| This dissertation focuses on the use of museums in medical education in North America in the period between 1860 and 1940. Although museums were nearly ubiquitous in medical schools and hospitals in this period, scholars have tended to deny the scientific mission of these museums and instead characterize them as freakshows or reliquaries. Medical museums were neither, I argue, but were intellectually analogous to the laboratory. Designed to form the were active sites of knowledge production and transmission. Thought by their nineteenth- and early twentieth-century adherents to represent a vibrant and stimulating application of the museum method to the practical problems of medical education, medical museums presented complex information in what curators believed to be an uniquely accessible medium. At the core of the medical museum experience was the gross pathological specimen; specimens occupied this role because of curators' belief that the object was more pedagogically compelling than the text and that the visual experience was more readily assimilated than the aural.; I draw upon material culture studies as well as museum studies and the historiography of medicine to explore how medical museum artifacts became the basis for institutional structures and professional careers. As I trace in my study, although many physicians in the 1920s and '30s became increasingly uncertain about the educational and research purpose of medical museums, those physicians who had built their careers upon artifacts did not abandon the museum easily. Curators responded to this uncertainty by casting about for new uses and audiences for their collections, but their devotion to that premier artifact of the museum, the gross pathological specimen, limited their ability to adapt the medical museum to new purposes. Condemned as collections of “meat” with little educational or research value in a rapidly changing medical milieu, many museums which were once the pride of their medical schools were simply discarded, and with them, an entire method for visualizing and communicating medical knowledge was discarded as well. |
