acquisition, curation, history of medicine, museum and knowledge politics
Collecting medical artefacts as a public-private enterprise
During the medical garbage collecting day in late May, we brought in a number of wonderful and interesting medical artefacts to our collections, including this plastic mannequin from the Department of Odontology (it’s Camilla to the left).
Now Vanessa tells us that Steve Erenburg (a.k.a. radio-guy), a New York based artefact dealer, has this dental mannequin 
called Dentman — an aluminum head sitting on a cast iron lab stand — for sale for $750!
Those $750 would have financed the whole medical garbage collection day!
Which gives me an idea. The Ministry of Science in this country wants its universities to engage more in private enterprise. So maybe we should begin to think in terms of collecting medical items for sale!
Actually, as a university museum under the Ministry of Science, Medical Musieon is not formally regulated by the Danish museum law (which is a Ministry of Culture thing). So we could easily begin a two-tiered acquisition strategy. Some artefacts could be collected for lofty heritage reasons, others for the medical antiquities market.
Maybe it’s time to start a Medical Museion Medical Antiquities shop as a PPP (public-private parnership) on the premises here in Bredgade?
The other side of the story is that private dealers in medical antiquities constitute a huge unexplored source of artefacts for medical history museums. The growth of an internet-based medical-historical artefact market is a new situation for our kind of museums. Are medical history museums moving towards a situation like that of art museums, which have always lived in the shadow of private dealers, collectors and galleries? For better or for worse, blogs like Vanessa’s certainly contribute to this tendency.
13 Oct 2008 Thomas
I totally agree about the importance of private collections and collectors. When I was working on my photo project about artifacts held in anatomical museums, I heard anecdotally quite a bit about from curators about the private collectors who routinely outbid them in their quest for acquiring new materials.
Hearing so much from these curators, and also friends who deal in antiques of these sorts, made me quite intrigued to visit and document these private collections. To this end, my next photo project will be of private collections of medical curiosities, artifacts, and ephemera.
An interesting side note: I know that this is a normal rhythm for museums–private collectors accumulate, then donate their accumulations to public museums upon their death–but the prevalance of these collections, and the high quality of the contents (not to mention their financial ability to outbid institutions) brings to my mind the pre-museum days of the Cabinet of Curiosity.
Hi Joanna, thanks for this! I cannot wait to see the result of your photo project — in the US only? Keep us updated! The cabinet-of-curiosity comparison makes a lot of sense too.
The actual, physical show will be in New Orleans, scheduled for May of 2009, so yes, America only. But I will definitely make an online version, and will let you know when that has launched. Already seen some interesting collections, and off to visit a few more in a week.
Interesting idea, Thomas, but I don’t think you’d benefit enough to outpace the bad publicity you’d get of a museum selling its ‘collections’ even if they were collected to be sold.
Joanna, that sounds like a good exhibit. At the Medical Museum in DC we tend to run across more collectors of … ‘oddities’ … than medical instruments oddly enough, although Dr. del Cerro is donating his microscope collection to us in stages and we’ve recently met with a collector of veterinary instruments
Re. bad publicity: I guess you’re right — people wouldn’t know when we collect for our exhibitions and when we collect for re-sale. I was only half-serious (but thus also only half-joking :-)