2024-04-12 04:44:20
A month before the start of the tourist season in Burgas, the Museum of Medicine was opened. It is located in the building of the “Prof. Dr. Asen Zlatarov” University, which also has a Faculty of Medicine.
The first exhibition recalls how in the 20th century they demonstrated the symptoms of various diseases. Today, in the era of artificial intelligence, telemedicine and increasingly fast-developing technologies, it is hard to imagine how doctors were trained 100 years ago.
Instead of computer models, they used wax models or the so-called mock-ups that were extremely fashionable at the time.
It was with an exhibition of such models called “Wax History” that the Museum of Medicine was launched.
There are 56 exhibits and they mainly present skin and venereal diseases. With the help of students, dermatologist and teacher Associate Professor Dr. Karen Manuelyan divided them into 5 categories – bacterial, viral, parasitic and fungal infections, as well as venereal diseases.
They depict rare or extinct diseases such as plague, smallpox, typhus, anthrax, forms of syphilis.
The casts are located in the lobby of the Faculty of Medicine, and the great historical, artistic and academic value of the collection has been confirmed by the Bulgarian Dermatology Society.
“The first moulages were made at the end of the 19th century in Paris and replaced the old engravings and paintings on which students were trained. They are three-dimensional wax models that realistically depict diseases with manifestations on the skin and visible mucous membranes.
There are about 20 known mock meetings in different countries in Europe and most of them are located in large university centers.
“In Bulgaria, until recently, only the mock collection was known, which the Clinic for Skin and Venereal Diseases in Alexandrovska Hospital is proud of,” explained Prof. Manuelyan.
He discovered the casts arranged in the new museum at the Medical College in Burgas, which was once a nursing school.
“I am involved in restoration, but this was the first time I encountered something like this, and for me this work was extremely challenging. I was impressed that the wax is of exceptional quality – in our time it is no longer possible to find such.
It’s unbelievable how these mockups have survived. When I started working, I saw that inside they were full of various papers and newspapers. Then it became clear that they date from the 1960s.
I took out part of the newspapers as a memory, I left another, putting today’s date on it, so that if someone does something similar again, it will be known how many hands they have passed through over the years,” said one of the restorers – Tsveta Vodenicharova, who worked on the wax models together with the sculptor Atanas Stoyanov.
“With this museum, Burgas will be on the map of medicine in Bulgaria, because museums are not only history – they are a step through the present to the future,” said the rector of the university Prof. Hristo Bozov.
According to him, the university’s intentions are to enrich the collection with old equipment of scientific value, which the hospitals donate to it. A room is planned on the ground floor for expanding the exposition.