Meckelsche Sammlung Tour

The first time I visited Brian in Halle, we were in a bookstore and spotted a book about the Meckelsche Sammlung, which is a huge collection of medical oddities from the 17 and 1800s. Visiting it was complicated though because you had to make an appointment and the hours were tricky. So we didn’t manage to figure it out the first time I was here or the second.

But this time Brian saw that they were doing tours on specific days. We went down to the Marktplatz where the tourism office is and bought tickets.

It was entirely in German and surprisingly started out as a walking tour. I believe we saw some houses where Meckel lived, and maybe some of his family, and there was something about Napoleon, and a whole lot of other stuff I didn’t understand. We saw a piece of the original Halle city wall that was built in the 1100’s or 1200’s.

We ran into a rival tour that I believe was about the history of Martin Luther and the whole conflict with the Catholic Church. Their tour guide was thematically dressed.

If our guide were thematically dressed she would have had to have had an extra limb or head. We ran into the other tour again at a cafe.

In front of this fancy building there was a trail of blood on the sidewalk which the guide commented on but I have no idea what she said about it. At this point I was really starting to wonder if we were going to get to see the collection or if we were just on a tour of the history of the guy whose collection it was. But we finally got to the anatomy building and listened to more long talks that I barely understood.

And at last we were released to just look around on our own. NO PICTURES ALLOWED. There were cabinets and cabinets of human skulls collected from various places seemingly in the study of phrenology. Brian found one labeled “Cannibal, Texas” in very fancy lettering right on the skull. There were skeletons with various spinal and rib cage deformities. There were disected heads and all sorts of other organs preserved in formaldehyde. And there were lots of preserved infants with fatal birth defects and conjoined twins. It was interesting and freaky. Nature does more disturbing things than I could think up. The methods of preserving them so long ago add another sort of layer of spookiness to them all. I hope that those things stay out of my dreams.

Then I thought the tour was over but they took us to a room of animal skeletons. One cabinet was full of deformed animals skeletons, like calves with two heads and then just lots of other cool animal skeletons.

I really wish I could have taken pictures. It’s worth checking out their site except it uses Flash which annoys me and means it won’t work for everyone.

It was a really awesome and interesting opportunity.

After we were done there we went and got gelato because nothing ends a visit to a museum full of creepy stuff in jars of formaldehyde than gelato.