Victorian and 20th-Century Medical Men

Many of the collections where I do research were owned by single collectors--men that generally had a background in medicine that blossomed into an obsession with medical objects and their histories. These include Sir Henry Wellcome (Wellcome Collection, London), Josiah C. Trent (Trent Collection, Duke University), Howard Dittrick (Dittrick Museum), Arno B. Luckhardt, LeRoy Crummer, and various people that connected them: the booksellers Henry and Ida Schuman, physician Harvey Cushing, etc. etc.

Howard Dittrick, whose museum has three manikins, was originally awed by Henry Wellcome's Collection--which had dozens of ivory manikins bought before his death in 1936--and in an obituary he wrote for Josiah Trent he makes sure to mention that "[Trent] was particularly proud of a group of 15 ivory manikins of rare beauty.*

*Bulletin of the History of Medicine23 (Jan 1, 1949): 95.