page_title: Museum Boerhaave
section_title: 18th Century
hierarchical_section_title: Museum Boerhaave / Collection / 18th Century
caption_attribution_description: Museum Boerhaave, Leiden - Specimens prepared by Bernhard Siegfried Albinus (1697-1770) and his brother Frederik Bernhard Room 7
context_page_description: Rijksmuseum Boerhaave is a museum of the history of science and medicine, based in Leiden, Netherlands. The museum hosts a collection of historical scientific instruments from all disciplines, but mainly from medicine, physics, and astronomy.
  The museum is located in a building that was originally a convent in central Leiden. It includes a reconstructed traditional anatomical theatre. It also has many galleries that include the apparatus with which Heike Kamerlingh Onnes first liquefied helium, the electromagnet equipment used by Wander Johannes de Haas for his low-temperature research, and an example of the Leiden jar, among many other objects in the extensive collection.
  The museum is named after Herman Boerhaave, a Dutch physician and botanist who was famous in Europe for his teaching at Leiden and lived to a great age, receiving brilliant students from all over Europe, including Peter the Great, Voltaire and Linnaeus.
context_section_description: The following two rooms are dedicated to an era of blossom for the University of Leiden, the oldest university of the Netherlands (founded in 1575).
  4 University of Leiden
  Boerhaave and ‘s Gravensande
  This large room is dedicated to physician, botanist and chemist Herman Boerhaave, physicist Willem 's Gravesande and instrument-maker Jan van Musschenbroeck. On display are large globes and a tiny pocket globe (all ~1700), each depicting heaven and earth. A table size planetarium by clock-maker Steven Tracy Mercury shows Venus, Earth with its moon, Mars, Jupiter with four moons and Saturn. There is also a large star atlas.
  Air pumps (1670–1730) and demonstration devices, notably several Magdeburg hemispheres, were made to explore the properties of the newly discovered vacuum. Other devices did the same for centrifugal force, collisions and laws of momentum, and gravity.
  Hydrometers, an aerometer, a hydrostatic bellows, a balance and steam pump, several table-top fountains all were used to look into hydrostatic pressure, and capillary attraction.
  Also shown are a large set of mathemical instruments to measure angles: sectors,  a protractor and beam compass.
  A collection of balances, levers, tackles demonstrate laws of statics.
  A variety of lenses, prisms, a slit, trays and screens explore optics. About ten screw-barrel and compound miscroscopes (1710–1780) demonstrate how this young science underwent dramatic progress in few years. A veriety of curved mirrors, used as anamorphic toys, show how a deliberately distorted image can be restored back to the original.
  The room also houses a range of instruments (levers and forceps) used to facilicate child birth.
  Lastly, shown are models of three out of five of Archimedes' so called simple machines (lever, inclined plane, wedge, screw and wheel), several hydrostatic balances to demonstrate Archimedes' law and two tables of forces which demonstrate interactions of forces in a horizontal plane.
  5 The University of Leiden
  Linnaeus and Van Musschenbroek
  Carl Linnaeus published his famous Systema Naturae in 1735, during his 3-year stay in the Dutch Republic, in which he also earned a degree in medicine, and closely worked together with Boerhaave. At display are paintings of Linnaeus and Boerhaave. Also 18th-century models and scientific measuring instruments: models that demonstrate basic physics principles, and instruments: several antique thermometers, a barometer, a theodolite and several pyrometers. Also two antique globes (one showing the heavens, one earth) and two mirror telescopes. The room is conamed after the brothers van Mussenbroeck: Pieter a professor, credited with the invention of the first capacitor in 1746: the Leyden jar, and Jan a famous instrument maker, who shipped his hand crafted precision thermometers all over Europe.
  6 Wonders of nature
  Over 30 antique microscopes are shown, most from the 18th century, in a large variety, with different solutions for lighting the subject and minimization of lens defects (e.g. chromatic aberration): simple, compound and reflecting microscopes, so called English microscopes (renowned for their quality), solar microscopes (which project their image on a wall, using sunlight only). Several wooden cabinets with microscopic slides are testimony of the craftsmanship than went into collections of ready made samples, which at the time were highly fashionable among well-to-do citizens who took an interest in scientific developments.
  7 Collection: The Albinus Brothers
  The room is dedicated to famous 18th-century anatomist Bernhard Siegfried Albinus and his brother and successor Frederik Bernhard Albinus, showing a few of the over 750 wet and dry anatomical samples that Bernhard Siegfried collected, and a wide variety of medical instruments (most 1670-1700) collected by his brother: several amputation saws and knives, cauterizing irons, a wide variety of forceps and clamps, spatula's, an elevator, a bullet extractor and brace, several (drill) crowns, two drills, a lenticular, several elevatoriums, a chuck key, a coach screw, a retractor,  l
caption: Specimen by brothers Albinus
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