Who was Gertrude van Wagenen?
Those who knew her well called her “Dr. Van” or just “Van.” She was a pioneer in primate research and a leading expert in reproductive endocrinology. At Yale, she worked (unsalaried) as a “Research Assistant, with the rank of Instructor” and later as a “Lecturer” (1960) in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology in the School of Medicine. But these titles understate her achievements. By the end of her largely self-funded career, Van had established an internationally renowned Rhesus macaque breeding colony, published 124 scientific papers, co-authored two books for Yale Press (Embryology of the Ovary and Testis in 1965 and Postnatal Development of the Ovary in 1973), and developed the first proof-of-concept for a “morning-after” contraception pill.
Van was an extraordinary collector, both professionally and personally. Inside the lab, she collected data from 1,261 monkeys across fifteen generations. Outside of the lab, her collecting was equally impressive. Friends describe how she acquired “books, pictures, old silver, China, and other objects of art” with particular attention to “the rare, the curious, and the beautiful.” But Van was also a collector who ended her own collections. She terminated her primate colony in 1977 and her object collecting, by 1940.
Anatomy of a Collector underscores this perspective. Instead of celebrating Van as collector or exploring the breadth of her interests, it revisits the institutional choices that reshaped her once varied collection into a single story about anatomy. The exhibition presents “the rare, the curious, and the beautiful” works associated with her name not as a reflection of her full life and passions, but as anatomized parts. It showcases a legacy both constructed and constrained by its fragments.