Object of the Month: September 2020 A Woman Protected from Cholera A copper patch on the chest over flannel bandages, a bodice made of elastic rubber. Above the dress a belt of small bricks, with wax taffeta bow flying towards the back. Lower leg clothes triple garnished with herb bags at the foot. Shoes and overshoes with […]
Masks for Little Heroes (Hua Hua Architects, 2020). Lego figures put on face masks as well: doctors and nurses, superheroes and techers, sportsmen and workers, little men and little women. Why should children be afraid of them? Masks for Little Heroes were designed and made by the Hua Hua Architects studio in Brno. You can […]
On August 11, a set of six postage stamps was published by the United Nations for the World Health Organization COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund, valued in dollars, euros and Swiss Francs. The stamps, designed by Rorie Katz, a graphic artist and illustrator and currently Creative Director of the UN Postal Agency, include pictograms for six public health […]
The Sběratel collectors’ fair – cancelled in March due to the epidemic and the emergency measures –published a complementary coupon accompanying the stamp titled Temptation (Pokušení, March 2020), designed by Vladimír Suchánek (b. 1933). The coupon and the postcard portray a sewing machine, commemorating „the tens of thousands of sewing machines and their artful owners, whose artifice […]
Switzerland published, on April 6, a bloc of ten stamps in red and white, displaying the Swiss (but also the Red) cross in the center of a circle, the shape of the SARS CoV-2 virion, but also the shape of the world unified by its threat. The typical glycoprotein spikes protruding from the surface of the virion […]
The COVID-19 (2020) collection at the NML Medical Museum continues to grow, thanks to contributions of museum visitors, library readers and others. In the time of emergency, when both the Museum and the Library were closed to public, we began collecting and preserving objects to remember the pandemic, the efforts of people in the Czech […]
Object of the Month: July 2020 Remdesivir A collection of objects that depicts life in the time of a pandemic must include medicines. In a story of fighting disease, a drug bottle or phial represents victory, prefigures the end of the hard times and gives face to the hope that defeating the plague is in human power and […]
The Směr Cooperative was among the largest toy producers in socialist Czechoslovakia. In the 1980s, Směr manufactured simpler, smaller version of Igráček figures under the name Hej Rup. The series included a physician: two doctor toys belong to the Medical Museum collection and – although they wear no masks – have been included in the COVID […]
Playmobil, the German version of the Igráček figure, has been produced by Geobra Brandstätter GmbH in Zirndorf since 1974. During the Corona pandemic, the makers of both Igráček and Playmobil used their production capacity to make face masks. For charitable purposes, both Igráček and Playmobil donned face masks themselves. Playmobil HeldInnen des Alltags campaign […]
Object of the Month: June 2020 Igracek Figures With Face Masks Face masks have become the most prominent symbol of the Corona pandemic in the Czech lands and beyond. Masks represent, on the one hand, the efforts of thousands of people to contribute to defeating the plague, to protect themselves and to help those […]