Museum Boerhaave

Museum Boerhaave, officially the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, is the national museum of the history of science and medicine, and it stands in the centre of Leiden in a former hospital. The building was the Caecilia Gasthuis, a hospital that dates from the Middle Ages, and later became the place where Herman Boerhaave, the most famous physician of his age, taught medical students at the bedside. The museum is named for him, and it tells the story of how science developed in the Netherlands, from the Golden Age to the modern era.

Herman Boerhaave, who lived from 1668 to 1738, was a professor at Leiden University and was renowned across Europe. His clinical teaching, in which students observed patients and learned from them directly, was a model for later medical education, and his textbooks were used for generations. Students came from all over the continent to hear him, which helped to make Leiden a centre of European medicine. The museum places him in the context of a city that was a hub of learning, with a university founded in 1575.

The collection covers a wide range. Among the objects are microscopes made by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the cloth merchant from Delft who used lenses of his own making to be the first to see bacteria and single-celled organisms. There are telescopes, clocks, globes and anatomical models, and a reconstruction of an anatomical theatre, where public dissections were held for an audience of students and curious citizens. These displays give an idea of how people saw the human body and the universe in earlier centuries.

The museum also covers more recent science. Leiden was a centre of low-temperature physics, and Heike Kamerlingh Onnes liquefied helium here in 1908, an achievement that led to the discovery of superconductivity and a Nobel Prize in 1913. Exhibits and demonstrations explain these ideas in an accessible way, and interactive elements engage younger visitors. Albert Einstein was a regular guest at the university and is associated with the city.

The museum is within walking distance of Molen De Valk, the National Museum of Antiquities and Naturalis. It suits science lovers, families with older children and curious visitors. Allow two hours, check opening times, and look at the programme of special exhibitions and demonstrations before you go.