A Picture of Health: How museums shape the story of medicine in New Zealand

Abstract

One of the most universal aspects of human beings is our common consciousness of health. Most people likely carry a story of how health and medicine has coloured a portion of their life, be it for better or worse. This thesis examines the adaptive medical story throughout a range of New Zealand collections, asking how the format of each category shapes the narrative on display. The sample of collections presented here are representative of a greater number of collections, despite a widespread lack of awareness that these museums exist. The patterns of similarity that have emerged from this discussion may also be extrapolated toward the question of whether New Zealand’s medical museums will continue to exist. The idiosyncrasies of both collection and curator within this field span quite the spectrum, but are categorised here beginning with an origin of medical collecting: university museums. The second category might be the least known of New Zealand’s medical collections, and without doubt the most diverse. Regional medical collections have been termed here to encompass the small museums that are hidden in hospital corridors, or open only on every second Sunday. New Zealand’s large-scale institutions are the final home of the health-relatedin this survey. Catering to the country’s greater publics, encyclopaedic and scientific institutions are shown to have picked up on mainstream interest in medical topics. The public perception of health that has been analysed here sees a movement away from reliance on the nature of the object, and more towards a biographical understanding of the material history of medicine. The categories of medical museum within this discussion map a loosely ascending shift from private to public, and ask how much access an audience has to both the tangible and intangible story of medicine.