On Monday I started work at the National Maritime Museum. So far it has been wonderful – everyone is very welcoming and interested in the project, and working in such a historically laden place is absolutely great. This Wednesday was the most exciting day of the week, as I was allowed to spend all day in a storage room with the medicine chests to study them. The first thing that struck me was their size or rather lack thereof. The measurements are in the catalogue, so I already knew the chests were not that big, yet seeing something with your own eyes is of course still an entirely different experience.

These medicine chests upon closer inspection looked like very practical first-aid kits, each containing about twenty to forty different material medica. Then something struck me: before coming to London I had been reading up on eighteenth- and nineteenth century English Navy medicine, and the lists of prescribed contents of ship’s surgeons’ chests I had seen seemed far more extensive than the contents of these chests. So I checked again, and indeed, in 1806 the standard Navy medicine chest contained about 62 different substances.

Does that mean the medicine chests at the NMM are not ship’s surgeons’ chests at all? It is possible, even if they were most likely used on ships. Most of them are simply too small to sustain a substantial ship’s crew with medical care for months or even years, and contain only drugs that can also be found in popular ‘companions to the medicine chest’ from the same  period. Yet it is not so strange that someone boarding a ship, naval, merchant or exploratory, would invest in a personal medicine chest if he could afford it. Even if there was a surgeon aboard, there was a fair chance he would also fall ill and die at some point, and then it was most practical to have your own first-aid kit with you.

Moreover, ship’s surgeons seem to have constantly complained about being underpaid, which may have led them to use the drug supplies otherwise, and some of them were very inexperienced. All the more reason to bring your own stash. Meanwhile, I have already found some exciting leads in the archives on where these chests might be from and how they were used… to be continued!

PS: My initial plan this week was to write about the strange ceramics in huge Erlenmeyer flasks resembling wet anatomical preparations that I saw at the Naturmuseum Winterthur, but as I could not get into touch with the curator to ask who made them and how they were intended. I am still working on it, so maybe in a later blog!

This week, I was in Winterthur, Switzerland. Lina Gafner and Siegfried Bodenmann of Universität Bern kindly invited me to present a paper at a workshop for young researchers sponsored by the Schweizerischen Gesellschaft für die Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften (SGGMN). The workshop was titled Objekte der Wissenschaft, Wissenschaft der Objekte, which roughly translates as Objects of Science, Science of Objects.*

My paper was based on one of my thesis chapters; the one about the bead-decorated preparations of human foetuses in the Leiden anatomical collections. I am not going to elaborate on this specific topic now, as my thesis will hopefully get attention elsewhere once I have defended it. What I want to share with you today is what we discussed at the workshop. It might seem a bit abstract (I know, strange as it is supposed to be about concrete objects) to those not in the field, but I find it so interesting I’ll take the risk of sharing. J

During the workshop, all kinds of objects starred in the papers: the white doctor’s coat, Indonesian keris daggars, seventeenth-century herbal guides, barometers, brain scans, models used in biology classes, even radiation, and of course the Leiden preparations. In the closing discussion, we saw that although we say that we write the history of things, what actually happens is that the materiality of objects is a way to access their meanings (which can change over time) and their reception history. This, to me, confirmed what I have thought for a while now, namely that although objects do have agency –  they can influence what happens in a network of things and people – but that that agency is of a different nature than that of human actors.

Another interesting issue we encountered was what happens with things that have lost their previous meanings, i.e. because they have been taken out of their original context and the new network they are part of does not remember and cannot (or will not) retrieve the original context. For example, the Indonesian keris one participant told us about had all kinds of magical, social and ritual meanings in certain parts of Indonesian society, but are now mere decorative exotic objects in some Western households. Of course, they may gain new meanings there; for the family who brought it with them from vacation it may be a beloved souvenir. But is that really a meaning?

Kant would say that if you appreciate das Ding an sich, without caring where it comes from, who made it, or what purpose it might serve, that is the essential disinterested aesthetic experience. Fair enough, but in the case of objects we historians of science know or suspect to have had a meaning in the past, like instruments and preparations, this seems unsatisfactory: we want to know why the thing was made, how it functioned originally, influenced the people around it throughout time. We feel we have to in order to do these objects justice, and to answer questions regarding their preservation and display in a museum setting.

Next week I’ll write about something more concrete: something peculiar that I saw at the workshop location, the Naturmuseum in Winterthur.

*Here the annoying problem returns that in German and Dutch Wissenschaft/wetenschap can also include the humanities, whereas in English they are more or less excluded by the use of the word ‘science’.

Next week, I am leaving for London again. I’ve spent time in the big smoke before, first as a graduate student in 2006-2007, when I took the London Consortium’s MRes programme. In 2011, I spent three months as a research associate at the  Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL for my PhD. This time, I have won a research intern grant at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. So back to my old stomping grounds – although Greenwich feels very different from Bloomsbury. It’s a town in it’s own right. But enough for the memories now: I am going to the NMM to dig out some treasure troves.

Because that’s what the nine ship’s surgeons’ medicine chests from between 1750 and 1850 kept in the collections are to me. Of a few, we know that they were the possession of famous lieutenants or explorers; of others we know next to nothing. Looking at the beautiful photos on the NMM website, I wonder why they all look so different. Were they made to order, and do the make-up and fittings tell something about the status and preferences of the owner? Or were it navy superiors and expedition sponsors who decided what the chests looked like and contained? And what was in those stoppered bottles? The usual suspects, or materia medica especially chosen for the ailments common to battle or tropical climates? And if the ship’s surgeon found some indigenous cure in a faraway region, did he add it to his chest?

It is questions like these that I am going to try to answer in the five weeks I will spend at the NMM. And I already made a small start, reading up on British navy and colonial medicine in the period. I also checked whether there were any interesting documents relating to the NMM medicine chests in Dutch archives. At the University of Amsterdam Library Special Collections, I found a letter written by William Edward Parry (1790-1855), Arctic explorer, the owner of one of the medicine chests, in 1823, to his friend John Barrow (1764-1848).* Barrow was a statesman and explorer with a lifelong interest in the Arctic, but he also travelled the Cape of Good Hope extensively. You never know if there’s anything relevant to your project in such a document, so of I went.

Parry and Barrow, like many learned men of their time, shared an interest in collecting naturalia, as also shows from the letter in Amsterdam. Parry wrote the letter while recovering from an illness, and mainly discussed news from friends and family. In the P.S. however, he’s talking business again. Here he wrote:

“The key of the [Ferry’s] mineral chest is in my possession. I will send by the first opportunity. I trust the minerals & other specimens will not be plundered before they are described. I have reason to know that they were so on the last occasion, which induces me to mention it now.”

The underlining is in the original, so even though Barrow was a good 25 years his senior, Parry makes it clear he is not one to be messed with. There was nothing about medicine chests in this letter, but it is an indication of the kind of man Parry was – I can’t wait to find out more about him and his medicine chest!

*Call number: UB: HSS-mag.: TOA hs. 128 Ar 1-2