Social History of Medicine Advance Access originally published online on October 25, 2005
Social History of Medicine 2005 18(3):419-437; doi:10.1093/shm/hki050
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© The Society for the Social History of Medicine 2005, all rights reserved
The Age of Museum Medicine: The Rise and Fall of the Medical Museum at Birmingham's School of Medicine
While much has been written in the last few decades on the history of medical education, less attention has focused on the subject of medical museums, which were central to instruction at medical schools during the nineteenth century. This article aims to readdress the question of provincial medical education in England and shed some light on museums, which, if one were judging by their rules, regulations, and costliness, were among the most important services offered by these educational institutions. Originally founded by innovative medical practitioners and supplemented with donations from wealthy patrons and local doctors, museums were reorganized, updated and enlarged into and beyond a subsequent era of hospital and laboratory medicine. Given their centrality to medical education before the Second World War, it is suggested this period might even be referred to as an age of museum medicine.
Keywords: medical museums; medical education; Birmingham; anatomical specimens; collecting; provincial medicine; hippopotamus
* Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Birmingham Medical School, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK. E-mail: J.Reinarz{at}bham.ac.uk
1 See, for example, K. Waddington, Medical Education at St Bartholomew's Hospital, 1123–1995 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2003); T. Bonner, Becoming a Physician (London, 2000); V. Nutton and R. Porter (eds), The History of Medical Education in Britain (Amsterdam, 1995); K. Ludmerer, Learning to Heal (New York, 1985).
2 W. Penman, ‘The Introduction of the Edinburgh Quizzing System into American Medical Education’, Bulletin for the History of Medicine, 52 (1978), 89–95, p. 91.
3 S. Paget (ed.), Memoirs and Letters of Sir James Paget (London, 1901), pp. 43–4. See also J. Manton, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (London, 1987), p. 119.
4 Manton, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, p. 121; K. Waddington, ‘Mayhem and Medical Students’, Social History of Medicine, 15 (2002), 45–64, p. 52.
5 Recently, there has been a noticeable ‘spatial turn’ in medical history, which has concentrated some attention on places of medical teaching, including museums. Important works in this field are P. Krietsch and M. Dietel, Pathologisch-Anatomisches Cabinet (Berlin, 1996); J. Pickstone, Ways of Knowing (Manchester, 2000); S. Alberti, ‘Placing Nature: Natural History Collections and their Owners in Provincial Nineteenth-Century England’, British Journal for the History of Science, 35 (2002), 291–311; A. Kraft and S. Alberti, ‘"Equal Though Different": Laboratories, Museums and the Institutional Development of Biology in Late Victorian Northern England’, Studies in History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 34 (2003), 203–36.
6 M. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Smith (New York, 1973).
7 G. Risse, Hospital Life in Enlightenment Scotland (Cambridge, 1986); C. Hannaway and A. La Berge (eds), Constructing Paris Medicine (Amsterdam, 1998).
8 Pickstone, Ways of Knowing, p. 73. See also Kraft and Alberti, ‘"Equal though different"’, p. 204.
9 Kraft and Alberti, ‘"Equal though different"’, p. 207.
10 E. Ackerknecht, A Short History of Medicine (New York, 1955), p. 134; C. Jones and M. Sonenscher, ‘The Social Functions of the Hospital in Eighteenth-Century France’, French Historical Studies, 13 (1983), 172–214, p. 173.
11 T. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (London, 1995), p. 3.
13 P. Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, 1994), p. 1.
14 Findlen, Possessing Nature, p. 37.
15 Bennett, Birth of the Museum, p. 28.
16 Findlen, Possessing Nature, p. 9.
17 E. Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London, 1992), p. 79.
18 Findlen, Possessing Nature, p. 257; L. Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits (London, 1999), p. 255.
19 G. Qvist, John Hunter, 1728–1793 (London, 1981), p. 73.
20 T. C. Gray, Dr Richard Formby: Founder of the Liverpool Medical School (Liverpool, 2003).
21 J. Dobson, ‘The Place of John Hunter's Museum’, Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 33 (1963), 32–40, p. 36. Report of the Select Committee on Medical Education (PP, 1834, XIII), pp. 71–2.
22 Birmingham University Library, Special Collections (hereafter BULSC), Birmingham Medical School, Minute Book, 1831.
23 J. T. J. Morrison, William Sands Cox and the Birmingham Medical School (Birmingham, 1926), p. 89.
24 S. Anning and W. Walls, A History of the Leeds School of Medicine (Leeds, 1982), p. 27.
25 BULSC, Birmingham Medical School, Minute Book, 1831.
26 R. Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London, 1988), p. 263.
27 T. Haviland and L. Parish, ‘A Brief Account of the Use of Wax Models in the Study of Medicine’, Journal of the History of Medicine, 1 (1970), 52–75, pp. 73–5; C. D. O'Malley, The History of Medical Education (Los Angeles, 1970), pp. 116–17.
29 J. Darwall, ‘Introductory Lecture to a Course of Lectures on Botany’, Midland Medical and Surgical Register, 2 (1829), p. 127.
30 BULSC, Birmingham Medical School, Minute Book, 1831.
31 Thomson, The Story of the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, p. 34.
32 Report of the Select Committee on Medical Education, p. 72; L. Jacyna, ‘"A Host of Experienced Microscopists": The Establishment of Histology in Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh’, Bulletin for the History of Medicine, 75 (2001), 225–53, p. 238.
