Search

Recent historical research has analysed the Cold War as an ‘imaginary war’, an interpretation that poses specific challenges for displaying the conflict in museums. In contrast to well-established ...

Many histories of scientific instruments concentrate on their manufacture and original function, but such artefacts as survive often do so in collections – many will have spent far longer in a museum than anywhere else. Alongside the rich literature on the history of scientific instruments, accordingly, there is a body of work on the histories of scientific instrument collections. This survey outlines genres and themes in the historiography of scientific instruments, focusing in particular on display and other collection-based functions. Fluid and contingent, collections are instrumental in the history, heritage, and historiography of science.

From the mid-1960s a new breed of scientific instrument curators emerged in the United Kingdom. This small community of practice developed in parallel to but distinctly from the expanding generation of university historians of science and other cognate museum sub-professions. Presenting the trajectories, experiences and practices of personnel in British scientific instrument collections, especially the Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh, this article explores how networks of interest around collections shaped the museum sector in later twentieth-century Britain. With particular objects – especially eighteenth-century instruments – the ‘brass brigade’ built a discipline.

Museums are often associated exclusively with bygones. This can be problematic, especially for those who manage science, technology and medicine (STM) collections. In seeking to correct this misconception with contemporary collecting, they also face other problems, especially in scale and complexity. While acknowledging such challenges, this opinion piece proposes opportunities afforded by the material culture of recent STM. Contemporary material can be used to tell stories as well as explain technicalities; it can connect with visitors using everyday objects and put 'difficult' material into context. Against the backdrop of practice and publications from across the sector, we present examples from the redisplay at the National Museum of Scotland in 2016, and from our current collecting initiatives. We thereby bring our perspective on the current state-of-play in STM collecting to the attention of the wider museum sector, drawing scattered practices together and weaving in our own. This is a text only version of the article, to see the full images please go to the publisher website.

OBJECTIVEOne of the greatest challenges of pediatric neurosurgery training is balancing the training needs of the trainee against patient safety and parental expectation. The traditional “see one, do one, teach one” approach to training is no longer acceptable in pediatric neurosurgery. The authors have developed the baby Modeled Anatomical Replica for Training Young Neurosurgeons (babyMARTYN). The development of this new training model is described, its feasibility as a training tool is tested, and a new approach of integrating simulation into day-to-day training is suggested.METHODSIn part 1 (development), a prototype skull was developed using novel model-making methods. In part 2 (validation), 18 trainee neurosurgeons (at various stages in training) performed the following 4 different procedures: 1) evacuation of a posterior fossa hematoma; 2) pterional craniotomy; 3) tapping of the fontanelle to obtain a CSF specimen; and 4) external ventricular drain insertion. Completion of the procedural stages (scored using a curriculum-based checklist) was used to test the feasibility of babyMARTYN as a training tool. Likert scale–based questionnaires were used to assess the model for face and content validity. Training benefit was assessed using pre- and posttraining ratings on the Physician Performance Diagnostic Inventory Scale (PPDIS). To determine the significance of improvement in median PPDIS score, the Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-rank test was performed.RESULTSIn part 1 (development), the model was successfully developed with good fidelity. In part 2 (validation), the validation data demonstrated feasibility, face, and content validity. The PPDIS score significantly increased for all groups after babyMARTYN training, thereby indicating a potential future role for babyMARTYN in the training of pediatric neurosurgeons.CONCLUSIONSThis recent collaborative neurosurgical development by the Royal College of Surgeons of England is designed to supplement current neurosurgical training. High-fidelity, portable, operation-specific models enable preoperative planning and have the potential to be used in an operating room environment prior to novel operations. A “see one, simulate one, do one” approach for pediatric neurosurgical training using babyMARTYN is suggested.

Nearly two million visitors a year will pass through the new permanent galleries of the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. This article reflects on the planning and collecting that presaged their redevelopment in the context of twenty-first century museum practice in the UK. We focus in particular on two elements: firstly, the fundamental project management work that underpins any development of this kind. Were established methodologies and practices conducive to open-ended, outcomes-based objectives such as research? Secondly, we ask this question specifically in relation to contemporary collecting in art, and in science. How can the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns of contemporary collecting be mainstreamed in project management workflows? What boundaries endure in museum processes and products? Publisher PDF

Historians are acutely aware of the role of art in medicine. Elaborate early modern works catch our eye; technical innovations attract analysis. This paper beats a different path by examining three little-known artists in early twentieth-century Britain who deployed what may seem like an outdated method: drawing. Locating the function of pencil and ink illustrations across a range of sites, we take a journey from the exterior of the living patient via invasive surgical operations to the bodily interior. We see the enduring importance of delineation against a backdrop of the mechanization of conflict and of imaging.

