Of Bison and Taxidermy: Biography of a Practical Zoologist Augustus Szusterus

Abstract

The article is devoted to the biography of Augustus Szusterus (circa 1805 — not earlier than 1871), the keeper of the zoological cabinet at the Vilna Medical and Surgical Academy (1835–1841), and then the University of St Vladimir in Kiеv (1842–1870). By using his life as a case-study, we analyse the career of an “invisible technician” in Russian higher education of the 19th century. Szusterus was one of the best taxidermists who worked for the academic community in the Russian Empire in the second third of the 19th century. He was a student of Ludwig Bojanus, a preeminent comparative anatomist, and of Felix Brunner, a skilled taxidermist. His legacy are museum exhibits that were made as skin-mount over sculpture, the technique that was (as it’s believed) developed only in the late 19th and in the early 20th century; in particular, several European bison mounted by him have been preserved till nowadays. The professors with whom Szusterus worked in Vilna and Kiev hardly mentioned his name in their annual reports and other documents, although it is quite obvious that without his assistance, both their educational and scientific activities would have been significantly obstructed. We collected information about Szusterus from scratches by using the documents from four countries. The most informative documents that we managed to find were about his work on European bison that served as valuable objects of museum exchange and even diplomatic gifts in the 1830s and 1840s. It was due to these documents that it became possible to restore Szusterus’ name to the history of zoology.