In his much-regarded article on "Museums of the Future" from 1933 Otto Neurath took a stand against museums as spaces for the mummification of knowledge, where visitors are invited to marvel at the peculiarities of an era long past. Instead of studying the originals with expert eyes, he suggested, museums makers should adapt content and form of the displayed knowledge to the everyday world of the observer. His proposal aimed at the implementation of a new object culture in the museum. For Neurath that implied abandoning the traditional and disciplinary knowledge order for the benefit of contemporary and application-oriented presentations, in which objects were supposed to fulfil a dual task: in addition to conveying knowledge, practices and insights they acted at the same time as the very vehicle of communication. In Neurath’s view this ideal had been realised in the new type of museums for technology, sociology and hygiene, in which he also included his Viennese Museum of Society and Economy with the Vienna Method of pictorial statistics (Iater known as Isotype). The characteristic features of these museums were the in-house production of their exhibits in proper workshops and their educational commitment. The latter was achieved with models, reconstructions, wall charts and demonstration apparatuses aimed to illustrate abstract and complicated procedures, and to make them understandable for the visitors. These were often asked to activate the exhibits themselves in order to convey the functionality of machines, social processes or the human body.

In my paper I use Neurath’s to date canonical contribution to museum theory as a starting point to position historically the German Hygiene Museum founded in 1912 in Dresden. In keeping with Helmuth Trischler’s positioning of the museum of technology I will interpret the foundation of this institution not only in the context of industrialisation processes but also as the product and force of the modern knowledge-based society at the turn of the century. Distinctive for this were, among other features, the scientification of the lifeworld as well as a close link between science and public. Here the orientation towards the present and application resulted in a celebration of the modern welfare state, and the development of innovative presentation techniques of the human body aimed at the instrument-based complete visualization of its hazards, for instance, in physiological control devices or the so-called models of the transparent man. Following recent studies on historical object culture in the science museum I will discuss, how the reconstruction of exhibitions and object ensembles can contribute to a cultural history of the sciences in the twentieth century.