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Some medical curiosities [1]

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Date: 2023-02-18  

Regarding the origins of cabinets of curiosities, Joan Lester, in an article in The Indian Historian, writes:

“In the eighteenth century, the well traveled gentleman placed in his home a cabinet, a piece of furniture, in which he displayed those curios that he had collected on his journies. They included anything that caught his fancy, either man-made or from the natural world. They were chance assemblages of objects arranged according to the whim of the owner.”

One of the displays in Historical Museum at Fort Missoula, in Missoula, Montana, featured “cabinets of curiosities” in which wealthy gentlemen and others displays the natural, ethnic, and historical oddities which they had collected. According to the display at the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula:

“Early museums focused on collecting and displaying items, but not necessarily interpreting them. Many also had a strange interest in collecting what others wouldn’t. Some of the earliest collections of the weird and strange were called cabinets of curiosities or wunderkammers. The term cabinet originally described an entire room rather than a piece of furniture.”

One of the cabinetd features various medical-related artifacts.

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