The Anatomy Museum at the Queen's University of Belfast.

The one hundredth anniversary of the British Museums Association, the association of museum curators, took place in 1989, and was designated Museums Year. Throughout the country museums mounted special exhibitions to publicise their role. As I am the current curator now is a good time to give a brief overview of the history of the anatomy museum at Queen's and to assess its role now and in the future. Until relatively recently the anatomy museum was part of the medical museum and therefore could be said to have originated when a museum room was formally established alongside the dissection room in 1835.1 This was associated with the formation of the Belfast Medical School in the Collegiate Department of the Belfast Academical Institution, which in 1831 had become the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. Anatomy and physiology had been taught previously in the Institution from 1819 when James Lawson Drummond was appointed to the chair.2 In 1849, after the retirement of James Drummond and the formation of Queen's College, within which the medical school formed a faculty, Hugh Carlile was appointed to the chair and with him came the entire contents, purchased for £500, of the medical museum of the Park Street School of Medicine in Dublin. This greatly increased the collection, commenced by Drummond, which was then temporarily housed in the general College museum located in the north wing of the original main building of Queen's College. In 1863 the first medical building was completed on the east side of the quadrangle of Queen's College, providing a new dissecting room with a lecture theatre attached (Fig 1). Then in 1866 the second and larger section containing the museum room was completed, allowing the museum to move to this permanent home. There was still only a medical museum, part of which comprised the anatomical collection. In 1910 the museum roof, having been found to be in a dangerous condition, was supported by steel pillars. At the same time it was observed that the floor of the museum was a fire risk, being situated over the heating furnaces for the building.3 Between 1911-13 the floor of the