this link (use your UZH email address): Register as a new ScFinder user We recommend starting with a reference search. From the menu on the left, choose References, type one or two keywords of your interest (in this example: heavy metal pollution) and start the search with a click on the magnifying glass.
Start a reference search.
In order to refine your search using the interdisciplinary Concept terms of the database, scroll down to find the filter by Concept in the left hand menu. Click on View all.
Find the Filter for Concepts in the menu on the left side.
View the Concepts by Top Count to find topics of interest related to your search terms. You might find additional inspiration for new search terms around your research topic.
Concepts by Top Count.
In order to refine by a specific Concept, change to the tab “Search” and enter a keyword (in this example: soil). Select all Concepts that apply. The references associated with each Concept are combined in your answer set (OR operator). In this example I selected all Concepts associated with soil pollutants and soil pollution.
Search for a concept.
If you want to further narrow down your search results with an additional term, use the Search within Results at the bottom of the page and enter another keyword. This can also be a term that you saw in the Concept list (in this example: Switzerland).
Search Within Results.
We hope you found relevant literature for your search question! If you work with amino acid or DNA sequences, you might also want to give the new biosequence search a try! On the start page, select Biosequences from the left hand menu.
With the literature management program Mendeley you can easily manage journal articles and the PDFs. Mendeley offers a new tool: Mendeley Reference Manager. According to the provider, this tool is intended to better address the basic functionalities of a literature management program. The basic functions of a literature management program are: Collect references, manage them, and cite the collected references into a Word document.
Create account and install program An account is required to work with Mendeley. In addition to the program, the Web Importer for the browser should be installed (the Web Importer is currently compatible only with Firefox and Chrome).
Collecting references in Mendeley Using the Mendeley Web Importer, references can be added from literature databases, publisher websites, or library catalogs. Further possibilities to capture references are: Direct import of PDF documents or manually adding a source
Organize references in Mendeley With a folder structure the references can be organized in Mendeley. With the integrated PDF viewer the PDFs can be read, marked and annotated.
Add references to a Word document Mendeley Cite is required for adding citations and creating a reference list. However, this add-in for Word is still in beta version and partly does not work correctly.
What is Mendeley Desktop? This tool is also a literature management program from the same provider. It offers more functionalities than Mendeley Reference Manager, but it has one disadvantage. The tool is not compatible with the latest macOS versions: MacOS 10.14 Mojave, MacOS 10.15 Catalina or MacOS 11 Big Sur. For citations in Word, the Word Citation plugin is used.
Alternative to Mendeley? Give Zotero a try! It is open sourced and compatible with all operating systems. Zotero Connector (the counterpart to Mendeley Web Importer) works with all major browsers.
Instructions to authors: Don’t write for a specific journal, but write a generic article. That way it is much easier to resubmit elsewhere if your paper is rejected. And don’t follow the boring rules of narrow-minded editors (regarding e.g. word count or structure).
Title and abstract: Choose a sensational title and a speculative abstract. Thus, more people will want to read your paper.
Introduction: Write the introduction before and independently of methods and results. At this point it is not important to know where the paper is heading. Cite outdated literature, or use random references to support your claims (nobody will ever check). Feel free to copy-paste large parts of the introduction into your next article on the same topic.
Methods: You can save a lot of words by simply writing that the methods have been described elsewhere (and provide a reference that will lead to another reference and so on).
Results: Plenty of mistakes can be made when conducting and reporting statistical analyses. Don’t bother to consult a statistician, especially not when planning the experiments or clinical study.
Discussion: Always end with “Further research on this topic is needed.” People love reading that.
Submission: Once you have submitted your article, do ask the editor every two weeks about the status of your paper and why the review process is taking so long. This will speed up the process.
Follow my tips step by step– and a rejection of your paper is guaranteed!
Need more tips? For further reading or watching (I mean, seriously, who reads texts nowadays, when everything is on YouTube?), I recommend:
Makin TR, Orban de Xivry JJ. Ten common statistical mistakes to watch out for when writing or reviewing a manuscript. Elife. 2019;8:e48175. doi: 10.7554/eLife.48175.
Murray R. Skillful writing of an awful research paper. Anal Chem. 2011;83(3):633. doi: 10.1021/ac2000169.
Cultural anthropologist Prof. Eberhard Wolff and medical historian Prof. Iris Ritzmann have both been studying the history of smallpox vaccination for many years and have done research on anti-vaccination movements in Switzerland and Germany. In this interview, they talk about parallels between then and now.
Interview: Ursula Reis
Prof. Eberhard Wolff and Prof. Iris Ritzmann
Do you see similarities between the criticism of smallpox vaccination in the 19th century and today’s sceptics?
Eberhard Wolff: Since the beginning, there have been two main strands of argumentation against vaccination: People had doubts about the effectiveness and were concerned about safety issues. To elaborate a little, they questioned whether the vaccination actually prevents the disease and whether it might not have any unknown harmful side effects. Of course, there were more, but these two main arguments cut across time.
