bavarikon4UTreasures from the Collections of the Deutsches Medizinhistorisches Museum
When the historian and physician Heinz Goerke (1917–2014) presented the idea of founding a medical-historical museum to the city administration of Ingolstadt, there were no collections yet. "Our most important object", it was said at the time, "is the building itself, the Old Anatomy". Due to the rich contacts of the founding director Goerke, to the great commitment of the following directors and to the substantial contribution of the "Gesellschaft der Freunde und Förderer des Deutschen Medizinhistorischen Museums Ingolstadt e.v." (Society of Friends and Sponsors of the German Medical History Museum Ingolstadt) it became subsequently possible to build up an extensive and high-quality collection.
Of particular importance was the acquisition of high-calibre objects from private collectors, the themes of which are still reflected in some of the museum’s focal departments: ophthalmological (eye medicine) diagnostics (collection Dr. Thilo von Haugwitz), ear, nose and throat medicine (collection Prof. Dr. Harald Feldmann), clinical chemistry and print graphics. In addition, the collection was enriched by specific purchases from the art trade, containing outstanding individual items, such as an Etruscan terracotta torso with a window on to the viscera, an orthopaedic children’s corset (seventeenth century), a plague doctor’s mask (around 1700) or a tableau with ophthalmic illnesses depicted on glass from 1834. Donated objects from dissolved doctors’ surgeries or physicians’ households continuously expand the collection by the medical material culture of the twentieth century.
This collection is a stock of the Deutsches Medizinhistorisches Museum (German Medical History Museum).