The Collection of Indian Surgical Instruments at the Karl Sudhoff Institute in Leipzig: Approaches (and Status) of Provenance and Object Research

This project report discusses a collection of Indian surgical instruments that were donated between 1907 and 1913 by the Indologist A.F. Rudolf Hoernle (1841–1918) to Karl Sudhoff (1853–1938) and which are now held in the collection of the Karl-Sudhoff-Institut für Ge-schichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften in Leipzig. As the history of indigenous Indian surgery in the colonial era is not a well-researched subject, understanding these objects is a challenge and requires recourse to multiple approaches. This project report sketches out approaches to examine these instruments based on their ma te-ri ality as well as the written documentation surrounding them and presents some preliminary findings.