In the individual case, of course, the arguments of vaccination opponents very much depended on the historic situation and the environment. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, several movements criticizing professional and academic medicine emerged. Most favoured naturopathy and were critical of vaccination. Embedded in this anti-medical milieu of naturopathic associations and animal experiment opponents, the antivax movement began to build its own associations. This cultural situation was still effective in the 1920s when Switzerland was confronted with its last smallpox epidemic.
In the early 19th century, things were different. There were no naturopathic associations. It was rather individuals who were opposed to smallpox vaccination, sceptical doctors or even concerned parents. In Germany, anti-vaccination associations were founded from about 1860 onwards. They published texts critical of vaccination. The movement then became very strong when general compulsory vaccination was introduced in Germany in 1874 – after smallpox epidemics in connection with the Franco-German War.
And in Switzerland?
Iris Ritzmann: It was similar in Switzerland. Vaccination opponents began to organise themselves with the federal vote on the Epidemics Act of 1882 that demanded compulsory vaccination for all citizens. Vaccination laws existed before that, but only on a cantonal level, not nationwide.
It must also be said that the opponents of vaccination were not just cranks. Especially in the early 19th century, without the opponents, it would probably not have been discovered so quickly that the vaccination loses its effectiveness after a while and that revaccination was needed. In many cases, concerned parents made observations, for example that a child’s wound became severely infected. The smallpox vaccination was not without risk. It is still considered dangerous today. One has to imagine that until the end of the 19th century, the vaccine was taken from a purulent pustule and then inoculated into a healthy child. It was common for undesirable side effects to occur. It is therefore not surprising that there was also resistance. This led to the development of the anti-vaccination organisations when the issue became a political one.
It is striking that the Epidemics Act of 1882 was rejected particularly strongly in the Catholic regions. It is assumed that the Catholic population was against vaccination out of religious reservations. Have you found any sources on this?
Eberhard Wolff: That is an interesting question. Such justifications are indeed found again and again among contemporary vaccination advocates, that the population rejects vaccination because they feel the disease is God’s will and the like. I have searched for such sources myself, but have hardly found any. In the meantime, I have come to think that the political and ideological location of the anti-vaccination movement is constantly changing. It often starts with a cultural fracture or a political tension. When compulsory vaccination as a strong governmental pressure is added, this can lead to a crash. Then it is no longer about religious values. In the 1880s, the still young federal state of Switzerland began to centralize. Pressure came from urban, Protestant areas. Catholic cantons were afraid to lose their autonomy.
Iris Ritzmann: Not all the particularly religious communities were opposed to vaccination. Some were also supporters. The said: God has sent us the vaccine. It is a gift.
Eberhard Wolff: For my dissertation, I worked with sources from radical pietists, i.e. a rather strict Protestant movement. You would think that they would reject vaccination with the argument that one should not interfere with God’s plan of salvation. I did not find that to be the case. They said: It does not work and it is dangerous.
The justifications also shift. Sometimes the rejection is more politically motivated, against state intervention. Other times, it is more of an opposition against science based medicine. Such objections were considered backward-looking by the advocates. But naturopathy in particular was an urban-bourgeois phenomenon and saw itself as decidedly progressive. The argumentation then – as now – was complex and sometimes contradictory. Tensions arise when open, critical discussions are no longer possible. This can be observed today with the opponents of coronavirus measures in Switzerland. The fronts are very hardened.
Was it perhaps more for cultural reasons that the rural population dealt differently with diseases or death?
Iris Ritzmann: It is very well possible that in rural areas the distance to the doctors trained in the cities at the universities was a factor. In the 19th century, lay healers in the villages were increasingly no longer allowed to practise. There was, however, a shortage of academically trained rural doctors. However, sources are often lacking on this.
One study I know evaluates court records from a rural area in the 19th century. It is striking that the opposition often comes from mothers. Even in case of the men convicted, they typically argue that they did not want to oppose their wives in this matter! The women usually argued with very tangible reservations. They report, for example, about vaccination damage that had occurred in other families. They say they could not bear the responsibility for such an intervention towards their children.
Finally, I would like to talk about a picture from a publication critical of compulsory vaccination. You see two fighting men defending the Swiss cross against snakes. What do you say to such a combination of anti-vaccination and nationalism?
Eberhard Wolff: You have to see the picture in its historical context. Artistically, the depiction is typical of the time. What effect did the makers of the magazine want to achieve with such iconography? The fight with the snakes refers to Greek mythology and provides a certain dramatization, which was certainly desired for such a signet of a magazine.
“Impfzwanggegner” Organ of the Association of Swiss Opponents of Vaccination. Zurich, 1924. Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv Zurich.
Iris Ritzmann: Vaccination is presented as poison. The fight is against compulsory vaccination, which is meant to threathen the Swiss people with poison. The men are thus defending Switzerland against the poisonous snake, which stands as an allegory for compulsory vaccination and the poisoning of the population. The text below demands the free decision to dispose of one’s own body. This historical argumentation is certainly comparable to today’s discussion against compulsory vaccination.
Eberhard Wolff: Today, the Swiss cross in the middle could be interpreted to mean that these people were nationalistic in an exclusionary way. However, contemporaries might have perceived it differently. Perhaps they wanted to show that they were good citizens who defended the values of Switzerland? The anti-vaccination movement was partly conservative, but not only. There was and is also a left-wing anti-vaccination movement.
