Blood. A Medical History Museum exhibition

The Medical History Museum’s current exhibition Blood showcases items from the Museum’s collection alongside artworks, rare books and teaching models from seven other University of Melbourne collections and some private lenders.

The exhibition illustrates strengths of the Medical History Museum’s collection, particularly items relating to the history of blood transfusion and the recording of blood pressure.

A number of these items are from the collection of the Australian Medical Association, recently donated to the museum. Sir Macfarlane Burnet’s microscope and that acquired by the University for Professor GB Halford upon the establishment of the Medical School in 1862 are also significant inclusions.

Medical practices such as blood-letting, cupping and the application of leeches are represented, with a historic collection of leeches on display.

Seventeenth-century advances in western European knowledge of the circulation of blood, exemplified by Englishman William Harvey, are encompassed by a copy of Harvey’s book, and engravings (including the man himself demonstrating to Charles I his theory of the circulation system).

Other medical texts of the period include volumes by Matthew Baillie and William Cowper. Historical artworks by William Hogarth, Hieronymus Wierix and Charles Meryon are seen alongside contemporary Australian images by Scott Redford and Greg Pryor, and Polish vampire film posters, from the collection of the Ian Potter Museum of Art. They are displayed with a splendid Chinese porcelain vase (C 1750) whose intense glaze is the colour of a glossy red ox blood or sang de boeuf.

Teaching models range from botanical models of the horse chestnut and willow bark (made in Berlin c.1900), to a late 19th-century papier-mâché model of the heart.

Wooden boards announcing the location of the daily dissection demonstration at the Alfred and St Vincent’s hospitals are an evocative link to medical teaching at the University. These and many other treasures from the Tiegs Zoology Museum, the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and the Medical History Museum have been combined to create an exhibition on a universal subject which crosses cultural, religious and medical boundaries.

This exhibition is free and open to the public from 1st June to 9th December 2011