Reuniting a Victorian anatomical model with its missing femur

The ask

The library's teaching collection included a full-length écorché anatomical figure attributed to the workshop of Dr. Louis Auzoux, produced in Paris between 1872 and 1878. It had lived quietly in a glass case on the top floor for a century, used sparingly for lectures, kept out of direct sunlight.

The left femur was wrong. Sometime in the 1930s — the exact date isn't recorded, though a note in the accession ledger blames "damage during the transfer from the Old High School" — the original wax femur had been replaced with a plaster copy, painted to approximate the surrounding tissue. It didn't fool anyone. The plaster was heavier, the colour off, the anatomical detail flattened.

The library wanted the figure returned to its 1878 state. That meant a wax femur, cast from an original Auzoux mould, ideally from the same production window.

A plaster leg on a wax body is a compromise. Compromises are fine. But we've been looking at this one for ninety years and it's time to stop.

The search

Auzoux's Paris workshop closed in the 1990s after a long slow decline. The moulds, the wax formulas, and the surviving stock were scattered across a handful of European specialists, most of whom trained under the last generation of Auzoux artisans. We identified three: a conservator in Lyon, a private restorer in Utrecht, and a small studio in Bologna that had taken in a shipment of workshop material in 2003.

The Lyon conservator had moulds but no cast pieces from the correct period. She offered to produce a new femur from period-appropriate wax, but the client — reasonably — wanted a piece with the same age, the same craquelure, the same slow oxidation. A new cast would look new for another eighty years.

Utrecht had nothing useful. The restorer there had rebuilt several Auzoux torsos but had never handled a full skeletal cast.

Bologna was the third call. The studio's principal, a woman named Elena, remembered a stripped model — a partial figure, badly damaged in a flood, that had come in as spare parts fifteen years earlier. She thought the left femur might still be intact.

The find

Elena sent photographs the following week. The stripped figure had lost its head, its right arm, and most of its torso wax to water damage, but the lower limbs had been protected by a fallen shelf. The left femur was complete, catalogued under Auzoux's own numbering as piece 47b, and stamped with a workshop mark dating it to 1874 — within four years of the Edinburgh figure.

The proportions matched to within two millimetres. The wax composition, tested by a small sample sent to a lab in Ghent, was consistent with the Edinburgh model's surviving pieces. The colouring had aged along a nearly identical curve.

Elena did not want to sell the femur alone. She sold us the entire stripped figure, on the understanding that we would preserve the remaining fragments for future restoration work. We agreed. The remaining pieces are now in our own reference cabinet, catalogued and available.

The delivery

The femur travelled from Bologna to Edinburgh in a wooden crate lined with acid-free tissue and temperature-logged for the duration. A conservator at the medical school performed the fitting over three days in late February. The plaster copy was removed, retained in the library's archive with its original 1930s repair notes, and the wax piece was set into place.

The seams were dressed with tinted beeswax. The final match, under the case's low tungsten light, is invisible at reading distance.

The figure is whole again. Students walk past it and don't notice anything. That is the highest praise a restoration can receive.