Medical History Museum
|
Through its artefacts and documents, the Museum tells the history of the Melbourne Medical School, its clinical hospitals, students and teachers. Since 1994 with the long-term loan of the Australian Medical Association collection, the Museum’s 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 generous assistance of the Wellcome Institute. The Medical History Museum is open to members of the public. It also functions as a tool for the University’s teaching and research. Its program of temporary exhibitions covers a broad range of medical subjects. The current exhibition is The Physick Gardener: Aspects of the Apothecary's World from the Collections of the University of Melbourne. The Medical History Museum is one of the 32 cultural collections of the University of Melbourne. 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 10am and 4pm. Some aspects 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. |
Location: Level 2, Brownless Biomedical Library |
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.