Book Review: Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads
When I first saw the book Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums by Stephen T. Asma, the title immediately caught my attention, and I knew that I definitely had to read this book. The book definitely drew a lot of odd looks from my colleagues while I was reading it.
"My hope is that, after reading this book, museum-goers will not be able to look at exhibits the same way again. Ideally, this book itself should be a decoder device that readers can draw upon for future museum visits," writes Asma in his Introduction. During the course of the book, Asma takes us on tours of London's Natural History Museum in South Kensington, the Hunterian Museum in London's Lincoln Inn's Fields, the Museum national d'histoire naturelle-Grande Galerie de l'evolution in Paris, the Galerie d'anatomie comparee in Paris, the Musee de l'homme in Paris, the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and the Field Museum in Chicago, as well as brief descriptions of a few other very small museums.
Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads is definitely not a book for the squeamish. In his first chapter, "Flesh-Eating Beetles and the Secret Art of Taxidermy," Asma introduces us to some of the interesting items found in the curiosity cabinet of Russian Czar Peter the Great. The "pickled heads" portion of his title comes from the preserved heads of Peter the Great's lover Mary Hamilton and his wife Catherine's lover William Mons. Peter had them both beheaded and placed in Catherine's chambers, "Maybe he was thinking that he and Catherine could put their past infidelities behind them and start fresh," muses Asma. Peter's curiosity cabinet also contained the body of a boy named Foma who suffered from an abnormality known as "lobster claw." It was these heads and the body of Foma that first got Asma interested in studying the development of modern natural history museums from these curiosity cabinets, as he wondered, "how do you stuff a human?"
In Chapter One, Asma explores the techniques of taxidermy and how these skills were originally used in curiosity cabinets and artistic displays, and how taxidermy has come to be used in modern natural history museums. He takes the reader backstage in Chicago's Field Museum to see the dermestid beetles that the preparators use to de-flesh recently deceased specimens for study and display in the museum.
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