Anatomy Museum: Death and the Body Displayed

(Hardback)

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Description

Anatomy museums contain some of the most compelling and challengingdisplays of the human body. This innovative book focusing on one suchmuseum in Scotland's northeast opens up a wide-ranging history ofdeceased bodies on display, from medieval relics, to nineteenth-centurymega-collections of human remains, to the controversial Body Worlds exhibitionthat is touring the globe. A surprisingly varied and ever-changingmaterial and visual culture of human anatomy emerges through this history,shaped by multiple factors, including colonialism and war, as well as shiftsin medical institutions, technologies and media.

Reviews

Pickled in formalin, stripped down to articulated skeletons or depicted in wax or plastic, human anatomical remains have educated generations of medics and fired the public imagination. Anthropologist Elizabeth Hallam uses the Anatomy Museum at the University of Aberdeen to anchor a history of such collections as synoptic mazes labyrinthine summations of knowledge. Hallam charts their convoluted chronicles of acquisition, dissection and preservation, weaving in a narrative on the cultural display of death, from ancient ossuaries to plastinated bodies. * Nature *
Keenly aware of the broader context and making liberal use of other collections in the UK, Hallam shows us how dynamic and diverse a successful collection like this was . . . She guides us beyond the museum to other anatomy spaces, especially the lecture theatre and the dissection room . . . Anatomy Museum is well worth reading. It is impeccably researched, nicely produced and lavishly illustrated. It spurs us to think differently about collections of all kinds, and relationships between the things in them. . . . From papier-mâch to plastic, from plastinates to plasticine, there is beauty to be found in the anatomy museum. * Museums Journal *
For the reviewer, a fan of the history of science in general, particularly the study of anatomy and physiology, it is difficult not to be effusive about this volume . . . This book will be a valuable addition to collections that serve practitioners and historians of the study and treatment of the human body. Recommended. * Choice *

Author Bio

Elizabeth Hallam is Director of Cultural History at the University of Aberdeen. Her books include the co-authored Beyond the Body: Death and Social Identity (1999) and Death, Memory and Material Culture (2001).