Description:
Exhibits collected by the Duke of Weissenfels provided the basic stock for a larger collection of the Collegium Medico-Chirurgicum in Dresden. This was the first Saxon school of surgery, opening in 1748. It was succeeded by the Provisional Teaching Institute of Medicine and Surgery (1814/15) and the Surgical-Medical Academy (1815 to 1864). These institutions also made use of comprehensive collections in their training of military doctors, surgeons and medical practitioners. Unfortunately, none of these exhibits made it into the possession of the indirect successor institution, the Medical Academy “Carl Gustav Carus”, founded 90 years after the Surgical-Medical Academy closed. However, a physician interested in medical history began acquiring new objects for teaching purposes. Heinrich Fritz, head of the X-ray and Radium Institute of the Dresden-Johannstadt Hospital from 1948, then Professor of Radiology and Radiotherapeutics at the Medical Academy “Carl Gustav Carus” and Director of the Radiology Clinic, collected more than 20 different X-ray tubes, documenting the development of the relatively new discipline. They were on display in a purpose-built cabinet and were used in the training of medical students and medical technical assistants. Nevertheless, there seem to have been no systematic efforts at the new institution to collect material witnesses to medical history, despite the efforts of Heinz Egon Kleine-Natrop, a proven expert and promoter of Dresden’s medical history at the Medical Academy “Carl Gustav Carus”. Kleine-Natrop was the first Director of the Dermatological Clinic and full Professor of Dermatology from 1957. This lack of system when it came to acquiring historical exhibits was perhaps due to the proximity of two important institutions, both of which had been founded before World War I and already owned extensive medical history collections: the Karl Sudhoff Institute for the History of Medicine and the Natural Sciences in Leipzig and the “Deutsches Hygiene-Museum” in Dresden.