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 at the University of St Vladimir, Kyiv (1842–1870). By using his life as a case-study, we analyse the career of an “invisible technician” in Russian higher education during 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 pre-eminent comparative anatomist, and of Felix Brunner, a skilled taxidermist. His legacy consists of museum exhibits that were made as skin-mount over sculpture, the technique that was (it is 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 today. The professors with whom Szusterus worked in Vilna and Kyiv 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 more difficult. We collected fragments of information about Szusterus by using archival material in various cities. The most informative documents that we managed to find were about his work on mounts and skeletons of European bison that served as valuable objects of museum exchange and even diplomatic gifts in the 1830s and 1840s. Thanks to these documents on mounting bison for museums it has become possible to restore Szusterus’ name to the history of zoology.