This dissertation focuses on the workings of popular national agency in late nineteenth-century Amsterdam and the question in what ways and to what extent ‘ordinary’ citizens constructed and... Show moreThis dissertation focuses on the workings of popular national agency in late nineteenth-century Amsterdam and the question in what ways and to what extent ‘ordinary’ citizens constructed and experienced ‘the Netherlands’ through their urban surroundings. It steers away from a top-down perspective and considers the lower and middle social classes as actual actors in the process of democratising the nation. The argument of the book is centred around five case studies: the popular experience of public monuments and statues; the singing of the national anthem; popular Orangism; the public response to the Boer Wars; and the commercialisation of the nation in an urban context. Show less
This dissertation analyses the use of the Leiden anatomical collections in the nineteenth century. It investigates what happened to anatomical preparations after they were added to institutional... Show moreThis dissertation analyses the use of the Leiden anatomical collections in the nineteenth century. It investigates what happened to anatomical preparations after they were added to institutional collections. Four chapters discuss the four main audiences of the Leiden collections: students, researchers, lay visitors, and university governors. The medical audiences (students and researchers) kept using the collections throughout the nineteenth century; the non-medical audiences (visitors and governors) stopped using the collections in the second half of the century. The dissertation argues that, to understand these developments, we need to see anatomical collections as dynamic entities: intended for active, hands-on use and containing objects that, as philosopher of biology Hans-J_rg Rheinberger has put it, are made of what they represent. These properties enabled researchers and students to continuously reinterpret the preparations as medical theories and practices changed. In the new medicine, the collections were placed in a closed laboratory environment, and the reinterpretations disconnected the preparations from their past and the moral stories once attached to them. Hence, they became hard to access and use for lay visitors and university governors. Even today, old preparations linger in hospitals and laboratories, waiting for new uses __ as do newly built collections of bodily material. Show less
