Since the company was founded in 1867, Aesculap has collected and systematically recorded a large proportion of its manufacturing patterns, catalogues and brochures. Some, predominantly older models and products have been purchased to complete the instruments, power systems and implants produced at the Tuttlingen headquarters so as to appropriately reflect the history and development of modern medical technology, upon which Aesculap, among others, has had a decisive influence.
An impressive collection of over five thousand surgical and medico-technical articles has thus been assembled over the decades. From this resource, the new Asclepius Surgery Museum displays a selection of around eight hundred objects of particular historical importance from the technical or medical point of view. This unique facility permits Aesculap to reflect its own contribution to the rich and varied history of the development of modern medical technology. At the same time, it provides specialists and lay people a multi-faceted insight into an area virtually untouched by historical research, in which traditional hand crafts and skills have been twinned with the engineering spirit and the empirical knowledge of the healing professions.
It is obvious that medical progress can be neither described nor understood without taking into account progress in medical technology. And this progress has accelerated in the recent past in an almost unimaginable manner, thanks to the creative interplay between pure scientific research, medical practice, strength in technical innovation and industrial expertise.
Aesculap has played no small role in this development, and is concerned, through the Asclepius Surgery Museum, to keep alive the history of the company's products whilst at the same time making an original contribution to the awareness of the modern science and information based society of the importance of the past.
