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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…

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Resources

Caduceus

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Atlas Obscura

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