In this Issue
- Features
  
  Summer 2024
  
  Wellesley on the Page
  Writer Bina Shah ’93 explores how Wellesley has been portrayed in literature—commercial, literary, genre, and the perennial favorite, the campus novel/coming-of-age story.More
  
  Citizenship in Action
  Leaders and activists from around the world gathered at Wellesley on April 6 to grapple with important global questions at the “Renewing Democracy: Women Leading the Way” summit.More
  
  Return Trip
  Who, in their postmenopausal right mind, would choose to serve once more in a role they had held fresh out of college? Especially when the position is located on the other side of the planet?More
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Heirloom Science Instruction

John Cameron, professor emeritus of biology, has cataloged some 1,600 objects from labs past. As Wellesley looks to the future of science on campus, Cameron showed us some of his favorite items from its past.

By Lisa Scanlon Mogolov ’99
Photography by Lisa Abitbol

Window on Wellesley,

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Antique wooden hydrodeik

College Hall Relic

Cameron spotted this tool in the Science Center’s collection, a hygrodeik that measures humidity, in a photo of its previous life in College Hall’s library. Cameron suspects that the instrument was saved from the library during the 1914 fire.

Rare Bird

Many of the taxidermied animals that overlooked the Focus have found homes at other institutions, but Wellesley kept those whose species are extinct: a passenger pigeon (above) and a Carolina parakeet.

Budding Interest

Henry Durant personally ordered a complete set of larger-than-life papier-mâché botanical teaching models made by Louis Thomas Jérôme Auzoux in France. Some of the collection now resides near Global Flora.

Early X-Rays

Shortly after Wellesley physics professor Sarah Frances Whiting learned in 1886 about Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays, she used this Crookes tube to make her own.

Face Off

Another Auzoux piece in Wellesley’s collection is a life-sized model of a human head. The College also has a life-sized model of a female body, one of only a handful in existence.

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Science+Technology

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New Life for Labs
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Profit and Progress
On the cover of Brenna Greer’s recent book, Represented: The Black Imagemakers Who Reimagined African American Citizenship , a fashionably dressed young African-American couple relax on a midcentury modern couch in front of a coffee...More

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