Beginning with the first wax museums, such as La Specola in Florence, lifelikeness attributed to wax made it the medium of predilection for anatomical representations. Later, my discussion focuses on the historical process of incorporating wax models into medical science. I try to understand how the unique qualities of the wax medium resonated with religious undertones. Those making a pilgrimage to churches in the Tuscan region sought not scientific documentation of an afflicted organ, but a devotional article on which their prayers could be projected. As a point of departure, I evoke the religious practice of ex-votos taking place in Early Modern Italy. How could such an illustrative teaching material, which still exists today in a number of medical schools and museums, have fallen so completely into oblivion? This book provides answers to this question.I investigate a long-standing tradition of depicting pathological conditions in the form of wax models. Thus it was in dermatology - the specialty that places the most value on the study of morphology - that moulages have enjoyed their broadest distribution and most intensive use. The moulage, a realistic object that could be painted and formed, lent itself above all to the representation of those illnesses that appeared on the epidermis or at least produced changes on the surface of the skin. In the nineteenth century, physicians in newly formed special disciplines of medicine requested models of illness from their fields of competence. This book, illustrated with numerous color photographs, describes the history of the art of moulaging, which had its beginnings in the anatomical wax figures of the eighteenth century. Until the mid-1950s they served as teaching models in the medical curriculum. Moulages are three-dimensional wax figures of pathological changes in the human body. Moulages- inventory from a wax museum? Not in the least.
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