The Wonder-Room of Ole Worm
This Renaissance Museum Wormianum was a Forerunner of Modern Museums
![Danish naturalist and physician Ole Worm, Wikipedia [in the public domain]](http://images.suite101.com/133318_olewormwikipedia.jpg "Danish naturalist and physician Ole Worm, Wikipedia [in the public domain]")
Growing up, Ole Worm [pronounced Ol-eh Vorm] (1588-1654) enjoyed an extended education. Considering that his father, Mag Willum Worm, was the mayor of Aarhus, a Danish city on the Kattegat Bay of the North Sea, it seems safe to assume that the family was affluent. Worm was made a rich man by inheritance from his father.
Worm had an exceptional career, maintaining a medical practice in Copenhagen and appointed as personal physician to King Christian IV of Denmark. It is reported that he stayed in Copenhagen during years of the Black Plague to take care of the sick.
Worm's interests covered natural objects, human artifacts, mythical creatures, and ancient inscriptions. Worm was a student of the runic stones. The King supported this research in the early Scandinavian literature, sending letters of introduction to the Bishops of Denmark and Norway stating that the research was permitted, and then paying the expenses of Worm’s runology trips. In all he traveled to Germany, Italy, France, England, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.
He assembled a fascinating collection, much of which he gathered during his extensive travels. To house his collection, he built one of the most well-known Wunderkammern or “wonder-rooms” in Europe. The objects on display in his rather modest display space were marvels of nature, antiquities, and ethnographic items, ranging from minerals, fossils, and preserved plants to bones, tusks, tortoise shells, taxidermed animals, and runic texts. Interestingly, the King brought princes and others to see his private museum.
In 1655 the catalog Museum Wormianum, or History of Rare Things, describing the contents of his varied collections, was posthumously published. It is a marvelous surviving record of this proto-museum.
His museum was a result of his serious, systematic efforts to investigate and comprehend the natural world. Formal boundaries between scientific disciplines didn’t yet exist and science, art, nature, and the wonders of the universe were interconnected to people of the seventeenth century. Even so, Worm, along with his more enlightened contemporaries, believed that learning comes about through experimentation and direct observation of nature rather than simply through the study of texts. These texts would have included the old orthodoxies like those set up by Galen and Aristotle. Worm firmly believed that vision was the most trustworthy sense for natural history investigations. The traditions of natural history and biology, established in the time of the ancient Greeks, were beginning to fall away in favor of empiricism.
Thus, Worm straddled the line between modern and pre-modern sciences. For example, Worm determined that the unicorn did not exist and that purported unicorn horns were actually from the narwhal. At the same time, he wondered if there were any merit to the claims of anti-poison properties then associated with unicorn horns and he performed related experiments on dogs.
Worm’s collection contained many birds but his techniques of conservation were not successful. In time the collection was destroyed by insects. Soon after, as scientific collecting grew into a serious interest, guides and manuals were produced to help collectors properly gather, prepare, preserve, and transport such natural specimens.
As the rigors of scientific thought developed, “wonder-rooms” went out of fashion. Certainly the Wunderkammern or early museums are evidence of humans’ timeless interest in collecting objects of curiosity and fascination. Though supporters of Karl Marx and theories of “social history” currently in vogue in the U.S. would have us believe that the ordinary should be emphasized over the exceptional, people instinctively are drawn to collect the fascinating and the marvelous. Eventually those with the means to do so opened museums so that all would have the opportunity to view such collections of curiosities.
Source:
O. Impey and A. MacGregor, The Origins of Museums (Oxford, 1985). From The Ark Catalogue. Retrieved December 19, 2006.
