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Hallam Elizabeth , Anatomy Museum: Death and the Body Displayed (Chicago, IL, and London : University of Chicago Press , 2016), pp.ￂ 444, $57.00, hardback,ￂ ISBN: 978-1-86189-375-8.
Book Review
Anatomy Museum is a book about all things to do with anatomy museums from Renaissance anatomical teaching to that of today, and at the same time it is a book about one single, small museum of anatomy in Aberdeen, the Anatomy Museum at Marischal College. Anatomy Museum thus unfolds a history of the display of the dead body in the broadest sense out of a close study of a particular museum.
Its landscape crosses several academic fields: the history of medicine, museology, anthropology, didactics and materiality studies. It provides a history of anatomical collections and British museums in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, covering colonial collection, social networks, and differentiation of disciplines. It contributes to anthropological insights on current practices of dissection and relations between persons and cadavers. And lastly it is a material history of anatomy teaching and changes in seeing, handling and conceptualising the body through different media.
Anatomy Museum is thus not a one-thesis-book. The teeming story is bursting at the seams with relics, cabinets, colonial collection, taxidermy, modern medical students, cadaver supply, plastic models and memorial services. The integrity of the story, however, is anchored by the Marischal College and through thematic threads that run through the whole book: the connections between the living and the dead, between objects and bodies, and between...