London Blog

Lost Museums: Nature and Medicine on Show

Nature Network’s Schemes and Memes blog recently ran a series on scientific museums, culminating in an outstanding world map of such institutions. What you won’t find on that chart are the many defunct, moribund and vanished museums. In the 18th and early19th Century, the learned gentlemen was hardly worth his bristles if he didn’t accrete his own collection of scientific and anatomical curiosities. At the heart of a worldwide empire of exotic and little-explored territories, London was the epicentre of such collections.

A new exhibition at the Hunterian Museum charts the rise and dispersal of several ‘lost’ museums. We learn of William Bullock’s Egyptian Hall on Piccadilly, which contained some 32,000 items, including natural specimens from Captain Cook’s South Sea voyages; John Heaviside’s Museum, stocked to the brim with anatomical preparations; the remarkable collection of Sir Hans Sloane, whose acquisitions contributed to the foundation of both the British Museum and the Natural History Museum. Even the Hunterian’s own collection is largely lost, thanks to enemy action in the Second World War. A direct hit destroyed two-thirds of the collection, including the skeleton of London’s most famous elephant.

The exhibition is rather small, but packs in many little-known tales from London’s museum history with a handful of items from the lost collections. Most poignant is the series of black and white photographs showing the fabulous extent of the Hunterian collection before it was reduced to smoking bone.

The BBC, as usual, have a slide show of exhibits.

A series of events accompanies the exhibition, including a talk by Philip Davies of English Heritage on lost London and (inevitably) a quiz hosted by me.

Lost Museums can be found at the Hunterian Museum, within the Royal College of Surgeons, on the South side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Entrance is free.

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