A Museum of Wonders or a Cemetery of Corpses? The Commercial Exchange of Anatomical Collections in the Early Modern Netherlands (original) (raw)

1713 was a sad year for Hendrickje Dircksz. Her husband, the Leiden anatomy professor Govard Bidloo died on April 20. A few months later, she put his library and anatomical museum on auction. Books were sold on October 23, 24 and 25 and brought in almost three thousand guilders. The museum was sold on the afternoon of the 25 th . It contained 131 anatomical preparations, i.e. human organs preserved by the injection of wax, which were valued at just over 177 guilders, a small sum of money. Only four years later, the Amsterdam professor Frederik Ruysch cashed in over thirty thousand guilders when the Russian czar purchased his anatomical cabinet. For this money, Ruysch could have afforded five or six elegant houses on one of the more fashionable canals of Amsterdam, and the deal was almost equivalent to winning the lottery. When Ruysch's daughter won the jackpot in 1720, she received seventy-five thousand guilders for her ticket. Bidloo's family, on the other hand, would scarcely have managed to survive until the following summer on 177 guilders. While the contrast between these two sales appears quite shocking, it would not have surprised contemporaries. The two anatomists were known to despise each other, and spent the better half of the 1690s on a bitter pamphlet war over the role of preparations in anatomical research. Their respective positions foreshadowed the divergence of the sales prices. Ruysch claimed that his anatomical preparations offered a faithful representation of the body. Bidloo countered that the specimens offered deceptive evidence, and anatomical atlases were better equipped to visualize anatomical structures.

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