Charles Cockell and colleagues consider what it takes to establish and maintain an experiment that lasts for decades – or even for centuries.

In this critical assessment of the ‘museology of science’ I cherry-pick recent scholarship and practice to unpack the functions of science collections. Some practices (exhibition, engagement, study) have already attracted considerable attention, others not yet (storage); but all tend to be considered separately as case studies from particular institutions and for particular disciplinary audiences. Juxtaposing different reasons to collect reveals both the tensions inherent in science collections and the opportunities these collections afford, especially around their materiality. This is why we have collected science, and why we should continue.

Museums have been complicit in the construction of physical and cultural hierarchies that underpinned racist thought from the Enlightenment until well into the twentieth century, in marked contrast to the inclusionary role that many now seek to fulfil. In Revealing Histories: Myths about Race (2007–2009) at the Manchester Museum, UK, a team from within and beyond the museum tried to address this uncomfortable history. They faced challenges and raised many questions: how to present such material honestly but sensitively? Could other voices be included without jeopardising the credibility of the museum? How can post-colonial arguments be made with a collection based on the spoils of empire? And, finally, how are museums to escape the legacies of prejudice? Although well intentioned, the actions of museum staff in realising the project – the authors included – exhibited unanticipated vestiges of institutional racism. Drawing on race and international development studies, this paper concludes that a ...

Effigies, facsimiles, and replicas were common features of nineteenth-century cultures of display. Medical museums in particular housed numerous models in media such as glass and plaster; the closest in appearance to human flesh for anatomical representation, however, was wax. This paper explores the role of ceroplastica in British anatomy museums through the wax bodies of Joseph Towne, modeler at Guy's Hospital Museum in London. Towne's processes and products were distinct from his European predecessors in ways that reveal not only the contingencies of museum practice, but also the particular place of wax in the Victorian exhibitionary complex.

In this book the eighteenth century Enlightenment receives an important reassessment, using an astonishing range of materials and objects drawn from Europe and beyond, including artefacts from India and China, West Africa and Polynesia. A series of authoritative essays written by experts in the field explores the full range of material culture in the long eighteenth century, raising crucial questions about notions of property and invention, homely and commercial lives. The book also includes a series of well-illustrated exhibits, a startling and provocative assemblage of objects from the Enlightenment world, each accompanied by expert commentaries. The collection of essays and exhibits is the result of collaborative debate by scholars from Europe and north America, who have together worked on the cross-disciplinary importance of material history in making sense of how past society was fundamentally transformed through the world of goods.

This survey outlines a history of museums written through biographies of objects in their collections. First, the mechanics of the movement of things and the accompanying shifts in status are considered, from manufacture or growth through collecting and exchange to the museum. Objects gathered meanings through associations with people they encountered on their way to the collection, thus linking the history of museums to broader scientific and civic cultures. Next, the essay addresses the use of items once they joined a collection, whether classificatory, analytical, or in display. By thus embedding the study of scientific practice in material culture, this approach contributes to constructivist histories of science. The final section addresses the role of objects in the experience of the visitors, emphasizing how fruitful the history of museum objects can be in the study of the public engagement with science.

Natural history, so popular a pursuit in nineteenth-century Britain, was a thriving part of the activities of the literary and philosophical societies that epitomized urban middle-class cultural life. The “lit and phils” are most famous for their museums, but this paper outlines the range of other activities pertaining to natural knowledge that went on within their walls, focusing on the thriving societies in England's largest county, Yorkshire. Foremost among these were regular lectures: this paper discusses the speakers, audience and content, as well as the significance of the architecture of the halls in which they were staged. More exclusive meetings and didactic classes are also examined, as well as their (often extensive) libraries. After a brief examination of the purported decline of the philosophical societies around the turn of the century, a conclusion outlines the importance of science within these voluntary associations both to the provincial middle classes and the emerging professional men of science.

Traditional accounts of the emergence of professional biology have privileged not only metropolis over province, but research over teaching and laboratory over museum. This paper seeks to supplement earlier studies of the ‘transformation of biology’ in the late nineteenth century by exploring in detail the developments within three biology departments in Northern English civic colleges. By outlining changes in the teaching practices, research topics and the accommodation of the departments, the authors demonstrate both locally contingent factors in their development and continuities with existing traditions in natural history. The appointment of Arthur Milnes Marshall in preference to Louis Miall to the new zoology chair in Manchester in 1879 casts light on contemporary views of the laboratory and museum as ‘equal though different’. The transformation in biology, in Northern England at least, was shaped more by such local institutional changes than by a phoenix-like rise of the laboratory from the ashes of the museum—more by the rhetorical construction of a professional academic community than any dramatic shift in sites. In this period the biology laboratory supplemented, rather than eclipsed, the museum, and the dichotomy between the ‘naturalist’ and the ‘experimentalist’ was far from clear-cut.

