Collection: Museum of Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons Glasgow

Collection-level records:

• Collection overview (Cornucopia)

  Hunterian Collection

  In 1799 the government purchased the collection of the surgeon and anatomist John Hunter FRS (1728-1793) and placed it in the care of the Company (later the Royal College) of Surgeons. There were originally over 15,000 specimens of human and animal anatomy and pathology and natural history. Many were lost when the College was bombed in 1941, but over 3,500 specimens remain, covering the most important part of the collection. Many specimens are associated with other significant figures, such as Joseph Banks, who supplied Hunter with many items; King George III and Queen Charlotte, for whom Hunter prepared a selection of specimens for the royal collection at Kew; and Edward Jenner. Also the collection is the skeleton of Charles Byrne, the ‘Irish Giant’. The collection also includes a small number of surgical instruments, personal items and furniture, as well as paintings by William Hodges, George Stubbs and Benjamin West. There are items purchased by Hunter, such as a collection of 200 microscope slides prepared by William Hewson in the 1780s, and Hunter’s published works, surviving manuscripts and casebooks are held in the College Library. The Hunterian Collection is a Designated Collection.

  Subjects

  Anatomy; Surgery; People (medical); Medicine

  College Museum

  The College’s Museum Collection contains about 3,600 specimens and objects acquired after 1799. Many specimens were prepared or collected by the conservators of the museum, such as Richard Owen, John Quekett, William Flower and Arthur Keith. A few items pre-date 1799, including a set of four anatomical tables prepared for the diarist John Evelyn in Padua in 1646. There are a number of specimens from the collections of significant surgeons, scientists and antiquarians, including material acquired from Sir Hans Sloane, Astley Cooper, John Heaviside and William Blizard. Amongst the artefacts in the collection are wax anatomical models prepared by Joseph Towne in the 19th century and corrosion casts made by David Tompsett in the 1950s. The Museum continues to acquire examples of anatomical and pathological preparations that are of historic significance.

  Subjects

  Anatomy; Surgery; People (medical); Medicine

  Fine Art Collection

  The College’s fine art collection includes 681 visual works, of which 487 are portrait paintings, drawings or busts (see separate collection record for more details). Aside from portraits, the collection includes important 18th and early 19th-century animal paintings by artists such as George Stubbs, Jan van Rymsdyk, John William Lewin and Jacques-Laurent Agasse. Other themes represented in the collection are anatomical and pathological drawings and watercolours, including a series by Anna Zinkeisen; paintings and drawings of surgical operations, including paintings by Henry Tonks, Barbara Hepworth and Roy Calne; topographical and architectural views of the College and other medical institutions; and original watercolours by Thomas Rowlandson.

  The College holds about 480 portrait paintings, drawings and busts; and approximately 2,600 portrait prints. The majority show figures associated with surgery, the medical profession or associated with the College as supporters or benefactors. The earliest work in the collection is a version of Hans Holbein the younger’s group portrait of Henry VIII presenting the charter to the Company of Barber Surgeons in 1540: this is an overpainted version of the cartoon made for the finished painting, which is still in the collection of the Barber’s Company. Other early works include a 1620 portrait of the oculist Richard Banister, attributed to Cornelius Jannsen; John Closterman’s portrait of William Cowper (1666-1709) and unsigned portraits of the lithotomists Jacques Baulot (1651-1714) and Thomas Hollier (1609-1690). Among the 18th-century works in the collection are portraits by William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, Martin Shee, George Dance, George Romney, Ozias Humphrey, Robert Homes, Philip Reinagle, William Hodges, John Hamilton Mortimer, David Allan, Robert Edge Pine, Godfrey Kneller, Jonathan Richardson and Thomas Bardwell. From the 19th century the collection includes portraits by Thomas Lawrence, John Jackson, Henry Pickersgill and Henry Jamyn Brooks. 20th-century works include an important series of pastel portraits of soldiers with facial injuries, made by Henry Tonks during the First World War. Other recent works include portraits of the Presidents and Council of the College, by artists including Terence Cuneo, June Mendoza, Boyd and Evans, Keith Breeden and Andrew Festing. Sculpture portraits include Henry Weekes’s statue of John Hunter; Alfred Gilbert’s monument to Edward and Eliza Macloghlin, and busts by Louis Francois Roubiliac, John Flaxman, Francis Chantrey, Peter Tunerelli, Thomas Woolner, George Halse, Thomas Brock, William Behnes and Jacob Epstein. The collection also includes a small number of early daguerreotype portraits, including several by Jabez Hogg (1817-1899). Portraits of surgeons and other medical practitioners.; Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons.

