a curious invitation last tuesday society
a curious invitation robert carlyles house last tuesday society national trust london
Andrew Martin on the London Necropolis Railway with the national trust

 


The 19th CENTURY ANATOMY MUSEUM
with Verity Darke

Thursday 28th September 2017
Doors open at 6:30 pm, Talk commences at 7:00 pm and ends at 8:00 pm

What is a giant doing in the Royal College of Surgeon's Hunterian Museum? Why were the Victorians worried that anatomy museums were too sexy? And how can we tour museums that no longer exist or have changed beyond recognition? Nineteenth-century anatomical museums and the bodies they displayed were embroiled in controversies from body-snatching to quakery, motiviating a need to differentiate the bodies on show in museums from those in freak shows and dubious commercial enterprises.

Focusing on the Hunterian, La Specola and Kahn's Anatomy Museum, Verity Darke discusses how these museums were composed not just of the arrangement and preservation of specimens, but with a vast array of media produced to inform, advertise and titilate the Victorian visitor.

Verity Darke
Verity Darke works with the Cole Library of Early Medicine and Anatomy at the University of Reading, considering anatomy and the popular imagination in nineteenth-century scientific, medical and literary texts. She is also the engagement fellow for the Linnean Society of London, and associate editor of the Wilkie Collins Journal. In her spare time, she loves a bit of true crime and a good taxidermy mole.

Tickets £15 including a glass of prosecco. Please click here to buy.

 

Carlyles house
thomas carlyle's house national trust london