Museums & Millennium : The Grand Illusion

Today’s prosthetic storehouse is well stocked with a wide range of medical hardware: false teeth, hearing aids, hips, knees, heart valves and pacemakers, to name some of the more popular items. We can now improve functionality as well as appearance, and soon may be able to restore the sight of the blind and the motor function of paraplegics. The dream of the Bionic Man is practically a reality.


		Researchers have attempted to transplant ovarian tissue from an aborted foetus or a still-born baby girl into a sterile woman. If this experiment produced a child, it would have a genetic mother who had never been born. Ollivier Dyens, Chair et métal, VLB Model of a pregnant woman used for medical instruction, circa 1700 From the Medizinhistorische Museum der Universität Zürich


		Photos: MHNN, Jo‘l von Allmen

For the past thirty years, living organs (hearts, kidneys, livers, lungs, crystalline lenses) from human or animal donors have become a part of the prosthetic stock in trade. And products of tissue engineering cultivated in vitro, have recently become available: skin and blood vessels, and before long, livers, pancreases and corneas.

In the face of all this progress, it is hard not to dream of outrunning death.


		Under the gaze of these glass eyes, we begin to see life in a new way. We meet people who, despite their difficulties, are happy to have a prosthetic leg, a transplanted lung or a heart that beats once more; and we realize how lucky we are, lucky to have avoided a visit to the spare parts counter. Glass eye collection, Wiesbaden, Germany, circa 1880 From the Medizinhistorische Museum der Universität Zürich


		Beggars with crutches and prostheses, by Simon Troger Wood and ivory, first half of the 18th century, Bavaria From the Medizinhistorische Museum der Universität Zürich