ABSTRACT To date historians have regarded the museum in the mid-nineteenth-century patent office building as a curious if not negligible precursor to the Smithsonian National Museum, which ultimately inherited its collections. This paper rejects this teleological interpretation by viewing the collections through the eyes of their progenitor and long-time custodian, John Varden, whose personal collections formed the kernel of the great cabinet. Varden’s personal collection of the hair of US presidents and distinguished persons, and its subsequent display and concealment, provides a heuristic to examine prevailing ideologies about the value of museum collections with respect to science and history. The displacement of curiosity by typicality and presentation by representation banished Victorian relic culture from the modern national museum’s displays.

中文翻译：

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专利局大楼博物馆名人发

摘要 迄今为止，历史学家将 19 世纪中叶专利局大楼中的博物馆视为史密森国家博物馆的一个奇特的前身，如果不是可以忽略不计的话，史密森国家博物馆最终继承了其藏品。本文通过其祖先和长期保管人约翰·瓦登（John Varden）的眼光看待这些藏品，拒绝了这种目的论解释，他的个人藏品构成了大内阁的核心。Varden 对美国总统和名人头发的个人收藏，以及随后的展示和隐藏，提供了一种启发式方法，可以检验关于博物馆藏品在科学和历史方面的价值的流行意识形态。