Anatomy Museum is a book about all things to do with anatomy museums from Renaissance anatomical teaching to that of today, and at the same time it is a book about one single, small museum of anatomy in Aberdeen, the Anatomy Museum at Marischal College. Anatomy Museum thus unfolds a history of the display of the dead body in the broadest sense out of a close study of a particular museum.
Its landscape crosses several academic fields: the history of medicine, museology, anthropology, didactics and materiality studies. It provides a history of anatomical collections and British museums in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, covering colonial collection, social networks, and differentiation of disciplines. It contributes to anthropological insights on current practices of dissection and relations between persons and cadavers. And lastly it is a material history of anatomy teaching and changes in seeing, handling and conceptualising the body through different media.
Anatomy Museum is thus not a one-thesis-book. The teeming story is bursting at the seams with relics, cabinets, colonial collection, taxidermy, modern medical students, cadaver supply, plastic models and memorial services. The integrity of the story, however, is anchored by the Marischal College and through thematic threads that run through the whole book: the connections between the living and the dead, between objects and bodies, and between scientific and social networks.
The book is thematically organised with a loose underlying chronology following the prehistory, formation and development of the Marischal Museum.
The first chapter concerns contemporary uses of the dead in anatomical teaching in Aberdeen and thus deviates from the chronology, but it sets the scene and introduces the main themes. Hallam explores the relation between the living and dead in the fundamental tension between trying to understand the living body by investigating the dead one. Teachers establish connections between students’ bodies and cadavers using mirrors, models, face paints, diagrams and texts. Another theme is the tension between the long history of anatomical investigation and the supposed a-historicity of anatomical knowledge. A fine observation is that bones or models with traces of use are thought distracting. Hallam cleverly parallels the removal of historical traces with the removal of the personhood of the cadaver. In this way the museum-objects and dissected body are ‘de-historicized and de-personalized’ in parallel. Anatomy Museum puts both the history and the people back.
Shifting relations between living and dead are further explored in a chapter on the prehistory of anatomical museums focusing on animated bodies. It touches on many of the highlights in the history of anatomy – Vesalius, the Leiden anatomy theatre, Worm’s cabinet, relics – but, although it draws an interesting line focusing on the animated corpse, the writing in this chapter is diffuse compared to the chapters linked to the specific practices of the Marischal.
The formation and consolidation of Marischal Museum of Anatomy are the topics of two main chapters. Here Hallam writes a ‘relational account’ tracing networks of anatomists, collectors, societies and museums. A special interest is taken in these chapters in the fact that the Marischal is a peripheral museum that was not based on a single large and famous collection. This makes the many interlocking networks of contributors and collectors even more apparent: private collectors, learned societies, students in the colonies, professors, technicians, or the owner of a taxidermy shop.
The following chapters deal with gradual shifts and changes in anatomical teaching and the mobilisation of a broad range of materialities to make anatomy visible and tangible. One chapter focuses on how the living body was integrated in anatomy teaching and it paints a compelling picture of the creative methods employed. An early twentieth-century teacher of anatomy enlivened images of dissected bodies with films of circus artists, metaphorical stories, X-rays, a rhododendron flower to show the colour of working muscles, and photos from advertisements. Another chapter brings out connections between different media – models, books and drawings – and Hallam describes with sympathy the intensely material and interactive processes of learning. She shows how changes in teaching focus from details to overview are embodied by the anatomical models: from lifelike waxes over Auzoux’s detailed papermaché models to 1960’s diagrammatic illustrations and plastic models.
The last chapter describes a 1960s redisplay of the museum and how zoological and anthropological specimens were reclassified and transferred to other museums – thus physically separating out fields of knowledge. The museum was cleared of what became seen as historical clutter and set up to mirror the body. At the same time the Department of Anatomy set up memorials for those who had given their bodies to anatomy. The link between redoing the museum and the set-up of the memorials is a little tenuous, but neatly ties together the beginning and end of the book, with tensions between eradicating and reinstalling the history of the specimens and bodies.
This interconnectivity is also found at the level of the book itself, the museum and the body. One of the main attractions of the book is its attention to and gradual uncovering of the layered metaphorical connections between the anatomised body and the historically layered museum collections. The historical-anatomical investigation is also highlighted in the ‘body’ of the book with little icons associating each chapter with an anatomical system: eye, nerve centre, skeleton, DNA etc.
Most of all, however, the book is a museum. A collection of ideas, material objects and relations collected meticulously and ordered, but allowing the visitors/readers to draw new connections between them and use them for their own purposes in teaching and research. As a well-kept museum, its references are in good order and the notes are a gold mine on the literature of the field. The book reads like a rummage through the collections with its mixture of poetic and evocative traces of the people, and enlightening juxtapositions of objects seemingly unconnected.
