'On the 20^th March 1893, the Cambridge School of Physiology threw a party. The occasion was a prestigious one. One of the most respected physiologists of the previous [c. 30] years had arrived on a visit to the country. That he – a German citizen – had accepted an honorary degree from the university was cause for celebration in itself. But for the scholars that had spent as many as twenty years building up this brand new school, Rudolph Virchow’s presence in the city represented more than the passing by of a scientific dignitary. It was an opportunity to show that British physiology had begun to rival the longstanding dominance of the field by German scholars; to show that the Cambridge School of Physiology had arrived.

The Cambridge Independent Press reported that the scholars of Cambridge put on a bewildering variety of scientific demonstrations, shows and lectures for the visiting professor. These included the presentation of such familiar objects and devices to historians of physiology as galvanometers, reaction-time chronographs, sphygmographs and other measuring, recording, and inscription devices. But other, rather less familiar items to historians of the field were also on display. The walls of the venue were decorated by ‘a number of specimens of curtains and mats from different parts of the world’. One offering included ‘a series of Saxon fibulae and other ornaments... two ancient Peruvian copper plaques. Eleven human flesh forks from Fiji... [and] preserved human heads from New Zealand.’ Not only were the displays decidedly anthropological; of three lectures given, two – by the embryologist John Graham Kerr and the physiologist Lim Boon Keng – concerned the culture of non-European peoples. Conventions surrounding the separation of men and women at Victorian conversaziones were clearly flouted. A considerable proportion of attendees were fellows of the newly-established Girton and Newnham colleges for women students. Finally, a range of printing techniques were made available for inspection, including photogrammic ‘diazotype printing’, ‘printing boards made of wood and of palm leaves’, and ‘photolithographs of 29 patterns of coloured bark cloth made by the Fijians.’[1] All of this took place in the pathological laboratory. The physiology of late 1890s Cambridge was rather more than the outcome of a set of careful experiments by British men working alone in isolated rooms.'