When, in 1949, Cecil Hackett from the Wellcome Museum of Medical Science surveyed the medical museums of Great Britain, he was clear what was meant by that term. Medical museums could be anatomical or pathological; they were primarily to be found in a hospital or university; and their purpose was to educate doctors, to whom highly restricted access would be granted. Arguably, this tight definition was open to challenge even then, ignoring as it did the museums of materia medica, museums of medical history and museums (sometimes several to an institution) of all but two of the UK's professional bodies. Nevertheless, even up to the present, most writing on medical museums has tended to concentrate on the anatomy-teaching museums, and the book under review continues that trend.

To criticize it for this, however, would be to mask the many useful insights that its author, an anthropologist who has already collaborated on more general works concerning medical museums, brings to the table – or perhaps we should say, the mortuary slab. Much current writing on medical history attempts to recover the lived experience of patients. This book concerns the post-mortem experience of those patients, or parts of them, as well as the lived experience of the students who studied them. It is as much a history of anatomical education (in which museums played a changing role) as it is of this type of museum itself. It is a peculiar, but ultimately successful, mix of a history of animated display, reviewing how anatomical specimens have been ‘brought to life’ over a period of several centuries, and a specific social and cultural case study of the Anatomy Museum of Marischal College (Aberdeen), from its origins in the 1830s until its closure in 2009. The author draws on her experience of using the museum during its final ten years, prior to the transfer of the collections elsewhere, and this lavishly illustrated book contains several photographs drawn from the small archival room she discovered there.

Just as students had to use the museum to visualize the human body as a spatial concept, so Hallam visualizes a now-deceased museum, both to memorialize it and to analyse how it functioned. The structure she adopts is a little confusing at first, switching from the recent to the distant past and then back again, and from the local case study to a discussion of museums worldwide, not returning to her supposed main focus until much later in the book. After reading the book twice, however, it started to make sense. Her rationale is explained not merely in the introduction but also, rather usefully, on the second page of the final chapter (p. 317). Chapter 1 offers a snapshot of the museum between 1999 and 2009, including some useful comparisons with the student experience of using similar museums in Scotland. A recent and hidden history emerges of medical education in a remote institution. Disconcertingly, Chapter 2 then gives an account of the display techniques employed by much earlier collections, including cabinets of curiosity, while Chapter 3 covers the formation of collections, describing this in terms analogous to bodily development, hence a chapter on museums as ‘nerve centres’ followed by one on their ‘skeletal growth’. Hallam is particularly good on how the plans to develop the collection from the 1860s were clearly inspired by Edinburgh University, the Barclay Collection at the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. The relevance of these much-described museums for a smaller, local one is thus revealed. The role of key individuals is also shown to be pivotal, notably John Struthers before the 1880s and Robert Lockhart prior to 1964. For Struthers this progress was a two-way process as it is shown to have helped him build his own reputation as an anatomist, collector and popular performer. In Lockhart's era it is also possible to acknowledge the often neglected role of the assistant, one example being the technician, cabinetmaker and photographer Alexander Cain. Together Lockhart and helpers like Cain pioneered a new teaching emphasis on the ‘living model’. While much of this teaching took place in the museum and was often specifically coordinated with study of the specimens, the author perhaps strays a little from the history of the museum itself.

Interspersed with this is Chapter 5, providing a potted history, as it were, of the display of human bodies from the 1890s to the 1930s, including the Marischal College museum's temporary expansion into a laboratory for anthropometry and a museum of anthropology, and Chapter 7 about the materials used to replicate specimens in anatomy museums worldwide. The overarching theme is how anatomy was thus made ‘visible and tangible’, the author going so far as to suggest that stimulation and engagement techniques characterized anatomy education far earlier than other science subjects. Interesting though this is, I wonder if this is more about the history of the type of objects to be found in (and across) museums rather than the history of the museums themselves. By contrast, Chapter 8 offers a welcome and, I think, unprecedented discussion on changing attitudes towards the people who have been dissected and who populate the museum. Hallam even derives her own new word, ‘necro-topography’, in discussing the juxtaposition to the museum of a physical (and contrastingly public) memorial garden.

In this respect the dust jacket of this book is correct in describing the author's approach as innovative. It is certainly neither strictly thematic nor chronological, though its intellectual proposition concerning ‘museums in motion’ does to some extent overlap the recent works by Rina Knoeff and Robert Zwijnenberg in The Fate of Anatomical Collections (2015) and Samuel J. Redman's Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums (2016) – both of which have been reviewed in this journal, and alongside which this book would usefully be read.