Books: Morbid Curiosities: Medical Museums in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Samuel Alberti’s book on the history of Manchester Museum took an anatomical view of his subject matter (Museums Journal October 2010, p58). In his latest book, the subject matter is anatomy itself – the morbid pathology which formed the basis of the collections in more than 100 medical museums operating in the British Isles during the 19th century.

It’s not a topic that sets the heart racing but it has had its dramatic moments and characters, including the resurrection men, grave-robbers who met the increasing demand for fresh body parts by removing bodies from graves soon after burial; the infamous Burke and Hare, who cut out the middleman and murdered in order to sell the dismembered corpses of their victims; and the crowds who attacked anatomy schools in Cambridge, Sheffield and elsewhere in the 1830s.

But Alberti, the director of museums and archives at the Royal College of Surgeons, London, is a conscientious and serious author and he deals with these matters with scarcely a glance. It seems he is anxious to protect his readers from the more melodramatic elements of this otherwise sober story.

It’s a pity because, although this is at times a dry tale, it is not without considerable interest. Here, as in Alberti’s Manchester book, he leaves few stones unturned as he methodically examines where museums of medicine were situated and how their collections were formed, conserved and preserved, displayed and viewed.

What he reveals is a rather murky world in which diseased body parts were gathered, exchanged and displayed; where conservators guarded their secret methods for preservation, where the director of the museum at Guy’s Hospital was known as the “inspector of the dead” and where there were stories of foul smells, misappropriated alcohol and unpleasant health and safety issues for museum staff.

The collections, which were designed as teaching and learning aids, grew exponentially. Alberti notes that by 1905 the museum at Guy’s had grown from 500 specimens to 12,000 and this “was still just one of a hundred medical museums.”

This was, however, the zenith of these collections, at least as far as their size is concerned. As teaching methods changed and the number of post-mortems declined, the years that followed saw the closure and even the destruction of some collections. More recently the 1999 Alder Hey scandal and the requirements of the Human Tissue Acts were further setbacks to the use of “preserved anatomical specimens”.

But, as Alberti notes, public anxiety about the use of body parts for teaching and research was counter-balanced by the success of Gunther von Hagen’s Body Worlds exhibitions, which have attracted about 25 million visitors around the world.

Private museums often held body parts in their collections. Reliquaries often contained small fragments of what were reputed to be the body parts of saints; no cabinet of curiosities would have seemed complete without some form of human tissue.

The debate about human remains continues to reverberate through museums and the arguments seem more about ownership and repatriation than collecting body parts for academic purposes.

Nevertheless, these museums (if that was ever the right word) found themselves in danger of being left stranded by an ebbing tide of interest and needing to reinvent themselves, ironically, as museums. Both the Royal colleges, in Edinburgh and London, have appointed directors with a museum background.
 
Both have undergone major revamps and the result, in London at least, is an homage to the preserver’s art, described in a Museums Journal review as “visually stunning, exquisitely lit and object-rich”.

Sadly, I can’t say the same for Morbid Curiosities, which surely deserves better than 30 grainy black and white illustrations in the text. The Hunterian Museum is selling signed copies at £44. There’s a message of some kind here – I am just not quite sure what it is.

Timothy Mason is a museum consultant