German Hygiene Museum Dresden collections database (review)

The online collections database of the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden so far gives access to images of and information about nearly twenty thousand objects from the history of health and medicine. These reflect, but also go beyond, the museum's own complex and internationally significant role as the major institution of German public health education. Founded by the mouthwash manufacturer Karl August Lingner after the First International Hygiene Exhibition of 1911, the museum took over its symbol, the all-seeing eye in a star-spangled sky. World War I and the great inflation delayed the opening of a building until 1930, but from 1912 workshops were producing and distributing innovative visual aids. The most famous are now the glass men and women, transparent figures with illuminated organ systems, which in the United States came to stand for the very idea of a health education museum. Under National Socialism the Dresden institution promoted racist science and was largely destroyed by Allied bombing. Rebuilt as a prestige enterprise of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), it served as a state socialist agency for public health education. Since reunification it has been reimagined as a center for exploring "the biological, social, and cultural dimensions of the human being" and has put on many pioneering exhibitions.

Although much of the original collection was destroyed in 1945, the museum today holds some forty-five thousand objects. Rather hidden in the informative Web site—from the homepage, click on "More," then "Collections"—is the database that already represents a large selection. It is more geographically, chronologically, and thematically focused than the largest library-based image banks in the field, Wellcome Images and the National Library of Medicine's Images from the History of Medicine, but its objects cover an impressive range. The main strengths are in the histories in Germany of health education and health care in everyday life, with special collections, most of them recently acquired, on beauty and grooming, especially hairdressing (more than two thousand objects, almost all in the database), history of ophthalmology (an unusually rich interpretation), orthopedics, East German nurseries, and international AIDS posters (about one thousand of seven thousand are online), as well as the history of the museum. The emphasis is on the twentieth century, but more than twelve hundred records are for objects made before 1850.

The diverse media on display reflect the museum's past output and exhibits: projection slides, posters, photographs—including many shots of museum exhibits—models, books, films, and instruments. The range of the 3,200 slides, mostly from the heyday in the 1920s, corresponds to that of the museum's educational lectures, with campaigns against alcohol, tuberculosis, and venereal disease, and for gymnastics, clothing reform, racial hygiene, and vaccination. There are more than one thousand records for wax moulages of pathological, especially dermatological, conditions. The film entries, accessible as single still images, include around two hundred from the GDR.

The items are well described with some wonderfully detailed records; those for films include long synopses and often identify the entire teams. Navigation and search menus are available in German, English, and French, but the records themselves and the ordering information are in German only. Search options include full text, object description, object title, date, and participants. Usefully, the results may be sorted in different ways, and, luxuriously, viewed one by one, as a list, or in a lightbox arrangement. The complex organization of the database and its size may explain why processing is relatively slow. Images are 72 dpi, but high-resolution versions may be ordered and used freely in scholarly work.

Though in some respects a work in progress, the site is worth reviewing now to draw attention to what is already an exceptionally valuable resource.