Marius Turda is a Reader in 20th Century Central and Eastern European Biomedicine at Oxford Brookes University, and Deputy Director of its Centre for Health, Medicine and Society.
The Museum of Natural History in Vienna was founded in 1876, and opened its doors to the public in 1882. The exhibitions were set up according to the 19th century exhibition classification and as taxonomical, geographical and evolutionary classification. A permanent section on physical anthropology was opened in 1930, which has featured several temporal and permanent exhibitions since.
Apart from a few considerations made by some of his former students and collaborators at the posthumous publication of the complete works by the great Romanian anatomist Francisc I. Rainer (1874-1944), nothing significant has been written about the medical and anthropological collections created by the founder of the Institute of Anthropology in Bucharest. In 1920 Rainer was appointed professor and head of the Anatomy Department at the Faculty of Medicine in Bucharest. After his retirement, twenty years later, he left behind a well organised Museum of Anatomy with a collection of more than 700 pieces of human and comparative anatomy. From 1942 professor Rainer has been officially recognised, by a special decree-law, as director for life of the new Institute of Anthropology. For this institution he created a Research Laboratory and a Museum of Anthropology with a huge collection of human skulls (over 5000 at the time of the inauguration, in June 1940) and a collection of pathological bones of over 1500 pieces.
The paper I am proposing consists of two parts. First I would like to offer you a historical introduction to the Museum Boerhaave and its medical collections. What were the intentions of the founders of the museum when they decided in 1928 to make the museum not only a museum collecting, studying and presenting the history of exact science, but to also add the history of medicine (and the other life sciences) to its assignment? How has this collection been presented to the public in the eighty jears of the museum’s existence; what story does it tell? What message does it convey? These last themes I will illustrate with impressions of the permanent displays of the museum, dating from 1931 until 1991.
“From undocumented objects to a public, scientific museum. About the Medical History Museum of Gothenburg, Sweden”
How do you deepen the general public’s interest, along with that of scientists and politicians, in a medical history museum?” This question has been the guiding star and the great challenge of my long professional life as museum curator and director.
The Medical University of Vienna’s medical collections include over a million items including pictures (photos, paintings, etc.), books (from about 1500 till now), an archive, instruments, as well as waxmodels (from 1784-88). They are exhibited in their original building, the “Josephinum”, the “surgical-medical academy”, built in 1785. The “Department and collections for the History of Medicine” seeks to collect, protect, digitise and use these collections for all manners of scientific work. Similarly, it hosts an increasing number of guided tours for children/schools and medical conferences, in addition to scanning of photos/pictures for use in publications, and preparing a new presentation of the collections of instruments towards attracting further visitors in the future. On the more academic side, the Josephinum is organising more lectures for students and offers new possibilities to write a dissertation or diploma.
I am currently an Associate Lecturer in the Department of History, Philosophy and Religion, and the Outreach Officer for its Centre for Health Medicine and Society at Oxford Brookes University.
Georgina Ferry is a science writer, author and broadcaster based in Oxford. Beginning as a section editor on New Scientist magazine and a contributor to science programmes on BBC Radio, she has since been largely self-employed. Her book Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life (1998) was the first biography of Britain's only female Nobel-prizewinning scientist.
Biographers naturally turn to their subjects for first-hand accounts of their life and work. The two biographical subjects I have addressed, Dorothy Hodgkin and Max Perutz, were almost exact contemporaries who worked in the same field, the X-ray crystallography of biological molecules. But their approaches to managing the narrative of their life and work were very different. Using these two examples, I reflect on the challenges facing the biographer as she attempts to produce a rounded picture of an individual scientist.
This paper gives an insight into the inner or ‘secret’ history of the upper ranks of the British health administration, based on many interviews with senior officials. After World War I, the work of the new Ministry of Health was handicapped by the economic depression. In addition, the new department was handicapped by the premature death of Sir Robert Morant, its architect and first Permanent Secretary. The success of the department depended on the harmonious working relation between the Permanent Secretary and Chief Medical Officer. Under the first incumbents, who were in office until 1935, this harmony failed to materialize. In addition, the early talent recruited to the department was quickly dissipated. By the late 1930s the health department had sunk into the doldrums.
