ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Historian of Science and the Silence of Material Sources: The Models of the Paduan Anatomical Theatre as a Case Study

• In Event: After Loss: Ephemeral Histories of Science and Technology 2 - Ephemeral Sites of Technoscience

English Abstract

Material sources can prove silent. Documentation about them is frequently incomplete: they may not appear in historical inventories, and original labels are often lost. Their creation typically involved a multitude of invisible hands who remain absent from written records. This is the case for the twentieth-century models of the anatomy theatre at the University of Padua, inaugurated in 1595. The first, probably dating from the 1920s, is now on display at the Museum of the History of Medicine in Padua. Two other models, held in the collection of the National Museum of Science and Technology Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, were created on the initiative of the Italian National Research Council for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. A further model, now in the Wellcome Collection, was produced in the late 1950s at the request of the medical historian Edgar Ashworth Underwood. Yet why were these models created? While some hypotheses can be advanced, their contexts of production are hard to grasp. Using these models as a case study, this talk seeks to explore the challenges historians face in writing the biographies of (scientific) objects. On the one hand, I will speculate on the meanings that can be drawn from the absence of sources concerning the material culture of science. On the other, I will reflect on the types of sources, though incomplete and scattered, that can be mobilized to address the frequent lack of documentation, to make sense of these objects, and to enrich current historical narratives.

Author

• Elena Rizzi, University of Padua