On 5th February 2013, Mark and I, along with Pat Harkin (Associate Director of Student Support in the School of Medicine, University of Leeds), attended a three-day course at the Hunterian Museum, Royal Collections of Surgeons, London to learn how to preserve and care for anatomical and pathological wet specimens. The University of Leeds currently holds approximately 1,000 human pathological wet specimens, largely dating from the 1920s and 1930s, as well as several hundred anatomical specimens and approximately 500 wet zoological specimens. Unfortunately, these collections, once vital to University teaching, are now in need of much care and attention. Yet, without the time, resources or expertise to conduct the necessary conservation work, these collections continue to deteriorate. The technical and scientific expertise required to care for such specimens are dwindling on a frightening scale across the world as collections are replaced with other teaching tools and as the number of specialist curators is decreasing. The opportunity to spend three days at the Hunterian to learn from experienced conservators at the Museum’s Conservation Unit, a centre of excellence for preserving natural specimens with one of the world’s most significant collection, was therefore too good to miss.
The course itself focused on the maintenance of collections within glass jars. We found it incredibly interesting to learn that there is no standardised way of doing this because there is no perfect single preservative, sealant or container for preservation. Specimens deteriorate and do so for any number of reasons. However, we were also reminded of the key rule of conservation of any specimen or object: follow the methods and materials originally used to make/prepare the specimen as best as possible, which is very difficult to do because all jars appear at first glance to look the same and few historical specimens have accompanying records.
Interestingly, many specimens prepared by John Hunter in the eighteenth century were the most stable and best preserved undoubtedly due to his skill in preparation. He used glass jars, which he covered with pigs’ bladders and layers of tin and lead as a sealant. This type of sealant was later replaced with a substance called ‘pitch’, consisting of asphalt and gutta-percha, while glass remains a common material for jars, alongside newer materials such as acrylic.
The course was incredibly useful and the new knowledge and skills we now possess will be invaluable in developing a plan for Leeds’ wet specimen collection. We hope to procure funding to allow us to purchase the necessary preservation equipment but also to enable us to develop our own conservation training programme for volunteers of the Museum of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. The benefit of such collections for medicine is clear: specimens are a greater aid to understanding the form of the body than any other type of source. Even with technology capable of producing high quality three dimensional images, there is no substitute for ‘the real thing’. So, while public audiences often find such specimens fascinatingly macabre, medical students take the knowledge acquired from their study and apply it to their everyday and future practice. Collections like this then make a considerable contribution to medical science today and it is therefore vital that they are preserved for future generations. With suitable care and attention, the collection at Leeds might prove to be as useful to medical students as the one at Hunterian Museum.