![]() The collection Suringar is particularly interesting because Suringar donated the collections to the university in a transitional period at the Leiden medical faculty. This collection contains many exhibits, is well catalogued and represented in drawings and educational treatises. ![]() The research will take as its starting point the collections of G.C.B. ![]() An analysis of the Leiden collections – still very much intact as collections – will importantly contribute to the history of pathology in the Netherlands. As a result the nineteenth-century anatomical collections have never been studied before (at least not from a ‘humanities’ point of view). During the twentieth century the collections were no longer deemed important in medical teaching and were largely taken out of the medical curriculum. As opposed to, for instance, nineteenth-century pathological collections in Vienna (Narrenturm) and Berlin (Virchov’s museum), that are still very much part of both ‘public engagement’ and tourist offer, the Leiden collections were stylised exclusively medical. Most probably this has to do with its disappearance from the public view. So far a comprehensive cultural study of the history of nineteenth-century pathological anatomy in the Netherlands has never been attempted. Among cultural reasons for the interest in the pathological body were, for instance, new pedagogical ideals in medicine, such as the idea of ‘observation, experiment and classifying’ in the spirit of nineteenth-century materialist philosophy, a decline of religion-based repugnance against dissection and an intellectualised notion of letting one’s corpse be dissected for medical science and therefore for the good of society. Yet, the construction of pathological anatomy and pathological exhibits was far from purely medical. Anatomy (or rather, pathological anatomy) in Leiden seemed to disappear into strictly medical surroundings. At the same time artists became less involved in the making of anatomical artefacts and illustrations and anatomical cabinets were no longer open to the public gaze. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as a result of newly formed relations between medical professionals and health institutions as well as the French medico-surgical analysis of tissue pathology (of for instance Xavier Bichat and René Laënnec), the focus of anatomical collections began to change from the preparation and exhibition of perfect bodies into the compilation of pathological conditions and malformations. It is concerned with how technological and medical developments influenced the way specimens were no longer exhibited in their ideal form how ideas in anatomy determined the formation of pathological anatomy as an academic discipline how pathological collections related to the perception of the body and its diseases how the anatomical museum was shut off from the public view and how educational values determined the exhibition of particular specimens. The project deals with developments characteristic of nineteenth-century anatomy. Hieke Huistra MSc is working on this project, which is directed at the historical and educational import of the Leiden University nineteenth-century pathological collections.
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