| Administrative history | Sir William Blizard, a founder of the Medical College is known to have maintained a museum collection at the Medical School as surgical specimens for the education of his pupils, but these specimens were subsequently placed at the Royal College of Surgeons of London and no permanent collection was assembled until 1853 when Sir Andrew Clarke (1826 - 1893) became Curator of the Museum. The new Medical School building in Turner Street, opened in 1854, included a museum and the collection developed under the curatorship of Henry Gawen Sutton (c. 1836 - 1891) and Sir Jonathan Hutchinson (1828 - 1913). During the 1880's the museum had both a pathological and an anatomical curator and was managed by a Library and Museum Committee (see MC/A/4 for records 1880 - 1920).
The museum's cataloguing scheme, first published in 1890, was revised by Sir Arthur Keith in 1902 and again by Hubert M. Turnbull in 1926. Dr Donald Hunter, curator 1933 - 1963, wrote much of the present [2004] catalogue and developed the museum's occupational disease section. A forensic medicine collection was likewise developed and augmented in the 1990s by specimens previously kept by the College's Forensic Medicine Department. In the 1960s and 1970s, a curatorial team led by Mr Clive Butler and including Professors Israel Doniach and Duncan Vere reviewed the collection, focusing its collection policy and creating new sections: general pathology, surgical pathology, central nervous system and cardio vascular. Anatomical specimens were transferred to the medical College Department of Anatomy. Dr David Hughes, curator until 1999 added collections of specimens selected from the pathology museums at the Royal Army Medical Corps, the Royal Naval Hospital Haslar and King's College Hospital.
Surgical instruments and medical equipment collected by the Pathology Museum are listed separately in the INV sequence (INV. 700 - ) |