The medical cabinet, similarly, contains a wide range of objects: five drawers hold botanical specimens, four contain minerals, one houses animal products, and several more store fossils and ethnographic objects. Many of these objects were collected when Addenbrooke (with a group of amateur naturalists and physicians) explored the countryside around Cambridge, from the gravel pits of Cherry Hinton to the Gogmagog Hills and Grantchester Meadows. There are also some (very unusual for the me) artefacts from Melanesia in the Pacific. Why did Addenbrooke amass these collec ons? Like his contemporary Hans Sloane (1660–1753), whose vast collec on of 71,000 items provided the material to found the Bri sh Museum, Addenbrooke seemed to believe that gathering and classifying could itself be a learning process, and that ordering the world, whether through books or objects, offered a pathway to understanding it. Addenbrooke bequeathed £4,067 2s. 1¼d. (equivalent to almost £800,000 today), for establishing a ‘small physical hospital for poor people’ in Cambridge. When I first lived in Cambridge in the 1970s, the Hospital was on Trumpington Street, almost opposite the Fitzwilliam Museum, in the building which is now the Judge Business School. (Brown’s restaurant is where the Outpa ents Department used to be, I believe.) By this me, however, construc on had already begun at the ‘New Addenbrooke’s Hospital’ (as it was then known) and some departments and services were already opera ng at the new site. This is now the heart of the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, where the Rosie Maternity Hospital and the Royal Papworth Hospital are situated, plus many offices and laboratories where biomedical research and development are carried out. In a few years a Cancer Hospital and a Children’s Hospital will also be built.
Richard Maxey.
PS If you’re keen to support the work of Addenbrooke’s, please visit h ps://act4addenbrookes.org.uk/donate/
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