33 R. Maulitz, Morbid Appearances: The Anatomy of Pathology in the Early Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1987), p. 191.
34 Paget (ed.), Memoirs and Letters of Sir James Paget, p. 42.
35 BULSC, Birmingham Medical School, Minute Book, 1831; Kraft and Alberti, ‘"Equal though different"’, p. 226.
36 BULSC, Birmingham Medical School, Minute Book, 1831.
37 Maulitz, Morbid Appearances, p. 219.
38 Alberti, ‘Placing Nature’, p. 302.
40 Alberti, ‘Placing Nature’, pp. 302–3.
42 J. Johnstone, An Address delivered at the Birmingham School of Medicine and Surgery, 6 October 1834 (Birmingham, 1834), pp. 6–7.
43 BULSC, Birmingham Medical School, Minute Book, 1831.
44 [Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh], Historical Sketch and Laws of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1891), p. 167; Alberti, ‘Placing Nature’, p. 303.
45 Lancet, 2 January 1829–30. ‘Monsters’ was a technical term, its meaning varying with time and context.
47 G. Cunningham, The History of British Pathology (Bristol, 1992), p. 52.
48 Jacyna, ‘"A Host of Experienced Microscopists"’, p. 247.
49 S. Lawrence, Charitable Knowledge: Hospital Pupils and Practitioners in Eighteenth-Century London (Cambridge, 1996), p. 182.
50 N. Rupke, ‘Richard Owen's Hunterian Lectures on Comparative Anatomy and Physiology, 1837–55’, Medical History, 29 (1985), 237–58.
51 BULSC, Vaughan Thomas Collection, MSS 281/i/175.
52 BULSC, Birmingham Medical School, Minute Book, 1831.
53 BULSC, Birmingham Medical School, Minute Book, 1831.
54 Thomson, The Story of the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, p. 84.
56 BULSC, Vaughan Thomas Collection, MSS 281/i/177.
57 V. Thomas, An Address upon Laying the Foundation-Stone of the Queen's Hospital, Birmingham, June 18, 1840 (Oxford, 1840), p. 43.
58 BULSC, Birmingham Medical School, Minute Book, 1831.
60 W. R. Merrington, University College Hospital and its Medical School (London, 1976), p. 159.
61 Morrison, William Sands Cox, pp. 109–10.
62 BULSC, Vaughan Thomas Collection, MSS 281/i/175.
63 Birmingham Central Library Archives (BCLA hereafter), General Hospital, Birmingham, General Minute Book, 1843–1851, HC/GHB/12.
64 R. Richardson, ‘Organ Music’, in T. Greenhalgh and B. Hurwitz (eds), Narrative Based Medicine: Dialogue and Discourse in Clinical Practice (London, 1998), 266–72, p. 267.
65 E. Collins, The History and Traditions of the Moorfields Eye Hospital (London, 1929), p. 122.
66 BCLA, General Hospital, Birmingham, Medical Committee Minute Book, 1855–68, HC/GHB/68.
67 Birmingham Central Library, Local Studies, Report to the Charity Commissioners, 1863.
70 D. Embleton, The History of the Medical School, afterwards the Durham College of Medicine at Newcastle-upon-Tyne for Forty years, from 1832–1872 (Newcastle, 1890), p. 39.
71 Midland Counties Herald, 29 October 1868.
72 Morrison, William Sands Cox, p. 143.
73 BULSC, Birmingham Medical School, Medical Faculty Minute Book, 1933–6.
74 Birmingham Daily Mail, 7 November 1913.
75 BULSC, Birmingham Medical School, Medical Faculty Minute Book, 1911–16.
76 J. Humphreys, Catalogue of the Collection of Skulls and Teeth in the Odontological Museum of the University of Birmingham (Birmingham, 1916).
77 BULSC, Birmingham Medical School, Medical Faculty Minute Book, 1916–21.
78 See, for example, the works of Bertram Windle (1858–1929), including Congenital Malformations and Heredity (Birmingham, 1888); The Proportions of the Human Body (London, 1892).
79 Collins, History and Traditions, pp. 138–9.
80 BULSC, Birmingham Medical School, Medical Faculty Minute Book, 1906–11.
81 University of Bristol Special Collection, University of Bristol Medical and Chemical Departments Minute Book, 1893–1909, DM 506/29.
82 BULSC, Birmingham Medical School, Medical Faculty Minute Book, 1900–3.
83 Bulletin of the International Association of Medical Museums, 3 (1910), p. 53.
84 BCLA, General Hospital, Medical Committee Minutes, 1921–24, HC/GHB/78.
85 BULSC, Birmingham Medical School, Medical Faculty Minute Book, 1921–4.
91 Cole, History of Comparative Anatomy, p. 448.
92 Haviland and Parish, ‘A Brief Account of the Use of Wax Models’, p. 75.
93 [Wellcome Foundation], The Wellcome Museum of Medical Science, 1914–1964 (London, 1964), pp. 6–7.
94 C. J. Hackett, ‘The Undergraduate Teaching Medical Museum’, in H. Clegg (ed.), Proceedings of the First World Conference on Medical Education (London, 1953), 529–38, p. 531.
95 S. Asma, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads (Oxford, 2001), p. 274.
96 Kraft and Alberti, ‘"Equal though different"’, p. 203.
97 N. Jewson, ‘The Disappearance of the Sick Man from Medical Cosmology, 1770–1870’, Sociology, 10 (1976), 225–44, p. 238.
98 D. Haraway, Primate Visions (New York, 1992), p. 29.