The Fate of Anatomical Collections ed. by Rina Knoeff and Robert Zwijnenberg (review)

The Fate of Anatomical Collections contains a diverse set of essays ranging from the early modern to the modern periods and examining a variety of anatomical collections and their respective fates or legacies. The focus on the object collections themselves (rather than on, say, dissection or illustrations), and in particular on the “fluidity of anatomical collections and the changing identities of the preparations in them” (p. 6), is one of the volume’s novel contributions, according to its editors; to a very great extent their ambitions in this respect are borne out. Organized roughly chronologically, chapters are grouped into themes of “Fated Collections,” “Preparations, Models, and Users,” “Provenance and Fate,” and “Museum and Collection Practices Today.” While some of the chapters address relatively well-known European collections, like those of John Hunter or the models of Auzoux, many are about anatomy in cities that are perhaps less well known to American historians of science, cities like Barcelona, Strasbourg, and Basel.

Chapters by Andrew Cunningham, Anita Guerrini, Samuel J.M.M. Alberti, and Anna Maerker give the reader a sort of “who’s who” of historians of anatomy and anchor a very strong volume. Chapters by Cunningham, on the changing structure and meaning of John Hunter’s collection under the curators who controlled it after him (and of the resulting difficulty for the historian in reconstructing Hunter’s original uses of the specimens), and by Tim Huisman, on the unadaptable nature of Leiden’s Wunderkammer of specimens that were not easily repurposed and therefore fell into disuse, provide images of the opposite fates to which anatomical collections might be destined, both of which present challenges of resurrection for the historian. The theme of reuse and repurposing is carried into later periods by Hieke Huistra and by Flavio Häner, whose chapter addresses twentieth-century restorations that seemed entirely to remake a seventeenth-century skull. Tatjana Buklijas, Anna Maerker, and Alfons Zarsozo and José Pardo-Tomás together make clear that, particularly in the nineteenth century, audiences for anatomical models and specimens were not limited to naturalists or medical men: in cities across Europe and the United States, anatomy provided a source of education and entertainment. Those audiences themselves gave meaning to the anatomical forms displayed. Anita Guerrini’s chapter presents that ubiquitous anatomical object, the skeleton, as a constructed object, one that belonged to anatomy and natural history, but also to religion, while Marieke Hendriksen describes a most unfamiliar set of objects—fetuses decorated with strings of beads—that call attention to their constructedness and cultural significance, now as in the time and place of their construction. Other chapters deal with repatriation and provenance, gender, the stripping of history and humanness from scientific specimens (with the record keeping entailed in the paper collections that traveled with the specimens), and biobanking and other twentieth-century heirs to the anatomical collections of the centuries that came before.

Together, these chapters suggest that the term “fate,” employed in the title of the collection, might be better replaced by something less passive sounding, by a term that suggests the complicated, often purposeful ways in which the legacies of historical anatomical specimens that are recounted in this book were made. Samuel Alberti’s chapter on the history of medical museum practice, found in the closing section of the collection, seems to make precisely this point, arguing persuasively, “Museums tame unruly objects . . . make order of them, set them in frames of meaning and render them legible. And this takes work” (p. 232). That work comes in making human bodies into scientific specimens, in collecting and organizing specimens in ways that highlight desired features, in determining an audience, and in narrating the story of a collection. This volume does an admirable job of revealing those many kinds of work, placing the material collections at the center of the many stories to be told about how their meaning as objects—scientific, medical, and popular...