Dr Kahn's Museum: obscene anatomy in Victorian London

Abstract

Dr Joseph Kahn's Anatomical and Pathological Museum was the 19th century's best-known and most visited public museum of anatomy. Established in England in 1851, at the height of popular interest in anatomy, Kahn's museum was intended to show the ‘wondrous’ structure of the body and to warn of the harmful consequences to health of abuses that ‘distort or defile’ its ‘beautiful structure’. Its subsequent decline into a front for the sale of quack remedies for venereal disease damaged the reputation of anatomy museums. After 22 years, and several bizarre legal cases, opposition from self-appointed representatives of the medical profession and anti-vice campaigners forced it to close. The successful prosecution of Kahn's museum under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 branded all public display of anatomical specimens as potentially obscene. Thereafter, anatomical education was restricted to medical professionals and public anatomy survived only in sideshows. The public anatomical museum has remained, for increasingly outdated reasons, a lost opportunity.