One of the more unique museums I visited while in Paris was the Musée des Moulages or Museum of Casts. Tucked inside the historic Hôpital Saint-Louis in the 10th arrondissement, the Musée des Moulages preserves the world’s richest ensemble of dermatological wax models (‘moulages’). The collection began forming in the 1860s as doctors sought better ways to teach skin diseases to their students – this is evident from the different casts on display. However back then in 1866, the physician Alphonse Devergie gave the hospital a set of watercolour paintings before the collection evolving into that of mixed drawings, early hand-coloured photographs, and a few experimental casts. Some of these early examples can be seen on display, or at least reproductions of them like the casts themselves. Soon after, Dr Charles Lailler enlisted Jules Baretta (then a maker of lifelike wax fruit) to model lesions directly from patients, establishing the technique that made the museum famous. Some of these fruit on display within the museum to demonstrate the technique used to create the approximately 4,900 pieces on display.

As you can imagine, demand for space and prestige led to a purpose-built building within the hospital grounds. Designed with a vast sky-lit hall and a mezzanine gallery, it was inaugurated on August 5th 1889, to coincide with the first International Congress of Dermatology during the Exposition Universelle. What an icebreaker event that must have bee. I am sure that I would have got lost in the museum instead of attending the conference – I wonder if any of the attendees did? Baretta had been appointed conservator in 1884 and, working until 1913, created thousands of casts with later modelers continued the work into the mid-20th century. The official historical catalogue lists 4,807 pieces grouped into four sub-collections (General, Péan, Parrot, and Fournier) however the hospital’s current website notes 4,952 works (potentially reflecting ongoing inventory refinements), but in any case the scale is around five thousand. In 1992 the collection and its cases were protected as Monuments historiques, underscoring their heritage value even as their original teaching role waned.

Today the museum remains a time-capsule: a large rectangular room lined with 162 wooden vitrines on two levels, reached by small spiral stairs, with casts arranged (charmingly, and a bit perversely) in alphabetical order of disease rather than by modern taxonomy. It’s part museum, part library (the adjoining Henri-Feulard Library) and very much part of the hospital’s identity as the cradle of French dermatology. If you’re a dermatologist or just curious, the range of casts on display include infectious skin diseases such as syphilis, tuberculosis of the skin, leprosy and smallpox to inflammatory and autoimmune dermatoses such as psoriasis, and eczema. Some of the casts are not for the squeamish as being medical teaching aids, they are extremely well detailed and life-like, in skin complexion, hair and likeness to living people.

The room the museum is housed in is striking, and has that Victorian museum smell to it. The floorboards creak as you walk over them, particularly within the balcony area and the light flicker. However, there are faces here bandaged, hands and feet with ulcers, plaques of eczema, the ravages of syphilis. To my eye, it is both beautiful and unsettling in equal measure, an aesthetic shaped by 19th century didactics rather than 21st century museum curation. Expect minimal scenography beyond tidy labels; the directness is powerful. All of these labels are in French however so brush up on your medical terminology before going or use an app like Google Lens, it may struggle with some of the handwriting though. The casts are astonishingly lifelike and show the evolution from watercolour atlases to three-dimensional teaching tools. If you have any interest in medical history, material culture, or the visual rhetoric of disease, it’s a must. I may not be a medic but I love finding and exploring collections like this that helped to advance science of medicine and advance our understanding of ourselves.

I’ve tried not to show the more gory casts in this post but sensitive visitors may find parts of the display difficult. These are casts were made with consent at the time and anonymised in presentation, the faces are so naturalistic they feel moments from breathing or asking what the time is. There are a number of specimens of foetuses or genitalia which demonstrates the rawness of the museum’s ethical weight and historical meaning. It is a record of patients and practitioners encountering illness together, before antibiotics or modern dermatopathology. If I haven’t put you off and you’d like to visit, you can find the museum inside the grounds of the Hôpital Saint Louis, with entrance via Porte 14. Visits are typically by appointment on weekdays so make sure you email ahead in order to secure a visit. Depending on how attentive you are to the displays, it should take you an hour or two to get around everything and really absorb it. If you’d like to get a quick peak of the museum, then please watch the video below.

Please note that photography of the specimens is not permitted, which is why I have used the images available online of the digitised collection from the Université Paris Cité. If you’d like to visit the online catalogue and see more of the casts, you can do so here. Taking and sharing photographs of a person’s remains, even if they are a cast, without their consent (or that of their family) strips away dignity and turns what should be a moment of education and learning into an act of objectification. Human remains are not simply objects of curiosity; they are the physical presence of someone’s life story, identity, and relationships. Respect demands that we preserve privacy even after death, focusing on context, commemoration, and ethical storytelling rather than voyeurism, so that the deceased are remembered with humanity rather than exposed as evidence. Therefore if you do visit, I encourage you to do the same.

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