Adieu Albinus

In 1932, Leiden laboratory assistant D.C. Geyskes was asked to clear out an old cupboard. It had formerly belonged to the brothers Bernhard and Frederik Albinus, both eighteenth-century anatomists. It contained around 800 wet preparations, mainly from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Geyskes’s task was to reconnect these preparations to their past and, in particular, to their makers. ¹ In 353 cases he succeeded: these preparations had a legible label with their maker’s name. The remaining preparations, around 450, remained disconnected from their makers, as did many more preparations outside the cupboard – old preparations in the collections still in use in the medical laboratories. ² How did all these preparations lose their past? In this chapter, I show that it happened mainly in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the preparations were transferred to new jars, remounted, relabelled and rehoused – all practices that distanced them from their makers. This does not mean that the three curators who carried out most of this work – Teunis Zaaijer, Johannes Boogaard and Hidde Halbertsma – were ahistorical men. ³ They all valued the past in one way or another: Teunis Zaaijer showed in his inaugural lecture that he was well aware of the history of anatomy; Johannes Boogaard chaired a committee to erect a statue for Herman Boerhaave; and Hidde Halbertsma treasured a microscope made by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, on whom he wrote his dissertation. ⁴ Yet, under their supervision, many preparations lost their past. The curators had historical awareness, but they also had professional obligations. Their first task was to maintain the preparations’ usefulness for research and teaching, the main purposes of the collections. To do so, they had to adapt them to new medical theories and practices. This required constant reinterpretations, and these reinterpretations disconnected the preparations from their makers.