Building a themed medical equipment collection
What type of collection do you want to put together? Random, inexpensive vintage curios? Artefacts of Victorian medicine? Or examples of medical instruments used in military settings?
Your collecting focus will be driven in part by your interest and in part by your budget. Building a collection of vintage medicine bottles and potion pots is going to be considerably cheaper than specialising in, say, equipment used in Georgian medical science.
There is no shortage of different routes you can take when adopting a collection theme. It can be based on geography, periods in history, branches of medicine or type of object.
Medical collectibles are probably more diverse than you’d imagine. Examples of unusual items that people collect include vintage glass eyes or dentures, blood-letting equipment including jars that leeches were housed in, and various forms of anatomical model used for medical instruction and practice.
Record everything you can about your collection
As you put your collection together, take care to document all you can about the items in your possession. Sadly, most of the objects that have survived into the twenty-first century lack provenance, that is, the history of where they came from.
While a vintage set of surgeon’s instruments is interesting in itself, it becomes so much more fascinating when its history is known. By knowing who used it, and where and when, an object is transformed from a thing into an example of living history.
An instrument or object might come into your possession with no provenance, but you can start to give it some by recording where you obtained it, what you paid and what history, if any, came with it. Collectors of the future will thank you for your diligence.
Collecting Antique and Vintage Medical Equipment
The Medisave team gets to see lots of cool, shiny and cutting-edge medical equipment every week. But we’re also fascinated by the gear doctors and surgeons worked with in the past.
Generations of medics carried out life-saving procedures with tools that now look better suited to a garden shed, and the implements that still survive give us fascinating insights into how modern techniques developed.
Lots of people, many of them practising or retired doctors, collect these relics of bygone medicine. They can make fascinating, if sometimes macabre, talking points while some are intriguing decorative objects.
How to find antique medical equipment
There are plenty of places for the amateur medical equipment collector to go looking for suitable objects. These include auction houses, antique shops and dealers. If you love the thrill of hunting down a bargain, car boot and vintage sales can be a source of fascinating finds.
Unsurprisingly, there’s a thriving online market in antique and vintage medical items, on sites such as eBay.
It may be that you already have one or two vintage objects, perhaps passed down through the family or acquired at some point in the past. These can form the heart of a new collection.
Before buying anything, it makes sense to research the market. You don’t want to be paying way too much for an item because you’re not sure of the market rate, and it’s easier to spot a bargain when you’re equipped with knowledge.
Use search engines to find websites that describe antique medical equipment collections and collecting and if you can, visit some shops and dealers to get a feel for what’s out there.
Building a themed medical equipment collection
What type of collection do you want to put together? Random, inexpensive vintage curios? Artefacts of Victorian medicine? Or examples of medical instruments used in military settings?
Your collecting focus will be driven in part by your interest and in part by your budget. Building a collection of vintage medicine bottles and potion pots is going to be considerably cheaper than specialising in, say, equipment used in Georgian medical science.
There is no shortage of different routes you can take when adopting a collection theme. It can be based on geography, periods in history, branches of medicine or type of object.
Medical collectibles are probably more diverse than you’d imagine. Examples of unusual items that people collect include vintage glass eyes or dentures, blood-letting equipment including jars that leeches were housed in, and various forms of anatomical model used for medical instruction and practice.
Record everything you can about your collection
As you put your collection together, take care to document all you can about the items in your possession. Sadly, most of the objects that have survived into the twenty-first century lack provenance, that is, the history of where they came from.
While a vintage set of surgeon’s instruments is interesting in itself, it becomes so much more fascinating when its history is known. By knowing who used it, and where and when, an object is transformed from a thing into an example of living history.
An instrument or object might come into your possession with no provenance, but you can start to give it some by recording where you obtained it, what you paid and what history, if any, came with it. Collectors of the future will thank you for your diligence.
Building a themed medical equipment collection
What type of collection do you want to put together? Random, inexpensive vintage curios? Artefacts of Victorian medicine? Or examples of medical instruments used in military settings?
Your collecting focus will be driven in part by your interest and in part by your budget. Building a collection of vintage medicine bottles and potion pots is going to be considerably cheaper than specialising in, say, equipment used in Georgian medical science.
There is no shortage of different routes you can take when adopting a collection theme. It can be based on geography, periods in history, branches of medicine or type of object.
Medical collectibles are probably more diverse than you’d imagine. Examples of unusual items that people collect include vintage glass eyes or dentures, blood-letting equipment including jars that leeches were housed in, and various forms of anatomical model used for medical instruction and practice.
Record everything you can about your collection
As you put your collection together, take care to document all you can about the items in your possession. Sadly, most of the objects that have survived into the twenty-first century lack provenance, that is, the history of where they came from.
While a vintage set of surgeon’s instruments is interesting in itself, it becomes so much more fascinating when its history is known. By knowing who used it, and where and when, an object is transformed from a thing into an example of living history.
An instrument or object might come into your possession with no provenance, but you can start to give it some by recording where you obtained it, what you paid and what history, if any, came with it. Collectors of the future will thank you for your diligence.
