Anatomical collections can present the historian with a challenging task. Intriguing to some, and abhorrent to others, they are things that require us to address both the scientific work involved in their production and the individual person constituting their vital but ultimately absent centre. These twin challenges run throughout The Fate of Anatomical Collections, a wide-ranging volume of essays that considers the relevance of such collections to broader histories of science, medicine and the body.

The clear strength of this book lies in its drive to uncover the scientific work surrounding anatomical objects, following in the footsteps of Steven Shapin in recovering invisible technicians, and in line with recent movements towards a more practice-oriented approach in the history of science and medicine, such as Stephen Casper and L. Stephen Jacyna's The Neurological Patient in History (2012). The ‘practices’ examined here concern themselves much more with the role of individuals than with the technical work behind anatomical preparations. Throughout, curators are revealed to be prominent figures, from Maude Abbott, the female curator of the McGill Medical Museum chronicled by Cindy Stelmackowich, to Flavio Häner's fascinating account of Skull Number 1-1-2/27 at the University of Basel's Anatomy Museum. In the latter, contemporary understandings of restoration versus destruction are interrogated. The skull, a seventeenth-century artefact, was originally rather beautifully inscribed with information about its background; under a late twentieth-century curator, however, this information was removed as collections were revamped for museum exhibition. The story of this individual object is a pertinent reminder that contemporary motivations for change, sometimes the motivation of a single individual, may have long-lasting effects. Andrew Cunningham's chapter on Richard Owen's changes to John Hunter's collection perfectly articulates the way in which anatomical collections were bound up not only with the people who assembled them, but also with those who modified and maintained them. Owen, working in London in the 1830s, was heavily influenced by Georges Cuvier and came to see Hunter's collection not as an end in itself, but as a supporting element for the broader project of comparative anatomy. In his work with Hunter's collection, Owen reinterpreted it and in the process re-formed conceptions of Hunter himself.

Classification is also addressed in Fenneke Sysling's chapter on physical anthropology collections. Sysling's account of Dutch collecting practices – bound up with the colonizing impulse and overseas trading of the Dutch East India Company – highlights how the classification of human material could be a political act, with ‘scientific’ categorization a means of constructing racial hierarchies. Similarly, Marieke Hendriksen's chapter on beaded babies – preparations of human foetuses adorned with coloured beads, also a primarily Dutch phenomenon – poses some difficult questions with regard to our own relationship with such human remains in the wake of the Human Tissue Act and recent moves towards the repatriation of human material. Hendriksen's chapter makes a strong case for the involvement of humanities scholars in museum debates: although some museums are choosing to dispose of their physical-anthropology collections, we should be mindful of what such materials and their transformations can tell us, rather than viewing them simply as troubling reminders of a colonial past.

The book does not shy away from the fact that these have long been decorative as well as didactic objects, providing entertainment as well as education. Tim Huisman's chapter on the Leiden collections, Anita Guerrini's on charnel houses in Europe and Alfons Zarzoso and José Pardo-Tomás's on the twentieth-century Roca Museum all address the reach of anatomical collections beyond the medical profession. The anatomical museum or theatre could be a private collection akin to the cabinet of curiosities, or an amalgam of prurient spectacle and public education, but also – as Tatjana Buklijas demonstrates – a somewhat revolutionary site. The dissection hall of the University of Vienna was used as a place for radical meetings, and Buklijas's exploration of this space reaffirms the positively transgressive potential of anatomical collections suggested by Hendriksen: of anatomical preparations as (difficult) objects to think with.

The final segment of the book, ‘Museum and collection practices today’, brings the reader into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Samuel J.M.M. Alberti's chapter ‘Anatomical craft’ is a valuable contribution to existing literature on preservation practices. A striking photograph shows Sydney Bartlett, a Royal College of Surgeons technician, fashioning Perspex jars for preparations, his workbench occupied by finished corrosion casts and a preserved arm – a wonderfully evocative image of the hidden work of producing specimens. The volume does not limit itself solely to laboratory- or workshop-based practices; one of the strongest chapters, by Tricia Close-Koenig, investigates the place of paper technologies in anatomical collections, where collections may be understood as both libraries and stock. Indeed, the theme of the anatomical artefact as commercial trade item comes through strongly in several of the chapters.

This final section also addresses head-on the ethical concerns attached to anatomical collections, as the book closes with Rina Knoeff's ‘Ball pool anatomy’ (the title is a reference to a 2004 art installation by Wim T. Schippers, which placed infant skeletons in and around a plastic ball pool). Knoeff's argument – that playing on the simultaneous fascination and concern of modern audiences can raise awareness of the often precarious lives of anatomical collections – brings the book back to where it began (one of the first chapters, Ruth Richardson's ‘Organ music’, offers an overview of the anatomy museum from the fictional perspective of museum skeleton Mrs Paget). That those pieces that most explicitly address the ethical dimension of anatomical collections appear at the beginning and end of the book suggests a continuing historical uneasiness surrounding these artefacts, a desire to impress upon the reader at the outset and conclusion that these are objects with powerful emotional resonance. Taken as a whole, though, the book successfully highlights the rich rewards that can come from focusing on scientific practice and makes a strong case for anatomical collections as entities with continuing relevance and resonance for the medical profession, humanities scholars and the public.