ABSTRACT

Almost every medical faculty possesses anatomical and/or pathological collections: human and animal preparations, wax- and other models, as well as drawings, photographs, documents and archives relating to them. In many institutions these collections are well-preserved, but in others they are poorly maintained and rendered inaccessible to medical and other audiences. This volume explores the changing status of anatomical collections from the early modern period to date. It is argued that anatomical and pathological collections are medically relevant not only for future generations of medical faculty and future research, but they are also important in the history of medicine, the history of the institutions to which they belong, and to the wider understanding of the cultural history of the body. Moreover, anatomical collections are crucial to new scholarly inter-disciplinary studies that investigate the interaction between arts and sciences, especially medicine, and offer a venue for the study of interactions between anatomists, scientists, anatomical artists and other groups, as well as the display and presentation of natural history and medical cabinets. In considering the fate of anatomical collections - and the importance of the keeper’s decisions with respect to collections - this volume will make an important methodological contribution to the study of collections and to discussions on how to preserve universities’ academic heritage.

part I|20 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|8 pages

Setting the Stage

chapter 2|10 pages

Organ Music

part II|89 pages

Fated Collections

chapter 4|20 pages

Gender, Fate and McGill University's Medical Collections

The Case of Curator Maude Abbott

chapter 5|20 pages

Resilient Collections

The Long Life of Leiden's Earliest Anatomical Collections

chapter 6|18 pages

Inside the Charnel House

The Display of Skeletons in Europe, 1500–1800

part III|66 pages

Preparations, Models and Users

chapter 7|16 pages

Adieu Albinus

How the Preparations in the Nineteenth-Century Leiden Anatomical Collections Lost their Past

chapter 8|14 pages

User-Developers, Model Students and Ambassador Users

The Role of the Public in the Global Distribution of Nineteenth-Century Anatomical Models

chapter 10|16 pages

Fall and Rise of the Roca Museum

Owners, Meanings and Audiences of an Anatomical Collection from Barcelona to Antwerp, 1922–2012

part IV|52 pages

Provenance and Fate

chapter 11|16 pages

The Fate of the Beaded Babies

Forgotten Early Colonial Anatomy

chapter 12|16 pages

‘Not Everything that Says Java is from Java'

Provenance and the Fate of Physical Anthropology Collections

chapter 13|18 pages

Cataloguing Collections

The Importance of Paper Records of Strasbourg's Medical School Pathological Anatomy Collection

part V|64 pages

Museum and Collection Practices Today

chapter 14|16 pages

Anatomical Craft

A History of Medical Museum Practice

chapter 15|16 pages

Restoration Reconsidered

The Case of Skull Number 1-1-2/27 at the Anatomy Museum of the University of Basel

chapter 16|16 pages

From Bottled Babies to Biobanks

Medical Collections in the Twenty-First Century

chapter 17|14 pages

Ball Pool Anatomy

On the Public Veneration of Anatomical Relics