Doorway to the Anatomical Museum, Old Medical School, University of Edinburgh. The Museum is open about one day a month to visitors who are not medical students. I’m excited to finally discover it today!

Anatomy Lecture Hall, view from near the door, Old Medical School, University of Edinburgh

Anatomy Lecture Hall, view from above, Old Medical School, University of Edinburgh

Downstairs foyer of the Anatomical Museum, Old Medical School, University of Edinburgh. It’s full of interesting skeletons, plaster casts, art, and so on, in a lovely vaulted chamber below the the main museum hall.

View in foyer of the Anatomical Museum, Old Medical School, University of Edinburgh

A collection of life masks from men and women of the world, Anatomical Museum collection, Old Medical School, University of Edinburgh

A striking portrait head of Chief Bokani in the Anatomical Museum collection, Old Medical School, University of Edinburgh

Detail of an illustration repoduced from De Humani Corporis… by Andreas Vesalius, 1543, in the hallway to the main display hall. Anatomical Museum collection, Old Medical School, University of Edinburgh

Image of Benjamin Rush hung in the stairwell to the main display hall, Anatomical Museum collection, Old Medical School. Rush attended the University of Edinburgh from 1766 to 1768.

Anatomical Museum, Old Medical School University of Edinburgh, photo credit Scots Magazine. Photography is not allowed without prior arrangement, since there are human specimens and pieces from private collections that do not have permissions granted for general photography scattered among the collection. Among the many, many fascinating objects here, there is a large phrenology display, a discipline now considered pseudoscience but once a cutting edge field of research. In this display, I gaze upon the faces, through their life / death masks, of: Robert Owen, John James Audubon, composers Ernst von Weber and Liszt, Robert the Bruce (skull cast), Sir Walter Scott, Johnathan Swift, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, Samuel Johnson, William Pitt, Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon Bonaparte, Jean-Paul Marat, William Herschel, Voltaire, John Ross, George Combe, George Washington, and many others.

I was naughty only once, and snuck a picture of the life mask of George Combe. Frederick Douglass was a fan of George Combe and wrote glowingly of their meeting. This episode is particularly poignant because phrenology would come to be used to reveal the supposed inferiority of black, Semitic, and other peoples. Evidently, there was no such association to Douglass in 1846. He would have been confident, I think, that Combe’s research would align with what Douglass knew to be true: the rationality and set of capabilities that all humans share.