The cultural history of museums is crucial to the understanding of nineteenth-century natural history and its place in wider society, and yet although many of the larger metropolitan institutions are well charted, there remains very little accessible work on the hundreds of English collections outside London and the ancient universities. Natural history museums have been studied as part of the imperial project and as instruments of national governments; this paper presents an intermediary level of control, examining the various individuals and institutions who owned and managed museums at a local level in provincial England, and their intended audience constituencies. The shifting forms and functions of collections in Newcastle, Sheffield and Manchester are studied in the hands of private collectors, learned societies, municipal authorities and civic colleges. I argue that the civic elite retained control of museums throughout the nineteenth century, and although the admission criteria of these various groups became ostensibly more inclusive, privileged access continued to be granted to expert and esteemed visitors.

The Modelled Anatomical Replica for Training Young Neurosurgeons (MARTYN) is a novel simulation model developed by the Royal College of Surgeons England (RCSEng). This study describes the development of the model and aims to determine its feasibility as a potential future training tool.Traditional model-making methods were used to develop a prototype. Initial procedural trials tested the feasibility of the model. Eighteen participants, grouped by experience (nine novices, four intermediates and five experienced), completed two tasks: a craniotomy and a burr hole followed by insertion of an external ventricular drain (EVD). Subjective data on confidence, usefulness, realism and preference to other training modalities were collected via a standardised questionnaire and a 5-point Likert scale.Preliminary trials of the model prototype demonstrated feasibility. The novice group had the greatest self-reported benefit from MARTYN training, with significant increases in self-rated confidence in both the craniotomy (p0.01) and EVD insertion (p0.05) procedures. MARTYN was reported to having good visual and tactile realism overall with the bone component being considered highly realistic. The model was reported to be a useful training tool. When asked to rank preferred training modalities, operative experience was chosen first with cadaveric training and MARTYN consistently scoring a second choice.MARTYN was developed with the intention to fill the current niche for an inexpensive synthetic model head. This study shows that the use of MARTYN for training is both feasible and realistic. We demonstrate a preliminary face and construct validity of the model in this pilot study. With the reduction in working hours, we believe this model will be a suitable supplement to the current ST 1-3 level cadaveric training and will have a positive impact on patient safety.

My goals in this paper are twofold: to outline there fashioning of amateur and professional roles in life science in late Victorian Yorkshire, and to provide a revised historiography of the relationship between amateurs and professionals in this era. Some historical treatments of this relationship assume that amateurs were demoralized by the advances of laboratory science, and so ceased to contribute and were left behind by the autonomous “new biology.” Despite this view, I show that many amateurs played a vital part in the construction of a professional academic community in urban Yorkshire, and then continued to collaborate with the laboratory-based biologists. The key to any analysis of the relationship between amateurs and professionals is the great variety of amateur identities and practices in Victorian Yorkshire. The amateur-professional riftfallacy arose because laboratory biologists fashioned an identity in conscious opposition to a particular type of amateur: an ideal that belied an array of co-operative relationships. As naturalists refashioned their roles and identities in light of the changes within academe and without, debates about the practice and place of life science took place as often among amateurs as between professionals and amateurs.

This chapter discusses the role played by civic colleges in the emergence of autonomous professional groups associated with new disciplines between 1860 and the Great War. It also discusses the role of local learned societies, particularly literary and philosophical societies in the founding and support of the young colleges and their impact on college growth and curricula.

Carlos III of Spain was especially fond of pachyderms. In 1773 an elephant arrived in the port city of Cadiz, a gift from the ruler of the Carnatic region of India via the Governor-General of the Phillipines. After trekking 600 km it fascinated nobility and the masses alike in Madrid, then lived out its days in the royal menagerie at Aranjuez. But elephants often have afterlives as interesting and varied as their lives, and this one was no exception. Upon its demise in 1777, Juan Bru, the dissector at the Royal Cabinet of Natural History, hurried the 50 km to Aranjuez to preserve and prepare the specimen, and to secure it for his master, Pedro Franco Dávila. The King wanted an elephant to display, and Dávila wanted a specimen for the cabinet. Accordingly, Bru spent over a week defleshing his mammoth charge, cooking the bones, drawing everything as he went along.