A Short and Remarkable History of Medical Museums
From the Soldier Vaughan to the Irish Giant
Art exhibitions draw our attention to the masterpieces of human imagination. Natural history museums catalog the wonders of the biosphere — from dinosaurs that lived millions of years ago to the massive woolly mammoth. But there is another kind of museum that turns its lens inward. It explores the fragile, profound, and often unsettling reality of the human condition itself.
Medical museums, in one way or another, are guardians of our mortality. They preserve the physical evidence of our biological struggles across history — calcified lesions left by tuberculosis, spines bent by labor in the pre-industrial age, rusted iron from early surgical interventions, and preserved tissues that still carry the genetic codes of past epidemics.
To the uninitiated, these collections may resemble “cabinets of horrors.” Yet they were once the first classrooms where the standards of anatomy were defined, and the laboratories where diseases were classified for the first time. But before we enter this rich history, let us begin with a simple question: what is a medical museum, after all?
What Is a Medical Museum?
A medical museum is an institution that collects, preserves, documents, and displays materials related to medicine, health, and disease. These materials can take many forms. They may include historical objects such as early surgical and diagnostic instruments, laboratory devices, pharmaceutical tools, nursing equipment, medicine bottles, and sometimes even preserved clinic or hospital furnishings from earlier periods.
There are also anatomical and pathological collections. These may include skeletons, preserved organs, diseased tissues, specimens stored in fluid, anatomical models made of wax or plastic, and teaching collections that were historically created to train physicians and deepen understanding of disease.
In addition, medical museums often hold archives and records — manuscripts and medical books, photographs, letters, institutional documents, public health posters, and materials that reveal how medicine has interacted with society, public policy, and the history of epidemics.
Medical museums are not a single category. Their form depends on the idea on which they are built, the audience they serve, and the nature of their collections. Some focus on the general history of medicine, tracing its development as an institution, a body of knowledge, and a social practice. Others are dedicated to anatomy and pathology, often rooted in historic teaching collections from medical schools. These may include materials related to congenital conditions, bone diseases, or rare anatomical specimens.
There are also surgical museums, which concentrate on the history of surgery, its techniques, instruments, and scientific transformations. Some display teaching models and surgical case specimens. Public health and hygiene museums, as their name suggests, focus on prevention, healthy living, community health, and the history of fighting infection and epidemics. Beyond these are highly specialized museums devoted to pharmacy, dentistry, psychiatry, forensic medicine, ophthalmology, and other medical fields.
A Short History of Medical Museums
The medical museum emerged gradually, evolving from private collecting efforts into public health institutions. Its roots can be traced to the Renaissance. Early medical collections were often in private hands, owned by European elites — cardinals and wealthy merchants — who gathered objects that resisted easy classification.
A single cabinet might contain a piece of coral, a Roman coin, a supposed “unicorn” horn, and a human skull. The goal was not systematic scientific study, but the display of status and intellectual curiosity. Yet by the sixteenth century, a shift had begun — from private possession to public institutional custody.
In 1523, a Venetian cardinal’s will marked a turning point, documenting one of the earliest cases of a public body receiving a private collection that included human remains. This trend accelerated with the establishment of the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford.
Within medicine, the need for such collections became urgent. As anatomical study moved away from reliance on the theoretical texts of Galen and toward direct observation, the physical specimen became the primary text.
One could not truly understand the structure of the heart from a book alone. It had to be seen. But because bodies decay, preserved specimens — dry skeletons or wet preparations stored in alcohol — became the only way to build a lasting reference library of the human body.
Between 1750 and 1900, medical museums entered their golden age. During this period, the museum stood at the center of the medical school. Teaching medicine without a medical museum was considered unthinkable. The Scottish anatomist Frederick Knox famously regarded medical instruction without specimens as little more than quackery.
As knowledge advanced, pathological anatomy emerged. Physicians began to recognize that the symptoms observed in patients were directly linked to structural changes in organs discovered during autopsy. To teach this connection, hospitals and universities collected thousands of specimens.
Medical museums contributed to three major developments during this era. First, they helped standardize pathology. Before photography, a preserved heart showing diseased valves was the only reliable way to unify diagnosis. A student in London and another in Edinburgh needed the same reference specimens to identify the same disease. It was a very different world from today’s digital medicine.
