The 'Regiment of Skeletons': A First World War Medical Collection

Soon after the outbreak of the First World War, pathologists and senior military clinicians set out to record and collect information relating to conflict-related conditions and wounds. This material included not only statistics, case histories and clinical illustrations, but also models and human remains. This paper discusses the largest British concentration of such specimens, in the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Pathological preparations and images arrived from the front and elsewhere to be preserved and exhibited-word, image and object juxtaposed-with the intention of training the Army Medical Services. The work that went into the collection and the post-war debates about the ownership of these specimens demonstrate the value of human remains in medical museums in the early twentieth century.