Museum Vrolik: A Father and Son's Anatomy Cabinet in Amsterdam

In 1856 Willem Vrolik, professor of anatomy in Amsterdam, bought a set of Beauchêne skulls, which the museum that now holds them calls “exploded skulls.” They are still in the collection that carries his family’s name, filed today among some 2,750 animal skeletons and skulls in a museum that sits inside a working hospital.

Museum Vrolik is one of the stranger and more demanding collections in the Netherlands. It holds human and animal anatomy, normal and pathological, assembled over roughly two centuries for teaching. It also holds material that the museum itself now describes as rooted in racist science. Both halves belong to the story.

A collection in a canal house

The collection began as a private undertaking. Gerard Vrolik, who lived from 1775 to 1859, and his son Willem, from 1801 to 1863, were both professors of anatomy in Amsterdam. They called their collection the Museum Vrolikianum and kept it in the family’s house on a canal.

According to the museum’s own history, the Vroliks collected normal human and animal anatomy, pathological anatomy, and specimens showing congenital defects. They preserved them by every method then available: preparations in liquid, dried preparations injected with wax, wax models, plaster models, and dried skeletons and skulls.

When Willem died, the collection could easily have been broken up. Instead, a group of wealthy Amsterdam citizens bought it and presented it to the Athenaeum Illustre, the institution that later became the University of Amsterdam. The sources differ on the year of that transfer. I amsterdam gives 1865, while Wikipedia gives 1869. Both agree on the next fact that matters: the collection was not put on public show as a museum until 1984, when it was installed at the Academic Medical Center, now part of Amsterdam UMC.

What the shelves hold

The museum’s collection overview breaks its holdings into 13 distinct collections, and the numbers give a sense of scale.

The core is a group of 1,230 human anatomical preparations acquired between about 1750 and 1954. Besides material from Gerard Vrolik and from a collector named Bonn, it includes teaching specimens added later by professors Fürbringer, Ruge, Bolk and Woerdeman. A separate group of 840 preparations documents congenital defects. I amsterdam singles out conjoined twins and cyclopean infants among them, and the museum’s front page counts around 1,200 wet specimens of human origin in all.

There are 3,300 human bones and skulls, including diseased skeletal material from Hovius, Bonn and Gerard Vrolik. There are 2,750 animal skeletons and skulls, among them 740 monkey skulls gathered by Bolk, and 2,960 animal anatomy preparations, many of them from Amsterdam’s Artis zoo. The zoologist Max Weber was a contributor, and since 2018 the museum has also managed 1,550 specimens from the University of Amsterdam’s zoological laboratory.

The collection keeps growing in unexpected directions. In 2015 the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience gave the museum roughly 22,000 thin stained sections of brain, gathered from 1909 to 1945 by C.U. Ariëns Kappers and stored in 1,760 drawers. A dentistry collection of 600 objects, assembled by Grevers, De Jonge Cohen and Bolk, includes diseased teeth on wax plates, dentures, forceps and 260 plaster casts. There are 410 wax models of embryonic development and human torsos, 530 plaster models and casts, 650 instruments, 7,400 glass slides and negatives, 1,620 plant specimens, some from mutation research, and around 200 objects from the hospital’s own history.

The museum stresses on its front page that the human and animal material belongs together historically and stays together. That is a curatorial choice with a clear logic: the Vroliks gathered both from the start, and splitting them would misrepresent what the collection was built to do.

A museum for students, then for everyone

For most of its life the collection served medical teaching. I amsterdam notes that the museum long received mainly students and medical specialists, and that it has been reaching for a wider public for several years. It describes the collection as still of real scientific value and mentions a full renovation intended to take visitors through the unusual human body.

That double role is now written into the museum’s own description of itself. Its front page says it serves both medical education and public understanding of human anatomy. Visitors arrive at a hospital, not a museum district: the address is Meibergdreef 15, inside the AMC location of Amsterdam UMC, and it opens on weekdays.

The material that is not on display

The hardest part of the collection is also the part a visitor will not see. The museum states plainly that Gerard and Willem Vrolik also gathered skulls and other human remains taken from colonial territories. They believed in distinct human races with differing physical and mental characteristics, ideas the museum now calls stereotypical and racist. That material is not exhibited.

The collection overview gives the numbers without euphemism. Among the 1,150 human skulls are 330 described as “racial” skulls, acquired by the Vroliks and later by Bolk. The plaster collection includes 17 so-called race busts and 140 masks. The museum’s front page says it is addressing this colonial inheritance through provenance research and repatriation.

That approach puts Museum Vrolik in an uncomfortable but honest position. A collection built by careful observers of the body was also shaped by the false classifications of their time, and the institution that inherited it has chosen to say so openly rather than leave the cabinets to speak for themselves.

Reading the collection now

What makes the Vrolik collection worth attention beyond medicine is how directly it shows a way of knowing. Every jar, skull and wax model records a decision about what was worth keeping and how to make it legible: by suspension in fluid, by injection with wax, or by exploding a skull into its separate bones. Those are techniques of display as much as of science.

The museum still uses them to teach. It also uses its own history as a lesson in how a collection can carry the prejudice of the people who made it. Laying out both sides of that inheritance makes the Vrolik collection more instructive, not less.