Medical Museums
Give me a museum and I'll fill it - Pablo Picasso
image by: dennisflarsen
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Collecting health, sickness, and difference at medical museums
Medical museums catalogue the history of biomedicine (using empirical sciences to understand illness and disease) by displaying medical instruments, preserved specimens as examples of pathologies and anomalies, and photography. The museums I will be using as examples are the Mütter Museum and the Indiana Medical History Museum. The aims for these museums is to show how biomedicine, and the science upon which its predicated, follows a linear progression from ‘primitive’ practices to contemporary practices, which are understood as scientifically enlightened and valorized.
First, it is necessary to unpack what museums do and how they do it. Museums are ostensibly places for education…
Resources
A Crowdsourced Atlas of Medical Achievements
Modern medicine has transformed the way we live. Hundreds of years of research and development in genetics, surgical procedures and even animal care have eradicated many dangerous illnesses and saved millions of lives around the world. But with the sites of humanity’s greatest medical breakthroughs scattered across the globe they can be difficult to keep track of – until now.
Can Museums and Other Institutions Keep up With Digital Culture?
What happens when a culture rooted in tradition is shaken by tectonic change? The intersection of culture and technology can explode the tried-and-true, and the consequent challenge for cultural institutions can be enormous.
Curating a UK Medical Museum: Two Heads are Better Than One
Order-member Carla Valentine is the technical curator of Barts Pathology Museum in London. I asked her to explain what it’s like to share human specimens for educational purposes in the UK, where the restrictions are borderline draconian. Here’s how she fought the system (and why we just might need the system).
Exquisite, Disturbing Objects From 500 Years of Human Anatomical Science
For centuries people have been simultaneously fascinated by what's inside the human body and squeamish about getting close enough to a cadaver to actually find out. "There's this tension between the desire to know, and what it takes to get that knowledge," said David Jones, a historian of science at Harvard Medical School and one of the curators of a new exhibit on the history of anatomy at Harvard's Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments.
How One Man Ran the World's Only Menstruation Museum from His Basement
The story of a 73-year-old bachelor, a massive collection of menstrual memorabilia, and the museum that may one day rise again.
How to Preserve Human Specimens | Conservation Lab
We talked to the guy who's responsible for rehydrating dried-up fetuses, fixing wonky skeletons, and cleaning skulls at the Mütter Museum.
Museum At The Birthplace Of Vaccination Needs Booster Dose Of Funds To Stay Open
Vaccines have saved more lives than nearly any other medical technology in the world. And 220 years after the first vaccine developer tested the first vaccine, his home, now a museum, may have to close to forever. Its trustees don’t have the funds to keep it open.
Shaking Chairs, Electric Shocks, and Wet-Dream Rings: Questionable Medical Devices
The Timely Warning is but one of many items assembled by the late Bob McCoy for his St. Paul Museum of Questionable Medical Devices. Now located at the Science Museum of Minnesota, the collection chronicles fads and frauds in the realms of weight loss, sexual health, and bodily robustness.
Shocking Medical Devices From Another Century
They are among the more than 2,300 devices at the Bakken Museum in Minneapolis. The museum's collection, which also includes some 11,000 books and scientific manuscripts dating back to the 13th century, focuses on the use of electromagnetism in medicine.
The Dark Side Gets Its Due
Most of us don’t stop for death until it kindly, or unkindly, stops for us. And then there is the new Morbid Anatomy Museum, which will throw the Grim Reaper an enthusiastic welcome party when it opens its doors this weekend in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn.
The development of medical museums in the antebellum American South: slave bodies in networks of anatomical exchange.
Medical museums function as a key case study for examining power relations among physicians, slaves, and slave owners, as well as underscoring southern medicine's dependence on slavery for its development.
The Doctor Is In, at the New Museum
For a show with health and wellness on its mind, Ms. Leigh uses video, sculpture and sound as well as a program of participatory “Care Sessions” to pay tribute to collective-care practices from around the world.
