A life-like human arm decorated with lace sleeves, holding an eyelid on a string, fragments of skin swivelling in a phial with a twig, a shiny silvery liver, a dog with a cleft palate, a human ear... Show moreA life-like human arm decorated with lace sleeves, holding an eyelid on a string, fragments of skin swivelling in a phial with a twig, a shiny silvery liver, a dog with a cleft palate, a human ear with a tiny pox mark, foetuses decorated with colourful beads. At first sight, it seems an odd collection of specimens. Yet they are all part of the eighteenth century Leiden anatomical collections, made by Leiden anatomists and their acquaintances and acquired by Leiden University afterwards.A lot has been written about the anatomists and their discoveries, but very little is known about these preparations. That is odd, as it are the preparations themselves that evoke so many questions: why these body parts, plants, animals? Why these decorations and combinations? Why did their makers conceive them? Why were they acquired by the university? It is also worrying that we know so little about these preparations, as they are steadily deteriorating - no matter how great the curatorial efforts made.This Ph.D. thesis uses the materiality of the anatomical preparations as the starting point to answer the questions they evoke, combining material and contextual analysis. The author argues that aesthesis, an epistemic culture that included a tacit quest for beauty and perfection rooted in sensory experience and intertwined with the rise of the new field of aesthetics, was defining for the way the eighteenth-century Leiden anatomists made and used their preparations. The knowledge embedded in the materiality of these historical objects is essential for making informed decisions about their preservation and display, now and in the future. Show less
