Rijksmuseum Boerhaave

The museum is named for Herman Boerhaave, the Leiden professor who reorganised medical teaching around the bedside in the early eighteenth century and drew students from across Europe, and it occupies the Caecilia hospital where he taught - a building that had been a convent and then a plague hospital. The collection covers Dutch science and medicine from the sixteenth century: Antoni van Leeuwenhoek's surviving microscopes, single-lens instruments of his own making with which he first described bacteria, protozoa and sperm cells; Christiaan Huygens's pendulum clocks and lenses; Kamerlingh Onnes's apparatus from the Leiden cryogenic laboratory where helium was first liquefied and superconductivity discovered in 1911. A reconstruction of the Leiden anatomical theatre of 1594 stands in the courtyard, the wooden tiers with skeletons around them as the contemporary prints show it.

What you actually see

• Leeuwenhoek's microscopes - single-lens instruments that first showed bacteria.
• The 1594 anatomy theatre - reconstructed with skeletons on the wooden tiers.
• Kamerlingh Onnes's apparatus - from the lab where superconductivity was found in 1911.
• Huygens's clocks and lenses - the pendulum work and the optics.

When to go

All year. Half a day.

Honest expectations

Closed Mondays. The subject is technical and the labelling assumes interest. Human skeletal material is displayed in the anatomy theatre reconstruction. It is smaller than Naturalis nearby.

Nearby

The Rijksmuseum van Oudheden and Naturalis are a short walk.