Museum Boerhaave

Museum Boerhaave (Leiden, Netherlands)

From Atlas Obscura:
“The museum, named for Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738), a Dutch physician and botanist, displays over four hundred years of advances in knowledge in a building that dates back to the 1500s. Originally the St. Caecilia nunnery, then a “plague hospital and madhouse,” the historic building was converted to a university hospital in 1653. In 1720, Herman Boerhaave gave a famous series of lectures known as the “sickbed lessons,” marking the beginning of clinical teaching and of the academic hospital in its modern form. In 1991, the St. Caecilia nunnery took its current form as a museum, where displays of human pathology bring to mind a different sort of “life after death” – that of the medical specimen.

“The museum also contains a wonderful collection of antique scientific instruments, natural history displays, and an old operating theater.”

There’s a lovely collection of photos at the Morbid Curiosity Flick page.

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About Comtesse DeSpair

The Comtesse DeSpair sits in sullen silence in The Castle DeSpair, obsessively reflecting upon the horrible void in which we exist. In her spare time (of which she has nothing but), she collects morbid trinkets and reads voraciously about the history of torture. She stores her trinkets in The Asylum Eclectica (http://asylumeclectica.com/). The Comtesse is hideously disfigured and thickly veiled at all hours. Once, an unfortunate servant caught a glimpse beneath the veil and was driven to madness. The Comtesse loves thunderstorms, darkness, and solitude.

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