Cataloguing Collections

Alongside the remains of the pathological anatomy collection in the Institut d’Anatomie Pathologique at the Faculté de Médecine de Strasbourg are shelves and shelves of ledgers. And like the shelves lined with jars, the boxes of embedded preparations and the drawers of microscope slides, they echo the long history of collecting. The practices from which the records derive can be situated in a broader history of transforming the world on and through paper with early modern state administration and accounting practices. ¹ But the collection ledgers did not record the financial accounts of the institute, rather they recount the collection, and beyond accompanying the collection of preparations, the volumes of records are a collection in themselves. ² These not only provide a window that allows us to glimpse what the collections included, but these catalogues and registers, along with the collection pieces, were central to disease identities and definitions. ³ They bear witness, on the one hand, to a fluidity in recordkeeping, and on the other hand, to the appropriation and re-appropriation of the collection during the tumultous late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.