MUSME, Medical history and technology museum in Padua, Italy
MUSME occupies part of the former Ospedale di San Francesco Grande, Padua's main hospital from 1414 to 1798, beside the church of San Francesco Grande. Across three floors, ancient instruments and anatomical specimens from the university, civic museums and hospital are paired with interactive games, virtual books and full-size video figures such as Vesalio and Galileo.
The museum occupies part of the Ospedale di San Francesco Grande, Padua's main hospital from its founding in 1414 until 1798. The idea of a medical history museum dates to 2000; the building, owned by the Province of Padua since 1959, was restored in the 2000s and renamed Palazzo della Salute. The Fondazione MUSME was created in 2008, and the museum opened on 5 June 2015.
The museum reflects how doctors and patients lived and worked across different time periods, revealing everyday medical practices and beliefs of earlier eras. These collections tell stories about how people understood health and dealt with illness in their own times.
The museum occupies three floors of the former San Francesco Grande hospital, with the first room on the ground floor covering the old hospital itself and four rooms on the upper floors devoted to anatomy, physiology, pathology and therapy. Visitors knock on large virtual doors where life-size video figures such as Sibilla de Cetto and Galileo introduce the themes. A digital table allows virtual dissections following Vesalius's instructions, and stations let you measure blood pressure and other parameters for teaching purposes.
The museum displays how surgeons and doctors actually worked, with reconstructed workshops and operating rooms from different periods. Visitors often discover how crude and dangerous many medical procedures were before modern technology arrived.
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