As a political science student, I wrote my bachelor thesis on the foundation of a national slavery museum in Amsterdam. Focusing on the difficulties that arise in this process, I was mostly touched by the way in which we do not seem to be able to engage with the history of slavery as a shared […]
Healing is a relative new and vague concept in Western Europe. Most people think of treatments with secret sessions involving drugs such as ayahuasca. But these treatments are centuries old and are more than just drug sessions. It’s a world where mind, body and soul come together in the healing process. These treatments and methods […]
The Enschedé Room in the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen’s University Museum houses part of the anatomical collection of the University’s former Anatomical Museum. After the Anatomical Museum closed its doors in 2003, the collection was kept in storage until 2011 when part of the collection was moved to the University Museum. Shown in a display that calls […]
Quite a portion of the debate on medical museum nowadays concerns human remains. Some museums suddenly have to deal with awkward origin of their specimens, while others now discuss the ethical side of their ‘babies in bottles’, which some visitors find hard to look at. Within this debate, the AMC Museum Vrolik, maintains a different […]
The Western world has been sceptical and critical about alternative medicine for centuries. In Europe’s early 15th century, witches were burned at the stake, because people believed that they befriended the devil. Nowadays, modern witches obviously do not get burned anymore, but still many people look down on witchcraft and other alternative medicine methods. However, […]
‘Mysterious’, ‘exotic’ and ‘supernatural’ would be the first words that I would think about when confronted with the subject of alternative healing methods. This vision on alternative healing is nowadays mostly developed through watching movies or television series in which shamanism or voodoo are used to explain the unexplainable. In many occasions these films and […]
Museum Vrolik closed its doors in 2011 to give its interior a ‘facelift’, as the Dutch Journal of Medicine calls it. The museum started as a private collection of anatomical preparations in the 19th century by Gerard Vrolik and his son Willem. At the time, the collection was only to be seen by a very […]
With burn-outs being occupational disease number one and depression rates rising at all ages, people seem to be searching for something different then western medicine to solve their health problems. Some people seem to replace typical western medication like antidepressants, for alternative medicine like St. John’s wort, an herb that that has risen in popularity […]
Museums about health and medicine can be found in all shapes and forms, and traditional museums are not the only places where people can find information about the history of medicine. For this blogpost about medical museums and exhibits about health and medicine in Dutch museums, I have decided to visit the Hortus Botanicus in Leiden. […]
The Universiteitsmuseum in Utrecht holds the historical scientific collections of the Utrecht University. It is closely linked to the towns university, by preserving its former collections of biological, medical, historical and other artifacts which were used for educational and research purposes, consisting of over 60.000 objects. Parts of these collections are being displayed in the […]