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I was a junior at Transylvania University before I heard about the Monroe Moosnick Medical and Science Museum. I was giving a campus tour to two prospective students, one of whom was interested in medicine. None of us can remember how we got to the top of Old Morrison and into the locked room that, at the time, housed treasures that few students knew existed. But none of us have forgotten our first encounter with the world’s largest buffalo hairball.
The hairball (or bezoar, in scientific terms) was given to the school by George Rogers Clark Todd, youngest brother of Mary Todd Lincoln, upon his graduation from Transylvania’s medical program, which operated from 1799 to 1859. Widely believed to be the largest ever recovered from the stomach of a buffalo, the hairball is just the tip of the iceberg of the museum’s collection of odd and fascinating medical and scientific artifacts. The eclectic collection consists of 19th-century science apparatuses, anatomical models, and botanical paintings that were used to teach the principles of physics, chemistry, and biology.
One of the most interesting – and certainly most startling – pieces in the collection is the Medical Venus. Physics professor and current curator of the collection, Dr. Jamie Day, recalls his first encounter with the Venus, a life-sized wax figure used to teach human anatomy.
“I was rooting around on some shelves in the basement, and when I moved a box from one of the top shelves, there was her single eye looking right at me,” Day recalled. “It was a truly frightening moment.”
The Venus was purchased in 1821 in Paris, France, by Transylvania professor Charles Caldwell for approximately $1,500. Two years later she finally arrived on campus from her birthplace of Florence, Italy. Cast in wax from the tissues and organs of as many as 200 cadavers, she originally contained the internal structure of a full female human body, including a small fetus. (It was hoped that her presence might necessitate less grave robbing, which was a primary method through which medical students obtained cadavers at the time.) Over time, the Venus has lost her limbs and her outer layers of skin, as well as several of her internal organs. Some of the damage is believed to have been incurred in a 19th-century fire, while additional damage is certainly due to neglect and years of improper storage. However, even in her less-than-perfect condition, she is a marvel.
Many of the items in the Moosnick collection were purchased in London and Paris between 1820 and 1850 to facilitate the teaching of thousands of 19th century doctors. Other items, particularly some of the taxidermied birds, were given to Transylvania by the first and second secretaries of the Smithsonian Institution. In fact, Smithsonian specialists have called it one of the finest collections of its kind from that time period.
Transylvania’s medical school closed in 1859, and the collection languished. The artifacts were stored in various attics, closets, and basements around campus; however, the treasures weren’t completely forgotten. Dr. Leland Brown, one-time chair of the biology department, pulled items out of storage in the mid-20th century, in an attempt to create a centralized collection. Chemistry professor Dr. Monroe Moosnick, who was with the university for over five decades as a professor and in various administrative roles, was the collection’s longest caretaker and is now its namesake. Moosnick tried to find appropriate storage and display space for the museum, and even today pieces can be found hidden in storage spaces throughout Brown Science Center. While much of the collection is housed in a single room, there are so many pieces that some are contained in cases lining the halls of the Brown Science Center itself.
When you approach the door to the museum’s current location in the Cowgill Business Building, a beautiful parrot watches through the window, one of the many taxidermied bird specimens in the museum (a passenger pigeon is also among the collection). The museum contains scientific teaching tools for all disciplines, including several fully articulated fetal skeletons, a plaster model of infant conjoined twins, a 19th-century stomach pump, and an early daguerreotype camera. Hand-blown glassware for chemistry experiments fills a cabinet, and the collection contains a number of items that have only “wow” factor, like the spark machines, or the magical selenite slides, which change from simple black-and-white sketches to brilliantly colored drawings when viewed through a polarizing filter that looks to the modern eye like a sheet of thick plastic. One of the oddest items in the museum is a jar of unidentified meat. The meat is a specimen collected from the mysterious “meat rain” that occurred for several minutes one spring morning in 1876 in Bath County, Kentucky, and there is still some question as to from what animal the meat originated.
The largest item in the museum is an incomplete Barlow Planetarium. Designed by Lexington industrialist Thomas Harris Barlow in 1841, it was one of only 20 models that he constructed in his lifetime. Although Barlow’s son continued to implement design changes and entered into a contract with a French manufacturer to construct 90 more for use in schools, the advent of the Franco-Prussian War halted production permanently. The original of Barlow’s planetarium was displayed in London’s Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851, and Transylvania’s example was lent to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1853. Unfortunately, it was nearly destroyed by the time it was returned, the cast iron joints succumbing to the force of gravity on the heavy yet delicate structure. The planetarium was a marvel, designed to display both the planets’ orbital features that give rise to the seasons and demonstrate, as well as predict, lunar eclipses. Although this wonder is no longer in working order, the planetarium, as currently displayed, is still a marvelous sight.
Today, the Moosnick Medical and Science Museum is far better known on campus than it was when I was a student at Transylvania, though unfortunately the collection is still not centralized and not all being kept in proper museum-quality storage conditions. Day hopes that someday the university will be able to build a state-of-the-art museum and archive to house the Moosnick collection, as well as Transylvania’s impressive special collections department and the original art that hangs throughout the campus. Until that time, the museum can be seen by appointment only. If given the opportunity for a look, don’t pass it by – you, like me, will probably never forget your first encounter with the world’s largest buffalo hairball.