Del gabinete de maravillas al museo anatómico popular: regímenes de exhibición y cultura material de la medicina

From the Cabinet of Wonders to the Popular Anatomical Museum: Exhibition Regimes and Material Culture in Medicine.

Program

Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Competitiveness; Reference HAR2015-64313-P

Budget

€35,574.00

Period of Execution

01/01/2016–31/12/2018

Number of Researchers

15

Principal Investigator: Dr. José Pardo-Tomás (Spanish National Research Council - CSIC).

ICRPC Participants: Xavier Ulled Bertan as a member of the working team.

Description

The project focuses on various scientific collections based primarily on human remains or their representations in various media, created, transformed, and exhibited in the cities of Madrid and Barcelona over a long period, spanning from the 17th century to the first third of the 20th century, with the ultimate goal of contributing to a history of urban science in modern and contemporary Spain. The research focuses on the collections of: a natural history studio (Barcelona); two museums from nineteenth-century medical schools (Barcelona and Madrid); an International Exhibition (Madrid); a natural science museum (Barcelona); and two entertainment companies (Barcelona and Madrid).

This research raises the need to overcome the old narrative framework of museum historiography, which repeatedly presents the evolution of museums within the framework of modern science and the new bourgeois culture, following a linear and relatively simplistic scheme ranging from cabinets of curiosities or wonders (the quintessential exhibition space for scientific materials, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment) to museums proper, which emerged from nation-states throughout the 19th century. On the contrary, the project seeks to foreground the importance of public exhibition (restricted or general) as a means of acquiring knowledge and is therefore interested in the development of the material culture of medicine, forged from different exhibition regimes that did not replace one another in a linear and orderly manner, but rather developed at different rhythms, often coinciding or overlapping in time and in specific plural spaces, which marked the relationship between exhibitors, the exhibited objects, and the audiences who attended their exhibitions.

Thus, the research aims to understand how the objects in the exhibited collections acquired a central role in the construction of explanations and scientific and medical discourse. Of interest, therefore, are the spaces and uses given to those objects: the agents who constructed the collections (production context), the regimes in which they were displayed, the purposes of their uses (teaching, discipline, leisure, etc.) (exhibition context), as well as the perspective of those who observed, interpreted, and appropriated them, adapting them and imbuing them with meaning (reception context).