The Nude in Museums
"If the public demands that the Discobolus should be relegated to an attic because it is unclothed, very well, let it go there. Let me have the key to the attic when I wish it."
The role of medical museums in contemporary medical education.
From the early 19th century until the most recent two decades, open-space and satellite museums featuring anatomy and pathology collections (collectively referred to as "medical museums") had leading roles in medical education.
7 unusual medical museums
Medical museums were once private affairs, granting access only to students and practicing physicians. But more recently, many permanent collections that revolve around deformed body parts floating in formaldehyde rather than pretty paintings have opened their doors to the public. There’s a macabre appeal to these museums, places where kindergarten field trips dare not tread, but their raison d'etre is purely educational.
Dead Baby Watching at Bangkok’s Medical Museum
And you thought Bangkok was all black market kidneys and autoerotic asphyxiation.
Human Brains in Jars at Yale's Medical Library
Sitting quietly in jars in a custom-built room at Yale's medical library are 550 human brains. The collection once belonged to pioneering neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing, who preserved the brains from 1903 to 1932 as part of his tumor registry. When Cushing died in 1939, his undergraduate alma mater Yale inherited the brains.
Inside The German Museum Of Perfectly Preserved Corpses
The Plastinarium is like a museum, replete with 16,500 corpses that have been given new life using plastination, a technique that von Hagens invented in 1977 at Heidelberg University's medical school. Rurik von Hagens, Gunther's son, now runs the 3000-square-meter facility in Guben, Germany since his father has been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.
Medical Collectors Association Newsletter, 1984-2002
For over two decades, thanks to the energy and dedication of M. Donald Blaufox, M.D., Ph.D., collectors of medical antiques had a forum for the exchange of ideas and information.
Medical museums
The medical museum was once a teaching resource as important to a medical school as its library. Although medical libraries remain a vital educational institution, most medical museums have become obsolete or extinct.
Surgery Museum Makes You Grateful for Any Modern Healthcare
Granddads would have you believe things were better in the good ol’ days, but a short stroll through the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago makes liars of them all.
The World’s 10 Most Fascinating Medical Museums
Modern medicine is nothing short of miraculous, with most of what we know today coming from thousands of years of exploration, trial, and error. These ten museums offer a fascinating and sometimes grotesque chronology of human progress in the realm of medicine.
World's 10 weirdest medical museums
Museums dedicated to niche medicine, pathology, anatomical curiosities and cultural trends keep visitors fascinated and appalled with their educational and grotesque displays. Whether it's an oversized parasite, a diseased organ preserved in formaldehyde or a historical look at the outrageous medical practices of yore, there's bound to be an address to discover some sort of unnerving discovery even in less traveled destinations.
Collecting health, sickness, and difference at medical museums
Medical museums catalogue the history of biomedicine (using empirical sciences to understand illness and disease) by displaying medical instruments, preserved specimens as examples of pathologies and anomalies, and photography.
Caduceus
A museum journal for the health sciences.
Museum of Health Care Blog
Bringing Canada's healthcare story to life!
Medical Museums Association
The Medical Museums Association was created to promote long term contacts among individuals, institutions, and organizations involved in collecting historical artifacts and objects of interest to the health sciences.
Atlas Obscura
Atlas Obscura is the definitive guide to the world's hidden wonders. The community driven, editor curated project uncovers unusual and overlooked places not found in your average guidebook.
British Dental Museum
The collection contains over 25,000 items and details the painful dental practices of the past.
Dr Jenner’s House, Museum and Garden
Discover the home of the country doctor whose work changed the world…
Glore Psychiatric Museum
The award-winning Glore Psychiatric Museum chronicles the 130-year history of the state hospital and centuries of mental health treatment. It is located on the adjoining grounds of the original state hospital.
Good Vibrations Antique Vibrator Museum
This vibrator museum honors dildo history.
History of Pharmacy Museum
An Arizona museum with a collection of pharmaceutical oddities, including a jar of a gangster's chewed gum.