  Subjects

  People (medical); Portraits; Scientific illustrations

  Surgical Instrument Collection

  The first recorded donations of surgical instruments to the College museum took place in 1816, just three years after the opening of the museum. Today the College has an extensive collection of about 7,000 historical surgical and dental instruments and other items of medical equipment. About 3,200 items are on loan to the Science Museum. There are instrument sets dating back to the 17th century, as well as a large number of instruments from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The collection contains instruments used, modified or donated by a number of famous surgeons including Benjamin Brodie, William Fergusson and William Macewen. Amongst the most important are the instruments and scientific apparatus of Joseph Lister (1827-1912). They include some of Lister’s prototype carbolic sprays and samples of the catgut ligatures which he developed, as well as his microscope and glass vessels used in his experiments on fermentation. This is collection is not actively being developed though appropriate material will be acquired when offered; the Museum has an agreement with the Science Museum and does not collect modern surgical instruments.

  Subjects

  Surgery; People (medical); Medicine; Science and technology

  Odontological Collection

  Over 10,000 specimens relating to human and comparative dental anatomy and pathology, including about 3,500 preparations of human material, such as jaws, casts and 261 skulls, 200 dentures and 300 dental instruments. It is particularly famous for its unique collection of specimens illustrating various aspects of non-human dental pathology, which is made up of 2,000 animal skulls and is unrivalled anywhere in the world. In addition, it contains 4,000 normal animal skulls. The collection contains important anatomical preparations donated by some of the founding figures of British dentistry in the mid-19th century, as well as examples of pathological conditions, such as phossy jaw, a bone necrosis common among Victorian match-makers. It is rich in material of historical importance, including Sir John Tomes’ collection of human jaws and skulls of known sex and age at death and his pathological specimens; Sir Charles Tomes’ collection of 1,800 microscope slides illustrating dental development in many species. Amongst many other items of interest are teeth retrieved from the battlefield of Waterloo; a necklace of human teeth brought from the Congo by the explorer Henry Morton Stanley; and a denture worn by Sir Winston Churchill. The most notable human material acquired since the Second World War is an extensive collection of skulls from Breedon-on-the Hill, an Anglo-Saxon cemetery in Leicestershire. They have been used to establish criteria for the ageing of human remains on the basis of tooth wear.

  Subjects

  Dentistry; Anatomy; Surgery; People (medical)

  Microscope Slide Collection

  The collection comprises about 30,000 slides. As well as the slides prepared by the anatomist William Hewson which are in the Hunterian Collection, there are extensive series of preparations from the early 19th century including approximately 11,000 slides prepared by John Quekett in the 1830s and ’40s. The collection also includes a collection of primate skeletal and wet-tissue specimens collected by William Charles Osman-Hill and numerous slides made from Hunterian and later specimens which are no longer extant This is a closed collection; further material of this kind is not being collected.

  Subjects

  Anatomy; Surgery; People (medical)

  Quekett Collection

  Approximately 11,000 microscope slides collected or prepared in the 1840s and ’50s by John Thomas Quekett.

  Subjects

  Anatomy; Surgery; People (medical)Science and technology

  Ancient Egyptian Collection

  The museum holds approximately 27 ancient Egyptian objects. Classes of objects represented in the collection include: amulets; canopic jars; faience figures; metal figures; human remains (including mummies); shabtis; textiles/leather. Of special interest is an artificially deformed skull, donated by the Egyptologist Douglas Derry, 1923. It is thought to have been excavated in a Coptic cemetery near El Fashn and to date from about the 5th century AD. The museum also possesses a cast of a circumcision scene from the Tomb of Ankhmahor, Saqqarah; a series of eight watercolour sketches of Egyptian mummies by Willian Home Clift; letters relating to material in, or formerly part of, the collections of the Royal College of Surgeons. Objects are known to have come from the following locations in Egypt (with the name of the excavator/sponsor and year of excavation given where possible): El Amrah; Beni Hasan; Deir el-Bahari (Reisner); El Fashn; Thebes.

  Subjects

  Antiquities; Ancient civilizations; Antiquity; Archaeological sites; Archaeological objects; Egyptology; Archaeological excavations

  Source: Cornucopia

  Date: Not known, but before 2015

  Licence: CC BY-NC