The Musee Dupuytren is the legacy of Baron Guillaume Dupuytren (1777-1835), one of France's most legendary surgeons (a full biography of the Baron can be found here). Dupuytren wanted to create a school of pathological anatomy but his funds were insufficient, so a senior faculty member persuaded him to found a museum of pathological anatomy instead. In 1835 the first Dupuytren museum was set up in an old convent at Cordeliers. From the start, the museum had problems with funding, and in 1937, over a hundred years after its creation, the museum was dismantled and the collection put in storage. Yet in 1967, the museum was resurrected, installed in the building at the School of Medicine where it can be found today.
The museum is well-hidden and not marked by any obvious signs. After much searching (and wandering into the wrong building, and bothering some nice English-speaking French people in their office with my frantic ramblings about a museum none of them had ever heard of), I stumbled across a big door with a doorbell. I rang. Within moments I was inside, my heart pounding, my eyes scanning the ceiling-high stacks of records and books. Wax anatomic models, culled from the collection for whatever reason, were stacked along the walls, collecting dust. A large glass case held a badly deformed skeleton, articulated in a sleeping pose. The woman who answered the door led me to a second door, and behind this lay the museum proper.
Before me stood rows and rows of glass shelves, each packed with dozens of jars of formaldehyde. The perimeter of the room was lined with more specimens, wax models and skeletons and still more formaldehyde.
Right: The skeleton of Marco Cazotte ("Petit-Pepin", 1757-1801), left, and a wax model of Cazotte at the time of his death. Cazotte was born with phocomelia in all four limbs - his hands and feet grew directly from his hips and shoulders. The hands of his skeleton have long since gone missing. "Pepin" made his living as a freak long before the freak show existed, exhibiting himself at fairs as a juggler. He spoke and wrote several languages and "performed all the necessary actions, exhibited skilfullnesss in all his movements, and was credited with the ability of coitus" (Gould & Pyle, p. 221).
Logistics: The Musee Dupuytren is located at the Cordeliers, 15-21 rue de l'Ecole de Medecine, 75006, Paris. Telephone 01 42 34 68 60. Admission is free to students and children under 12; general admission is 6 euro. Hours are from Monday-Thursday, 10am-12pm and 2pm-6pm, and Friday 10am-11:15am with afternoon hours TBA. Photos are allowed only with permission, and group visits are restricted to 20 persons at a time. More information can be found at Les Cordeliers.
1.9.06 - Museum national d'Histoire naturelle at Le Jardin des Plantes, Paris
The museum is hard to locate in any guidebooks because the vast museum complex - which includes buildings dedicated to paleontology, gemology, and evolution - is located within the larger Jardin des Plantes. The Jardin was founded in 1626 to grow medicinal plants for King Louis XIII and was later opened to the public in 1640. The numerous museum structures were subsequently added over the next three centuries. The ground floor of the paleontology museum, which is dedicated to comparative anatomy, is where Ritta and Christina are supposed to be - but aren't.
The Museum of Comparative Anatomy is a long rectangular room filled to the ceiling with the skeletal remains of every animal known to man at the time of the museum's construction. Down the center of the room are rows of large animals - giraffes, hippos, whales - while the glass cases along the walls house the more delicate creatures such as monkeys and shrews. At the far end is a small case devoted to medical anomalies and containing conjoined lambs and a chick with two faces. Of particular interest is a pair of cephalopagus and cyclopic conjoined twin puppies, demonstrating the relationship between secondary fusion of embryos and the potential for midline defects.
I do not know where Ritta and Christina are today. I am awaiting a reply from a museum official, after two museum employees gave me conflicting stories about the skeleton's whereabouts. Whatever the case, don't go looking for the Sassari Twins at the Natural History Museum - you will not find them. However, the collection at the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy is absolutely stunning and well worth the visit. Also of interest in the Natural History complex are the palentology museum (upstairs from Comparative Anatomy) and the gem & mineral museum (in a separate building).
Logistics: The official home page of the Museum national d'Histoire naturelle can be found here. The entrance to the Museum of Comparative Anatomy is located at the corner of Quai Saint-Bernard and Rue Buffon and is directly across from the Gare d'Austerlitz. The museum is open every day of the week but Tuesday, from 10am to 5pm. Admission is 6 euro.
1.13.05 - Museum Vrolik at the Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam
The specimens are laid out in an organized and informative manner, with numbers that correspond to lists on the wall that list their specific malformations. The teratological specimens line the outer walls, while cases of preserved organs and tissues and normal human fetuses stand in the center of the room. Also displayed are numerous skeletons and skulls of people with hydrocephalus (including an adult), rachitis ("rickets") and achondroplasia.
A puzzling specimen is a pair of craniopagus conjoined twins who also appear to share tissue in the umbilical region - making them one of only two or three recorded cases of twins with double union (I believe these are the twins described by Dr. Rowena Spencer in her Conjoined Twins: Developmental Malformations and Clinical Implications, p. 381, "Unusual Twins").
Logisitics: The Vrolik is located at the Academic Medical Center, Meibergdreef 15, 1105 AZ Amsterdam. It is on the outskirts of town. To get to the AMC from Amsterdam proper, take the 54 Metro from Centraal Station to Holendrecht. On your left as you pull up to the station is a very large complex; this is the AMC. Footpaths lead from the Metro station directly to the hospital. The Vrolik is located in Building J0 and a map can be obtained from any of the helpful information desks in the hospital.
The museum is open weekdays from 9:30am-5pm and admission is free. You may see the hours listed in the internet as Tuesday-Wednesday 2-5 pm - these hours are wrong. These are the hours for guided tours only. Guided tours of up to 15 are available by appointment (email: museumvrolik@amc.uva.nl - I wouldn't suggest calling the number that is listed on the UvA website because it is now a private residence and I disturbed some poor woman at home three times trying to reach the museum). Photography is prohibited in the museum.
My interest in the Natural History Museum was piqued by Armand Marie LeRoi's book Mutants in which he discusses the sad fate of Ritta and Christina Parodi, conjoined twins born in Sardinia in 1829. When the twins died of pneumonia at the age of 8 months, their remains came into the possession of Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (left), the father of modern teratology. The skeleton, said LeRoi, is on display at the Natural History Museum.
I had tried to visit the Vrolik, after reading about it in Mutants two years ago, but it was closed. Thus I was none too optimistic about my chances of seeing it this time, but things worked out well. The Vrolik Anatomical Embryology Museum is a secluded room at the Universiteit van Amsterdam's Academic Medical Center (AMC). It is the personal collection of the famed Dutch anatomists Gerardus Vrolik (1755-1859) and his son Willem Vrolik (1801-1863) and became the property of the university in 1869.
Left: Thanatophoric ("death-bringing") dysplasia in a stillborn infant born in Amsterdam around 1847, drawn and described by Willem Vrolik. The skeleton of this child is displayed at the Museum Vrolik. Its skull is so thin that it is transparent. (LeRoi, 2003)