It has become common to argue that the Nazi Euthanasia programme was an important way-station on the ‘twisted road’ to Auschwitz, that the elimination of ‘undesirables’ that began with the murder of asylum inmate
In this lecture, Volker Roelcke details the history of the relationships between eugenics and medical genetics between 1910-1060, demonstrating that the history of eugenics can yield broader analytical tools for investigating the international dimension connecting medicine, science, and politics. Volker reconstructs the emergence of institutionalized research agendas in the field of psychiatric genetics in three national contexts,
In this fascinating lecture, the Natural History Museum in Vienna’s Maria Teschler-Nicola explores the points of convergence between Austrian anthropological and medical traditions between 1850 and 1920. Investigating a largely neglected period dominated by physicians, anatomists, pathologists, and geologists and their respective research interests, this lecture focusses on the lives and achievements of various key figures such as Ferdinand v. Hochstetter and the anatomist Carl Toldt who promoted the young physician Rudolf Poech. Poech, a member of the team the Academy of Sciences sent to study the 1897 plague outbreak in India, was also an early supporter of a ‘modern biology’ that increasingly centred on hereditary theories, an approach he explored through numerous research projects on both European as well as non-European populations.
Benedek Varga studied history, archivist studies and philosophy at the ELTE University, Budapest. He was an honorary visiting fellow at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, in 1991-92; and a visiting researcher at King’s College Cambridge in 1994 (2 months) as well as at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, in 2000.
Ignaz Semmelweis (1818 – 1865) was a Hungarian physician who, in 1847, discovered that the incidence of puerperal fever could be drastically cut by improving on hand washing standards. As head of Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, he reduced puerperal fever’s mortality rate to 1-3%. Although his achievements were welcomed by some, he also encountered serious criticism. Dismissed from his post in 1850, Semmelweis returned to Budapest where he worked as a university professor in obstetrics. But by the time of his death aged 47 in 1865, Semmelweis’ mental balance had collapsed, he had been deserted by his family and friends, and was soon forgotten.
Tim McHugh is a Wellcome Trust Researcher/Lecturer in the History of Medicine at Oxford Brookes University. His research has centred on the social history of medicine in France, examining the relationship between the nature of a hierarchical society and the charitable assistance of the poor in the early modern period. His research interests include the history of hospitals, the earl
This lecture seeks to contest Jean-Pierre Goubert’s picture of eighteenth-century Brittany as a medical desert by examining the roles played by parish priests in shaping the medical experience of the peasantry. The parish priest in Brittany was largely responsible for implementing much of the charitable action unlocked by the Catholic Reformation. One part of this was the ‘rescuing’ of the peasantry from medical ignorance. The paper also argues that parish priests deserve to be seen as amateur practitioners in their own right.
Race has been called the South African disease, and in this lecture I shall be discussing two aspects of it as it relates to my recent and forthcoming research on the history of medicine in South Africa. After outlining some general points about the distinctive features of the country, I outline my current project on changing access to public and private healthcare in a segregationist and then apartheid society from the 1940s to 1990s.
Prof. Anne Digby’s research ranges widely over the landscape of British social history from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries: from schooling and society to the New Poor Law, agrarian society in the nineteenth century to welfare policy in the twentieth. However, her primary current interest is in the social history of medicine.
Areas of research include:
This lecture looks at the inter-relationships between clothing and medicine. It explores some established fields (clothing as protection from disease and clothing and medicine in advice literature for instance), but also a wide range of under-explored topics such as clothing as a vector of disease and clothing as therapy and cure for disease.
Steve King is a Professor of History at Oxford Brookes University, Assistant Dean for Resources in the School of Arts and Humanities, as well as Chair of the Wellcome Trust History of Medicine Grant Panel.
Steve King was awarded his PhD in 1994. His research interests are varied, spanning a range of periods, themes and countries, but may be grouped under four broad headings:
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