Museum Boerhaave

Museum Boerhaave

Entrance of the museum
Established	1931
Location	Lange Sint Agnietenstraat 10 Leiden, Netherlands
Type	Science Museum
Collection size	87,600 objects
Visitors	47,500 (2010)
Director	Dirk van Delft
President	Douwe Breimer
Curator	Hans Hooijmaijers
Public transit access	Leiden Centraal
Website	museumboerhaave.nl

Museum Boerhaave is a museum of the history of science and medicine, based in Leiden, Netherlands. The museum hosts a collection of historical scientific instruments from all disciplines, but mainly from medicine, physics, and astronomy.

The museum is located in a building that was originally a convent in central Leiden. It includes a reconstructed traditional anatomical theatre. It also has many galleries that include the apparatus with which Heike Kamerlingh Onnes first liquefied helium (in Leiden), the electromagnet equipment used by Wander Johannes de Haas (a Leiden physicist) for his low-temperature research, and an example of the Leiden jar, among many other objects in the extensive collection.

The museum is named after Herman Boerhaave, a Dutch physician and botanist who was famous in Europe for his teaching at Leiden and lived to a great age, receiving brilliant students from all over Europe, including Peter the Great, Voltaire and Linnaeus.

Boerhaave Museum's history began in 1907, when a Historical Exhibition of Natural Science and Medicine was held in the Academy Building Academiegebouw (Leiden) of Leiden University. The many objects in the exhibition came from all the learned corners of the country. It was a great success and there were immediately calls to set up a permanent science history exhibit.

In 1928 a foundation was initiated by physicist Claude August Crommelin, who worked at Leiden university, for a museum for the history of natural sciences. The aim of the museum was described in the preliminary statutes of the foundation: "the collection of instruments, tools, slides and specimens, documents and other objects, which are important for the history of the natural sciences; to look after these objects, describe them and keep them in a museum which is to be located in Leiden". The sciences to be represented included: Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry, Botany, Zoology, Pharmacy, all medical sciences - including Physiology, Anatomy et cetera, and Mathematics.