Second, collections of surgical instruments and wax models allowed students to study the mechanics of operations. The museum and collections of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, for example, grew from the need to raise the standards of surgery.
Third, comparative anatomy gained ground. Scholars used their museums to study universal principles of physiology. They collected not only human parts, but specimens from across the animal kingdom, showing how different species solved similar problems of digestion, circulation, and reproduction.
By the early twentieth century, these collections had reached an industrial scale. At Guy’s Hospital in London, the number of specimens rose from around 500 in the 1820s to more than 12,000 by 1905.
A Center for Public Education
With the dawn of the twentieth century, the medical museum shifted its focus once again. Industrialization, urban expansion, and the acceptance of germ theory created new public health challenges. Tuberculosis, syphilis, and cholera spread rapidly in crowded cities.
The museum began to turn outward, evolving from a space reserved for physicians into a center for public education. The “hygiene museum” emerged. These institutions used models, posters, and interactive displays to teach the public about cleanliness, nutrition, and infection control.
This movement appeared in different regions at roughly the same time. In the Ottoman Empire, for example, a Health Museum was established in 1918. It was initially intended for medical training, but soon became a tool for public health communication, teaching citizens how to avoid infectious disease.
In the United States and Europe, “popular museums” and anatomical exhibitions — sometimes blurring the line between education and entertainment — helped spread awareness about the body and its internal structure.
During this period, the museum also became a tool of social advocacy, a role it continues to play today in institutions focused on mental health and contemporary epidemics.
The Hyrtl Skulls
Medical museums have often taken on roles few would have imagined. Consider the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, founded in 1858 by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. It is perhaps the most famous medical museum in North America.
The museum grew from the collection of Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter, a pioneering surgeon who donated his personal teaching specimens on the condition that the college appoint a curator and preserve the collection for medical research.
Among its most important holdings is the Hyrtl Skull Collection, acquired in 1874 from the Austrian anatomist Joseph Hyrtl. At a time when many anatomists collected skulls to support phrenology and racial hierarchies — arguing that skull shape determined intelligence — Hyrtl’s purpose was the opposite. He assembled 139 skulls to challenge the idea that cranial anatomy was linked to intellectual ability or racial superiority.
Hyrtl demonstrated the wide anatomical variation within European populations, undermining the simplistic racial classifications of his era.
The Secret of Soldier Vaughan
Medical museums remain faithful custodians of medical history. The story of the 1918 influenza pandemic offers one of the clearest examples of how a museum specimen changed the course of science.
The pandemic remains the deadliest in recorded history, claiming an estimated 50 million lives. For decades, virologists struggled to understand why it was so lethal. Where did it come from? What made it so deadly?
Because viruses do not fossilize, it seemed that the evidence was lost forever. But in the late 1990s, Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger, a pathologist at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology — whose collections are now part of the National Museum of Natural History in the United States — began searching the museum’s archives for preserved lung tissue from soldiers who died in 1918.
There he found a small cube of lung tissue, about the size of a fingernail, embedded in paraffin wax. It belonged to 21-year-old soldier Roscoe Vaughan, who had died at Camp Jackson in South Carolina.
Using this 80-year-old specimen, Taubenberger’s team extracted viral RNA. Through careful reconstruction, they decoded the virus’s genome and discovered that the 1918 strain was an H1N1 influenza virus closely related to avian flu.
In 2005, the team fully reconstructed the virus in a high-security laboratory at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study its behavior. The discovery reshaped earlier theories about the pandemic’s origin and identified specific genetic markers linked to its severity.
This knowledge directly informed vaccine development during the 2009 swine flu pandemic and continues to guide global pandemic preparedness strategies.
Had Soldier Vaughan’s lung not been preserved in 1918, this genetic insight might have been lost forever.
Racism and Ethics in Medical Museums
The story of medical museums has not always been humane. The Hunterian Museum in London, once a center of British surgery, displayed one of its most famous — and most controversial — exhibits: the skeleton of Charles Byrne, known as the “Irish Giant.” Byrne stood nearly 2.5 meters tall due to untreated gigantism.
In the 1780s, Byrne was a well-known figure in London. Yet he lived in fear of being dissected by the surgeon John Hunter, who was determined to obtain his body.
Byrne clearly asked to be buried at sea to prevent this. But after his death in 1783, Hunter bribed the undertaker, stole the body, and stripped it down to bones.
