Artifacts of the neurosciences: A resource guide to museums and collections

ABSTRACT

Medical museums and collections care for important artifacts relating to the history of the neurosciences across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. This essay highlights the collections and galleries of greatest interest and worth a visit. It also provides a list of online directories of medical museums and bibliography of related publications.     

Frank Clifford Rose Memorial Lecture: The tale of three trephines: Surgeons and their surgical-instrument makers in Britain,France, and America in the nineteenth century

ABSTRACT

Trephines and trepanning date to ancient times, but a “modern” form of instruments was codified by the seventeenth century. This did not preclude efforts to “improve” the trephine in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Surgeons and instrument makers in Britain (Jardine and Savigny), France (Thomson and Charrière), and America (Galt and Otto & Reynders) endeavored to make the trephine safer and more precise. In exploring their interactions, this presentation shows the evolving role of the instrument makers not only as fabricators of tools, but as creative design collaborators of surgeons and physicians.