64 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
FOUNDATIONSBY SUKANYA CHARUCHANDRAL
egend has it that Russian czar Peter
the Great once kissed the forehead
of an embalmed child, mistaking it
for a slumbering baby. That lifelike infant
was one of the many treasures in Frederik
Ruysch’s cabinet of curiosities. Ruysch, a
Dutch anatomist and botanist, was famous
for his tableaux: aesthetic amalgamations
of plant, animal, and human parts that
reminded viewers of the ephemerality of life.
After his father’s death in 1654,
16-year-old Ruysch was apprenticed to
an apothecary to help support his family.
After gaining his license, he began study-
ing medicine at the University of Leiden,
where he dabbled in the preparation of
anatomical specimens.
In 1666, he moved to Amsterdam and
became an anatomy instructor for the city’s
surgeons’ guild. He also taught obstetrics
and midwifery. In 1679, he was named
“doctor to the court of justice” for the city,
a role that included examining the corpses
of executed criminals. Through these
appointments, Ruysch gained access to the
specimens that would form his collection.
Ruysch honed his preservation tech-
niques over the years, desiccating and
varnishing some specimens, and inject-
ing others with fish gelatin and red wax.
He was among the foremost practitioners
of arterial embalming, and developed an
injectable solution that reached the tiniest
blood vessels, imparting a lifelike quality
to preserved fetuses and children.
Ruysch housed his collection in five
rooms of his Amsterdam home, often mix-
ing animal, human, and plant parts within
a single display. Delicate lace crafted by
Ruysch’s daughter Rachel, a still-life artist,
adorned the fetuses, who sometimes held
human organs in their little palms. His
most famous works were tableaux of fetal
skeletons, urinary stones, and blood vessels
decorated with pearls and feathers. Some
of these arrangements were accompanied
by Latin sayings that reflected on the tran-
sient nature of an individual’s existence. Inone display, a fetal skeleton mourned life’s
brevity with a “handkerchief ” made from a
human membrane.
“The idea of presenting a spectacle that
was pleasing to the eye was very important
to him,” says Gijsbert van de Roemer, an
expert on Ruysch and professor of cultural
studies at the University of Amsterdam.
Unlike modern-day viewers who might
be shocked, visitors to Ruysch’s museum
marveled at his creations. “We have no
sources of people who s ay, ‘Well, this is a
bit strange, what this man is doing,’” says
Roemer. Any negative comments came
mainly from other anatomists who likely
envied Ruysch’s skill, he adds.
In addition to creating art with his col-
lections, Ruysch wrote several illustratedcatalogs of them, recording for the first
time the existence of valves in the lymph
system and of various medical condi-
tions including intracranial teratoma, in
which a differentiated tissue mass grows
uncontrollably within the brain.
Peter the Great wandered the rooms
of Ruysch’s collections for days. In
1717, he purchased the entire collec-
tion and had it shipped to the Kunstka-
mera museum in St. Petersburg. While
Ruysch’s tableaux have been lost, many
of his vials and jars of preserved body
parts were not. Of more than 2,000
specimens, 916 remain at the Kunstka-
mera, where a group of Dutch and Rus-
sian researchers and curators continue
to study them.gDeathly Displays, circa 1662–1731
US NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINEA MACABRE SPECTACLE: Frederik Ruysch’s arrangements often melded together animal, plant, and
human specimens. He strove for artistry in his anatomical displays with ornamental accents such as lace
and pearls. This tableau was crafted with fetal skeletons, blood vessels, and gall, bladder, and kidney stones.