2021 - L'Erma di Bretschneider
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The science and ethics concerning the legacy of human remains and historical collections : the Gordon Museum of Pathology in London
P. 135-149
- I present the case of the Gordon Museum of Pathology in London, one of the first British anatomical ceroplastic artists worked in the nineteenth century, especially focusing on a less explored issue concerning the legacy of human remains as it affects museums of pathology. The chapter meaningfully deals with (a.) the changes ethical norms have undergone in recent decades in storing and exhibiting human remains, revealing a new moral attitude towards the manipulation of ancient skeletons, (b.) the legal approach to the dead as a way to restore individual rights, and (c.) the educational value of collections, and especially the case of wax reproductions. Attention to the history of medical knowledge acquires particular significance nowadays, as both a way to fight back at the surge of anti-vax movements and studying emerging diseases such as Covid-19. [Publisher's text]
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In the same volume
- Foreword
- Notes on contributors
- Scientiae in the history of medicine : an introduction
- The University of Padua Medical School from the origins to the Early Modern Time : a historical overview
- The anatomy theater : towards a performative history
- Sixteenth-century university gardens in a medical and botanical context
- The origin and development of medical museum heritage in Padua
- The science and ethics concerning the legacy of human remains and historical collections : the Gordon Museum of Pathology in London
- Between text and practice : the anatomical injections of Berengario da Carpi
- Sources and resources of court medicine in Mid-Sixteenth Rome : erudition as an epistemological and ethical claim
- The experience of the physician Girolamo Donzellini in the 1575 Venetian plague : between Scientia and heterodoxy
- Pestilence in Renaissance Platonic medicine : from astral causation to pharmacology and treatment
- Elements of Descartes' medical Scientia : books, medical schools, and collaborations
- Testing drugs in Giorgio Baglivi's dissertation on Vesicants
- Tracing Senguerd's footprints : sciences and tarantism at Leiden Universtiy (1667-1715)
- Classifications from an epistemological point of view with particular attention to the classifications of diseases
- List of abstracts