The Public Domain Review

In a 1870 paper, Hubert Airy became the first to attempt to explicitly visualise the scintillating scotomata of his migraine.

Being in debt was once an artful promenade — the process of eluding creditors through disguise and deceit. Erika Vause explores a forgotten financial history: the pervasive humor that once accompanied the literature and visual culture of debt.

A series of six lithographic dreamworlds inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

This is a paradox in the cocktail of qualities that define sprezzatura — the achievement of eloquence and honesty through deception and concealment.

For the Polish educator Antoni Jażwiński, history was best represented by an abstract grid.

Ox-faced children, elderly women sprouting horns, and cloven minds — all features attributed to Edward Jenner’s vaccine against smallpox. Introducing us to the original anti-vaxxers, Erica X Eisen explores the “vacca” in the first-ever vaccine: its bovine origins and the widespread worry that immunity came with beastly side effects.

Ox-faced children, elderly women sprouting horns, and cloven minds — all features attributed to Edward Jenner’s vaccine against smallpox. Introducing us to the original anti-vaxxers, Erica X Eisen explores the “vacca” in the first-ever vaccine: its bovine origins and the widespread worry that immunity came with beastly side effects.

Angels emerge from avian eggs and a figure climbs a ladder to the moon, in Blake's unique take on the emblems tradition.

Inspired by Jules Verne’s scientific novels, The electric life has garnered retrospective praise for successfully anticipating much of modern life.

The nineteenth-century images collected here concern hatha yoga, the yoga of physical discipline.