Historical story

Eye membrane on a string

The NWO-funded project 'Cultures of Collecting:The Leiden Anatomical Collections in Context' investigated the cultural context in which eighteenth-century anatomical specimens were made and collected, using the specimens themselves as the starting point. The results are surprising:the preparations appear to contain a wealth of information about ideas about beauty, science, the nature of life and people.

From the seventeenth century, Leiden University collected an anatomical collection, first in the anatomical theater and later in laboratories, the university hospital and an anatomical museum. Most of the preparations were made by Leiden professors of anatomy and donated to or purchased by the university after their death.

The remains of the historical collection, in total about eight thousand preparations, most of which from the 18 e and 19 e century, is partly on loan from the Leiden Museum Boerhaave. Another part is in the anatomical museum of the LUMC, which is only accessible to medical students and professionals. Because the collection is so extensive, the majority of the preparations are in storage.

No function

The research was necessary because the enormous collection of historical specimens requires a lot of space and maintenance, but does not really serve the core business from the owner, the LUMC.

Some old preparations are still useful in modern medical education and research because they show advanced stages of diseases that either no longer occur here or are generally successfully treated early. This is useful for doctors when they go to developing countries, for example, where those diseases still occur. But the vast majority of historical preparations no longer have a function in contemporary medical education and research.

Nevertheless, the LUMC does not want to just throw them away or exhibit them to a large audience. After all, they are human remains, and the preparations raise all kinds of questions. For example, there are children's arms with lace sleeves and organs injected with mercury. I investigated why the preparations look like this, and in this way discovered many new things about the way of thinking and working of the eighteenth-century anatomists.

Less scary

The Leiden anatomists, for example, all turned out to be driven by a pursuit of beauty when making their preparations, and that idea of ​​beauty changed with fashion in the course of the eighteenth century. For example, stumps of limbs and traces of dissection on children's heads were hidden with sleeves and caps, to make the preparations look more lively and less scary.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, when large lace collars and cuffs were fashionable, the preparations were also given lace trim on sleeves and caps. As lace went out of fashion over the course of the century, lace decorations on the preparations also disappeared.

The specimen by the Leiden anatomist Bernard Siegfried Albinus (1697-1770) on the right is one of the last examples of a specimen decorated with lace. Although lace was already starting to fall out of fashion, Albinus still used it in this preparation because he wanted to refer to his predecessor and teacher Frederik Ruysch. On the string hangs an eye membrane injected with red wax, about which Ruysch had previously published.

He thought he had discovered a new fleece and called it the 'tunica ruyschiana'. Albinus repeated his experiment and concluded that there was no new discovery after all. A pity for Ruysch, but not bad and even understandable, Albinus wrote in a publication. After all, Ruysch had done a great deal of clever work; no wonder he was sometimes wrong.

But this preparation is more than just the result of an investigation and a reference to Ruysch. Albinus was very interested in how the senses work, and he believed that you could only discover that by dissecting them yourself.

That was also what he did to make this preparation:he dissected an eye, and from the arm he carefully removed the skin and nails. He made another preparation from the skin, which unfortunately has been lost. He then used the two preparations in his lectures to show students how skin and eye are constructed.

Finally, Albinus wanted to use these specimens to show what a refined, elegant anatomist he was. Both preparations are extremely difficult to make, and the arm with the eye membrane is an allegory of the two most important senses for a good anatomist:touch and sight.

Albinus also showed his pursuit of elegance in the preparation of the skin of the arm:he did not hang the preparation on horsehair as usual, but on a twig of a plant that Senecio Elegans is called. These kinds of preparations are thus very layered objects:they were research result, piece of evidence, teaching aid, allegory and aptitude test at the same time.


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