ABSTRACT
Vienna is a city renowned for its historical medical collections, among which the most famous are the pathological-anatomical collection in the Narrenturm, where ‘wet’ specimens of diseased organs are mixed with dermatological moulages, and the collection of Florentine anatomical wax models acquired by Emperor Joseph II from the Florentine workshop of Felice Fontana in the late eighteenth century. 1 The modes of display of these collections, in spaces that have changed little in decades and centuries, and with specimens often in their original casings, subtly suggest that what we see is what the creators of these collections envisaged. Collections, it seems, are static: they teach straightforward gross anatomical and pathological knowledge that has withstood the test of new scientific advances. But take the example of Joseph’s Florentine wax models, which remained in the same space for over 200 years. They were purchased for Joseph’s new military medical and surgical academy (1785), known as the Josephinum, the purpose of which was to educate military medical staff and, more importantly, to serve as the experimental station for Joseph’s radical ideas on education. 2 Yet the expensive models arrived to a critical reception from Viennese medics who, by advocating dissection over wax models, were also rejecting Joseph’s restructuring of medicine and, more broadly, his reforms and his politics. 3 Although the models did not leave the Josephinum, the building changed its purpose and users more than once throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the military academy closed and reopened its doors several times until it closed for good in 1870. When, in the twentieth century, the Josephinum became the home of the Institute of History of Medicine (now Collections of the Medical University of Vienna), new curators – historians of medicine rather than anatomists and clinicians – reinterpreted these models. Instead of controversial and possibly obsolete teaching tools, they now came to be seen as important remains from the past and precious art objects.
