Lecture | COGLOSS Seminar
Petrus Camper’s Research on Elephants: Cabinets, Menageries, and the Zoology of Exotic Animals in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch
- Date
- Wednesday 12 November 2025
- Time
- Series
- COGLOSS Seminars 2024-2025
- Location
-
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden - Room
- Conference room (2.60)
Abstract
In the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic, elephants were regarded as remarkable exotic animals from Asia and Africa. This paper examines how such animals were perceived and studied within Dutch intellectual culture, focusing on the eminent anatomist Petrus Camper (1722–1789). Specifically, the paper highlights how Petrus Camper’s Dutch base, with its connection to Asia and Africa, helped advance his research. In the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic, elephants were regarded as remarkable exotic animals from Asia and Africa. This paper examines how such animals were perceived and studied within Dutch intellectual culture, focusing on the eminent anatomist Petrus Camper (1722–1789). Specifically, the paper highlights how Petrus Camper’s Dutch base, with its connection to Asia and Africa, helped advance his research.
The first section analyses the publications on elephants by Petrus Camper and his son, Adriaan Camper (1759–1820). Following Petrus Camper’s dissection of a male elephant in 1774, he published the reports in Dutch and German. However, his submission to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris was rejected. He continued his research on elephants throughout his life. After his death, Adriaan Camper published a French monograph on elephant species in 1802, with the aim of prompting a reassessment of his father’s achievements.
The second and third sections investigate the scholarly practices and cultural activities that supported Petrus Camper’s investigations, notably the procurement of living animals and anatomical material. The second section examines menageries as sites of observation and modelling. Willem V, the stadtholder of the Dutch Republic and a patron of science, maintained a menagerie, in which elephants from Ceylon, dispatched by officers of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), were displayed. Petrus Camper was invited to study living specimens there and to produce models.
The third section addresses the culture of collecting for natural history cabinets. As was typical among eighteenth-century naturalists, Petrus Camper maintained such a cabinet. He energetically collected elephant specimens for his cabinet, some of which were acquired through VOC officers and ivory merchants active in Dutch port cities.
About the speaker
Chisa Mizobuchi is a PhD student in the Department of Asian History at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, where she began her studies in 2023. Her research focuses on cross-cultural history, with a particular emphasis on elephants in India from the early sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Her recent works in Japanese include “Crossing the Cultures of Asia and Europe in the Early Modern Period: A Case Study of Elephants with Turrets in the European Visual Arts” (Comparative Civilization: Journal of the Japan Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, 39, 2023) and “Studies of Elephants by John Corse, Surgeon of the British East India Company: An Analysis of the Formation and Transfer of Knowledge between India and Western Europe around 1800” (The Journal of the Research Department of Toyo Bunko, 106(1), 2024).