For more than two centuries, Byrne’s skeleton stood at the center of the museum’s display. It had scientific value. Twentieth-century researchers used it to better understand the role of the pituitary gland in growth and later identified a specific genetic mutation in Byrne’s DNA. Yet its public display became the focus of growing ethical criticism.
In 2023, after years of pressure from ethicists and patient advocacy groups, the museum removed the skeleton from public exhibition. It acknowledged that educational value no longer outweighed the violation of Byrne’s expressed wishes. The decision marked an important shift in how medical museums confront their own legacy.
In the United States, the Mütter Museum launched a similar initiative in 2023 called the “Postmortem Project.” This was a two-year review of 6,500 human remains in its collection, accompanied by public dialogue sessions and surveys. The review responded to criticism that the museum’s online presence — especially YouTube videos — and some of its displays placed too much emphasis on “oddity” rather than education, raising concerns about respect for the individuals represented.
What Is Happening Now
Building on this long history, medical museums are now collecting material for the future of medicine. One of the clearest examples is the COVID-19 pandemic. During the crisis, museums recognized that they were witnessing history in real time. Instead of waiting decades to gather artifacts, institutions such as the Science Museum Group in the United Kingdom, the Smithsonian Institution in the United States, and the Canadian Museum of History launched rapid-response collecting initiatives.
Curators understood that the story of the pandemic was not only about the virus. It was also about society’s response. Museums collected some of the first vials of COVID-19 vaccines distributed during mass immunization campaigns. They preserved homemade protective equipment — masks sewn from old shirts — reflecting early shortages and community resilience. They archived public health posters that captured the visual language of “social distancing” and “stay at home.” They even gathered artistic responses that documented how people behaved during lockdown.
This proactive approach ensures that future historians will have a material record of the pandemic — not only statistics, but the texture of everyday life during a global crisis.
Today, a more human-centered approach defines many medical museums. Institutions such as the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in the United Kingdom and the Glore Psychiatric Museum in the United States are dedicated to reducing the stigma of mental illness.
By presenting the history of treatment — from the harsh restraints of the eighteenth century to art therapy in the twentieth — these museums help visitors understand both the evolution of care and the humanity of patients. Whether viewing artwork or historical specimens, visitors — health students or members of the public — learn to see the “person,” not just the “case.” This perspective directly shapes better patient care.
Another major development is digital access. The physical museum is no longer the only way to engage with medical collections. Digitization has opened medical history to a global audience. Three-dimensional imaging allows fragile specimens, such as skulls, to be scanned in detail. Students and researchers can now interact with digital models in virtual environments without risking damage to the originals.
The National Museum of Health and Medicine has created comprehensive virtual tours of its 1918 influenza exhibits, allowing a global audience to learn from the collection without traveling to Maryland.
The continued popularity of many medical museums reflects their cultural value. People are naturally curious about their own biology and about the difficult realities of human life. This curiosity often leads to deeper reflection. Visitors frequently describe feelings of awe and empathy, recognizing our shared vulnerability in the face of disease — and the remarkable progress science has achieved.
In this sense, medical museums can also strengthen appreciation for the health professions. They preserve the heritage of medicine, honoring the practitioners and patients who came before us. At the same time, they use that legacy as a foundation for a more humane and thoughtful future for medicine itself.
References
Canadian Medical Association, “Antibiotic Use in Primary Care: Lessons from Canada,” Canadian Medical Association Journal, Vol. 186, No. 3, 2014
Canadian Medical Association, “Recent Clinical Study Published in the PubMed Database,” 2023
Thomas Washington, “The Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons – London,” Medical History Journal, Cambridge University Press
Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Making Museums and the History of Medicine
Mütter Museum, “The Hyrtl Skull Collection,” Philadelphia
“Learning Medicine Through Museums: A Modern Educational Perspective,” Journal of Electronic Medical Education, 2023
“Analyzing the Impact of Medical Exhibitions on Public Awareness,” PubMed Database, 2010
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Reconstructing the 1918 Influenza Virus: Scientific and Historical Background,” Influenza Archives
Canadian Museum of History, “COVID-19 and Public History: The Role of Museums in Documentation,” Canada
CDC Museum, “The 1918 Influenza Pandemic and the Reconstruction of the Virus,” Museum Exhibitions