International Museum of Surgical Science
Dr. Max Thorek founded the International College of Surgeons (ICS) in 1935, with the goals of promoting the exchange of surgical knowledge worldwide. The Museum was originally conceived as the ICS Hall of Fame, and as a repository for its growing collection of historically significant surgical instrumentation, artworks and manuscripts. Today, the Museum’s four floors are filled with extraordinary artifacts that interpret the prehistoric through contemporary healing practices.
Iran National Museum of Medical Science History
The museum contains historic tools and medical manuscripts, and information on nursing, embryology, herbal medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine and more. Because this region of the world bears important significance for human history, the Iranian National Museum of Medical Sciences contains some unique historical artifacts - Lily Cichanowicz
Le Musee des Moulages
A unrivaled and rather horrifying collection of wax dermatological models.
Meguro Parasitological Museum
Located in Tokyo, the Meguro Parasitological Museum was established by Dr. Satoru Kamegai in 1953. It contains about 1,500 types of parasitical specimens, with over 60,000 individual parasites in total - Lily Cichanowicz
Moulagenmuseum
Museum dedicated to wax representations of disfiguring diseases.
Musée Fragonard
Musée Fragonard is a Parisian museum specializing in anatomical oddities. It has been in operation since 1766 but didn’t open to the public until 1991. Musée Fragonard is part of the veterinary school, École Nationale Vétérinaire de Maisons-Alfort - Lily Cichanowicz
Museo Galileo
The Museo Galileo is one of the foremost international institutions in the History of Science, combining a noted museum of scientific instruments and an institute dedicated to the research, documentation and dissemination of the history of science in the broadest senses.
Museum Boerhaave
Museum Boerhaave first opened in 1907 when an exhibition of natural science and medicine was held there. In 1928, the museum expanded its collection to include tools, specimens, instruments, and documents that are important to the history of natural sciences including medicine, botany, zoology, astronomy, chemistry, and physics. Today, the museum contains historical medicinal objects and surgical materials that date as far back as the 16th century - Lily Cichanowicz
Museum of Questionable Medical Devices
Collection currently on display in St. Paul, Minnesota at the Science Museum's "Weighing The Evidence" exhibit.
Museum of the Eye
Learn about the museum and add to our collection.
Mütter Museum
America’s finest museum of medical history, the Mütter Museum displays its beautifully preserved collections of anatomical specimens, models, and medical instruments in a 19th-century “cabinet museum” setting. The museum helps the public understand the mysteries and beauty of the human body and to appreciate the history of diagnosis and treatment of disease.
National Museum of Civil War Medicine
Follow in the footsteps of soldiers, surgeons, and more to discover how Civil War medicine continues to change lives today.
National Museum of Health and Medicine
The National Museum of Health and Medicine, established in 1862, inspires interest in and promotes the understanding of medicine -- past, present, and future -- with a special emphasis on tri-service American military medicine.
Paul Stradins History of Medicine Museum
The purpose of the museum is to encourage public interest in the development of medicine from antiquity to the present day, also helping people to understand the close linkage which exists between history and medicine. The museum is one of the three largest museums of its type in the world.
Philadelphia’s freaky medical museum
Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum should come with a warning: do not visit if you are freaked out by dead people and their pickled parts.
Southern California Medical Museum
The Southern California Medical Museum was established in 1982 by Merlin A. Hendrickson, M.D., to provide education on the history of medicine.
Surgeons' Hall Museums
The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh was founded in 1505, with the Museum collections growing from 1699 after 'natural and artificial curiosities' were publically sought. In the 1800s, the Museum had expanded to include the remarkable collections of Sir Charles Bell and John Barclay. Initially established as a medical teaching resource, access for all is now a priority and visitors can explore The Pathology Museum, The History of Surgery Museum upper and lower (floors) and the Dental Museum.
Urology Museum
Fascinating museum dedicated to the under-appreciated medical history of urology features some wince-inducing devices.
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