Hygiene The story of a museum - Marres

The emergence of the international hygiene movement coincided with the rise of the modern
city, with its grime, untreated waste and a connected growing fear of epidemics. The hygiene
movement should be seen as a social solution for the most urgent problems arising from a
continuing industrialisation and urbanisation. It is interesting to note that initially, these
problems were approached as social questions.
Alongside this social view of hygiene, the 19th century witnessed the development
of a scientific view of hygiene as a branch of modern medicine. This brought hygiene out of the
social domain and back into the institutes, universities and laboratories, where the social
questions were now approached as individual medical problems that could be treated and
managed. This institutionalisation and scientification resulted in an enormous improvement
of the living conditions of the public. Consequently, the hygiene movement acquired a global
importance and an effectiveness that it had to maintain and legitimise.
From the desire to relate a vision of society to the ideology of hygiene, the Hygiene-
Museum was established in Dresden in 1912. The museum’s development of educational
materials – ranging from moulages to anatomical specimens and glass figures – reveals the
ambitious desire to literally make the human body transparent. In 1911, Karl August Lingner, a
manufacturer from Dresden who had created the ‘Odol’ line of oral hygiene products, initiated
the First International Hygiene Exhibition. As a logo for the exhibition, the famous artist Franz
von Stuck created the now legendary eye, which symbolised the desire to ‘see more’ and ‘look
at things afresh’, since new technologies such as microscopy and radiography had laid bare
the limitations of visual perception.
From the mission to relate the perspective on society to the ideology of hygiene,
the Hygiene-Museum was established in Dresden in 1912. The museum’s development of
educational materials, which ranged from moulages to anatomical specimens and glass
figures, reveals the ambitious desire to make the human body literally transparent. Moreover,
the exhibitions of the Hygiene-Museum reflect the effort made to visualise everything that
had always been invisible; how the abstract concept of hygiene, in all its complexity, could be
related to the wonder of the human body.
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