The hair of distinguished persons in the patent office building museum

Abstract

ABSTRACT To date historians have regarded the museum in the mid-nineteenth-century patent office building as a curious if not negligible precursor to the Smithsonian National Museum, which ultimately inherited its collections. This paper rejects this teleological interpretation by viewing the collections through the eyes of their progenitor and long-time custodian, John Varden, whose personal collections formed the kernel of the great cabinet. Varden’s personal collection of the hair of US presidents and distinguished persons, and its subsequent display and concealment, provides a heuristic to examine prevailing ideologies about the value of museum collections with respect to science and history. The displacement of curiosity by typicality and presentation by representation banished Victorian relic culture from the modern national museum’s displays.