The specimen hall
Hundreds of preparations behind glass.
dreizung — Public domain · Flocci Nivis — CC BY 4.0 · Anagoria — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Anagoria — CC BY-SA 4.0
The Museum of Medical History at the Charité hospital is built on a collection assembled by Rudolf Virchow, one of the founders of modern pathology, in the late nineteenth century. Virchow gathered thousands of diseased specimens for a teaching purpose: so that students would see illness in the tissue itself rather than in description. Its central specimen hall displays some seven hundred and fifty anatomical preparations preserved in fluid behind glass — organs, foetuses and bones showing diseases and congenital malformations. This is not an easy visit, and the museum says so plainly, posting a warning at the entrance and barring under-sixteens from parts of it. But the museum does not stop at display: a substantial section addresses medical ethics and the history of medicine's misuse, including the role of German doctors in forced sterilisation and medical killing under the Nazis — a direct confrontation with a past many medical museums avoid. The historic nineteenth-century hospital building is itself part of the experience.
Hundreds of preparations behind glass.
A direct confrontation with medicine's misuse.
Charitéplatz 1, 10117 Berlin
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