ABSTRACT

The museum-based investigations surveyed in the last two chapters - “histories of exotic trades” and medicinal chemistry - shared a common practical concern with the application of the knowledge generated. In the case of the former, newly discovered cultures and landscapes were divided up and transported home so as potentially to provide beneficial commodities or to suggest economically significant artisanal innovations. With the latter, trials of materia medica were used to understand the medicinal effectiveness of extant remedies and to yield new ones. Complementing chapter five, which analysed the enduring impact of the narrative style of investigation into local natural history objects and numismatics, my subject in this chapter is the legacy of the more functional character of museum-based studies of exotic curiosities and medicines.1 The knowledge produced through the narrative approach to objects emphasised their role as believable anchors for stories. The common thread in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century museum science under consideration here lies instead in the idea that knowledge can be produced by examining how objects are used, and this by puzzling out either what their makers did with them or alternatively what governed their inherent effectiveness. The question of what function objects, but also their host institutions serve has been one of the most vexed but also most fruitful questions posed within museums ever since, and this particularly in those devoted to anthropology, medicine and decorative arts. At a broader level, it has also fed into more recent debates about the educational role of museums.