Schiffman-Binda-Bonardo Collection

The Schiffman-Binda-Bonardo Collection was a collection of wax figures and models that was dissolved and auctioned in 2001. It comprised around 350 pieces, which together weighed more than ten tons, and as a private collection of medical wax models should have been unique.

Medical wax models

Before techniques such as x-rays or ultrasound examinations were introduced, wax models were essential for training prospective doctors. They were mainly made in Germany and France and sold to the appropriate facilities across Europe. In addition to anatomical models that depict the normal state of the human body or certain symptoms of illness, figures were also produced that documented particular deformities of individual people.

History of the collection

Léonce Schiffman

The Swiss painter Léonce Schiffman collected the wax replicas of human bodies and body parts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is not certain where the individual pieces come from. Most of them were probably made in Germany and were originally used to train medical professionals. Schiffman may also have acquired pieces that had been sorted out by relevant museums.

During the First World War , the collection came from Germany to Switzerland; the transport car is said to have served as a camouflage for the German secret service. Schiffman showed the wax models at traveling exhibitions in Switzerland for years.

Lily Binda and William Bonardo

Lily (Augustine) Binda, the collection's next owner, was one of the few women in show business with abnormalities in the early 20th century. Before purchasing the wax figures, she traveled with an “ elephant man ” from Algeria , a “lion man” who bore the traditional name Lionel , the giant Atlas and Bertha, a cow-headed woman and a creature with a woman's head and the arms of an octopus had, and other extraordinary phenomena, the fairs and put these games of nature on display.

From the 1960s onwards, such performances were no longer desired in Europe and Lily Binda limited herself to going on tour with the wax figure collection. To increase the attractiveness, she brought several large fairground organs with her. The traveling exhibition was touted as Humains Mystères . Binda herself presented her traveling wax museum in an interview as a serious, educational institution that does not aim to satisfy the visitors' thirst for sensation. Rather, it seems rather sobering and makes the viewer thoughtful.

In fact, with her tours, she continued a tradition that began around the mid-19th century. Traveling exhibitions at that time served as a means of teaching and educating the people, especially in the field of health and hygiene.

Lily Binda died in the 1980s and the collection was stored in Collombey-Muraz . In December 2001 her widower William Bonardo had some of the wax models auctioned off at Christie's .

Special pieces

The auction at Christie's included a series of 16 prepared human brains from the embryonic to the adult stage, which were intended to illustrate the development of the brain, as well as an extensive series of figures showing the course of a pregnancy from the moment of conception to Representing birth, numerous other models on the subject of pregnancy, especially taking multiple pregnancies into account, as well as the model of a Cyclopean child born in Stockholm . The prepared model is in the Royal Anatomical Museum in Stockholm. A set consisting of a healthy stomach and a stomach impaired by alcohol consumption as well as the bust of a woman marked by alcohol were also among the auctioned exhibits, as were the replicas of genital organs with the symptoms of various sexually transmitted diseases, the model of a woman who was given a caesarean section , Numerous representations of further operations, including the reconstruction of a nose made of skin from the forehead of the victim, but also curiosities such as the model of an abdomen with a chastity belt on or limbs with traces of medieval torture methods . The collection also contained a model of a hand, the individual parts of which were marked with the insurance sums that could be expected if the limbs were lost. According to this list, you were compensated for the loss of the whole hand with 7,000 marks, for the individual fingers values between 4900 marks for the thumb and 300 marks for the little finger were given.

A wax model of Italian Siamese twins is believed to represent the brothers Giovanni Battista and Giacomo Tocci at the age of just over three , although the names are not mentioned .

Where to find individual pieces

Before the collection was dissolved, it was shown again in autumn 2001 at the instigation of the Louist-Jeantet Foundation in the exhibition Corps en cire - corps en scène in Geneva .

Three models of legs showing ulcers as a result of syphilis infection are now in the Science Museum London . They are likely to date from around 1910/1920. A larger-than-life phrenological head and the full-length anatomical model of a man in a showcase are now in the holdings of the German Historical Museum Berlin. The caesarean section from around 1870 was made public at least once again after the sale, as was the life-size figure of a woman with an ectopic pregnancy.

Individual evidence

↑ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1364095/Medical-waxwork-horrors-come-under-the-hammer.html

^ AW Bates: "Indecent and demoralizing representations": public anatomy museums in mid-Victorian England. In: Medical history. Volume 52, Number 1, January 2008, pp. 1-22, PMID 18180809 , PMC 2175054 (free full text).

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