With her long, golden locks and a pearl necklace adorning her slender neck, the eighteenth-century anatomical Venus model reclines in a glass case at the entrance of the Amazing Models exhibition in Museum Boerhaave like Sleeping Beauty in Efteling’s fairy-tale wood, but naked and with her stomach cut open.
“This lady is actually a plaster reproduction we had made in China. The original wax model is in Vienna: she’s too fragile to move”, admits museum curator Bart Grob. Most museums arrange their anatomical models by body part: heads with heads, legs with legs and lungs with lungs but Museum Boerhaave has taken a different approach, Grob explains. “We’re displaying the wax models primarily as showpieces, sometimes even in their original glass cases.”
A case of elaborate ivory models from the sixteenth century underwrites that approach: they are tiny female figures with a detachable abdomen. “Actually, students were absolutely not allowed to touch them. These figures would have been kept in a collector’s cabinet or best room.”
Meanwhile, a beam from a projector creates transient words like “scary”, “sensual”, “alienating”, “horny” and “abject” on the floor or on the clothes of the museum’s visitors. “These are the associations that the models might evoke”, says Grob. After all, these are nothing like the stiff, correct models in the corners of modern biology classrooms. Even so, many examples really were used for educational or medical purposes, like the doctor’s dolls. These gracefully posed figures allowed women to point out to doctors where they felt pain without having to undress. “We don’t know why these models are partly focused on sensuality and sexuality, perhaps to entertain the doctor.”
Educational models of eye cross-sections were not only meant to demonstrate the anatomy of the eye: “You can tell by the tiny pins that keep the parts in place. More specifically, they taught students how to prepare a specimen.”
Lining the sides of the museum’s room are cases of which the glass is mat, leaving only an eyehole. You can only see their contents if you stand in front of the case: a life-size cross-section of a male pelvis, for instance, with a large penis right in the middle. Grob remarks: “Just great if a group of first-year secondary school pupils walk by. Nineteenth-century education was not quite the same as Dokter Corrie (a Dutch television personality who teaches sex ed to children in a school television programme and who recently caused a stir, Ed.).” This model was made by French anatomist Louis Auzoux, who set up a factory that made anatomical models from papier-mâché in his native village in 1828. Papier-mâché does not lose it shape when heated or handled.
Further on, there are wax models, demonstrating skin disorders rather than cross-sections.
“Almost endearing”, sighs Grob stopping to show me a serene baby’s head, eyes closed, with a little thrush around its mouth. The next models are well made too, but more off-putting: a baby’s head with a severely deformed skull and an adult’s head with syphilis. The skin disorders on these heads and on the other parts of the body are framed by strips of white linen. Wax fingers stick out from under a sheet to lift up a scrotum to show genital warts and eczema more clearly - a clever detail.
“That was taken on tour to show to people in the country at the beginning of the twentieth century. They were used to demonstrate the importance of hygiene in regions where most people were analphabets. It did away with taboos: people were less worried about seeing a GP.”
Until 1 June 2014, Free admission on presentation of your student ID