- Hardcover: 256 pages
- Publisher: OUP Oxford (7 April 2011)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0199584583
- ISBN-13: 978-0199584581
- Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 14.6 x 2.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 780,511 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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absorbing (Christopher Lawrence, Times Literary Supplement )
a welcome and original addition to the scholarship on natural and medical history ... consistently engaging and accessible (Victoria Bates, Archives of Natural History )
a welcome and original addition to the scholarship on natural and medical history ... consistently engaging and accessible (Victoria Bates, Archives of Natural History )
Product Description
In the first comprehensive study of nineteenth-century medical museums, Morbid Curiosities traces the afterlives of diseased body parts. It asks how they came to be in museums, what happened to them there, and who used them. This book is concerned with the macabre work of pathologists as they dismembered corpses and preserved them: transforming bodies into material culture. The fragmented body parts followed complex paths - harvested from hospital wards, given to one of many prestigious institutions, or dispersed at auction. Human remains acquired new meanings as they were exchanged and were then reintegrated into museums as physical maps of disease. On shelves curators juxtaposed organic remains with paintings, photographs, and models, and rendered them legible with extensive catalogues that were intended to standardize the museum experience. And yet visitors refused to be policed, responding equally with wonder and disgust. Morbid Curiosities is a history of the material culture of medical knowledge in the age of museums.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fascinating window on the material culture of medicine,
This review is from: Morbid Curiosities: Medical Museums in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Hardcover)
"The body is a cultural phenomenon as well as a biological entity," Samuel Alberti observes in this compelling, exhaustively researched examination of medical museums.We can see the power of Alberti's observation in the history of "RCSHC/P998," which anchors the book's introduction. The renowned 18th-century anatomist John Hunter created this object by removing post-mortem a cancer victim's ulcerated esophagus. He skillfully preserved it in a glass cylinder, and there it remains more than two centuries later. Hunter's goal -- here and in the countless other specimens accumulated in his medical museum -- was to preserve an example of disease as a point of reference for future study and research. Placed next to other esophagi, healthy and pathological, RCSHC/P998 serves as "one page in a three-dimensional encyclopaedia of disease". Hunter also, of course, stripped away the individuality of the woman (perhaps a Mrs. P of London) whose death provided this particular piece of material data. A once-indivisible part of a suffering human being became a partible specimen identified with a catalog number. The implications of this are scientifically enormous and morally complex, as Alberti illustrates. The story of RCSHC/P998 offers a fascinating microcosm of medical practice, particularly at the hands of Hunter's Victorian successors. Alberti shows how the material culture of the medical museum provides indispensible insight into an intricate series of relationships: between doctors and their patients, between medical professors and their often unruly students, between presumptuous London and Britain's striving provincial cities, between solemn anatomists and rambunctious showmen, between the shifting boundaries of medical disciplines. Scholars with an interest in 19th-century medicine and science will devour this book, and it has much to offer to other audiences. Medical professionals will be fascinated by the window it opens on the history of their field. Visitors to modern medical exhibitions, from the earnest respectability of London's Hunterian Museum to the crowd-pleasing of "Body Worlds," will acquire a deeper understanding of the social, political, scientific and ethical implications of what they see. Lovers of Victorian literature will obtain a deeper appreciation of the preoccupations with the body and the macabre that runs through the work of Dickens, Eliot, Darwin and so many of their contemporaries.
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