The Collectors

December 16, 2025

Anatomy and pathology museums were once essential infrastructure for medical research and education—places where generations of physicians learned to read the body. To understand the history of medicine fully, it helps to understand the history of these institutions. The Collectors, an online repository, aims to do exactly that: it catalogues anatomy and pathology museums founded by physicians and surgeons who belong to a single academic lineage traceable to Pieter Pauw, founder of the first university anatomy museum, established at Leiden in 1597. Museums within this lineage sprang up at major medical centers across the globe, from Edinburgh and Philadelphia to Buenos Aires and Kolkata. The repository documents these museums along with their founders, curators, and holdings.

The project is best understood as an exercise in collective biography—a method historians have long used to root the history of science in the social and political currents of its time. This project adapts that method, shifting the focus from a particular era to the material world of anatomy and pathology museums themselves. The broader goal is to map the social, political, and scientific forces that drove the collecting of human remains.

The bodies and body parts once displayed in these museums arrived by strikingly different routes. Some were obtained through dissection imposed as punishment for capital crimes; others through unauthorized exhumation, colonial appropriation, or voluntary donation. The full spectrum runs from the legal-but-unethical to the furtive, the violent, the racist, the coercive, and the freely consensual. A handful of specimens came from living donors, but the origins of many others remain, tragically, unknown. The Collectors treats this history as central rather than incidental, making a deliberate effort to record what is known about how each collector acquired his or her specimens—and to flag plainly the cases in which that acquisition was unethical.

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