Medical History Museum
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Through its artefacts and documents the museum tells the history of the medical school—its clinical hospitals, students and teachers—and since 1994 with the acquisition of the Australian Medical Association collection, its scope has broadened to cover the history of the profession in Victoria. On permanent display in the museum is a fully equipped nineteenth-century Savory and Moore Pharmacy, shipped from London and installed in 1971 with the further generous assistance of the Wellcome Institute. Predominantly a teaching and research collection, the Medical History Museum is also open to members of the public interested in medical history, its artefacts and the stories they can tell. It has hosted several exhibitions over the past few years, including Treating the Past: How Medical Melbourne Came of Age (download an essay about this exhibition [pdf:4.5MB] by the curator Ann Brothers). The museum is currently exhibiting Being Patient: Care and Convalescence, 1850–1950'. ToursGuided museum tours are provided for both student groups and for interested members of the wider community. These are conducted from Monday to Friday and can be arranged by appointments made well in advance. The museum is also open to the general public on week days between 9am and 5pm. Some parts of the collection are on permanent display, such as the historic microscope and microtime collections, early boxed instrument sets, and the Savory and Moore Pharmacy. Other items from the collection appear in temporary exhibitions, two of which are mounted each year in the museum space. |
Location: Level 2, Brownless Biomedical Library
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History of the Medical History Museum
The Medical History Museum and its collection were formally established in 1967 in conjunction with the Department of Medical History, under the professorship of Kenneth Russell. The museum itself was opened with generous funding from the Wellcome Institute (now Wellcome Trust), London, in support of study and research in medical history. The collection at this time consisted of a small but well-selected range of medical artefacts that Professor Russell had gradually acquired over time, with a view to opening a museum. This was in keeping with the long-standing tradition of leading medical schools across the world to develop their historical resources as a study collection.
Since its opening in 1967, the museum's collection has grown substantially through the donation of documents, photographs, instruments, and records from medical graduates, families and institutions in and around Melbourne. Originally the collection mainly reflected the teaching of medicine at the University of Melbourne and its clinical schools, and the achievements of its graduates from the 1860s to the present day. However, the donation in 1971 of the nineteenth-century Savory and Moore Pharmacy, through a further grant from the Wellcome Trust, and the 1994 acquisition of the Australian Medical Association collection, has seen the scope of the museum broadened to reflect the history of medical practice in Victoria, and more generally the development of Western medicine.