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
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
A description of 17th century anatomical activity at the major Dutch university in a cultural context This study offers a history of the Leiden anatomical theatre in the first century of its... Show moreA description of 17th century anatomical activity at the major Dutch university in a cultural context This study offers a history of the Leiden anatomical theatre in the first century of its existence; who were the scientists working there in the 17th century, the Dutch Golden Age. What was the motivation of these scholars for studying and demonstrating the human body? Was it purely medical or were their other - more philosophical - questions at stake? Besides a cultural historical account of the anatomical theatre the dissertation also offers the histories of other centres of anatomical activity in 17th century Leiden: the Collegium Medico Practicum at the Caecilia Hospital, and Leiden's surgeons guild. Show less
