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STEPHEN T. ASMA, Stuffed Animals & Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xv + 302. ISBN 0-19-513050-2. L22.99, $30.00 (hardback).
DOI: 10.1017/S0007087403245040
The market for museum books is expanding delightfully, fuelled by writers from across the disciplinary spectrum. Throughout the 1990s a growing community of scholars studying museums past and present developed a stable of methodologies from literary theory, social history, cultural studies and the history of science, technology and medicine. Stephen Asma has chosen to ignore them all.
Stuffed Animals & Pickled Heads takes us on a whirlwind tour of museums in America, England and France. He might well have concentrated on any one of these national arenas, treating it with more care than he is wont to do in this frustrating yet beguiling book. Purporting to present an account of 'The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums', the book instead offers a scientific travelogue. A series of accounts of the author's visits to a number of museums...