- Tickets: Student DKK 95 / Standard DKK 145
- A Hypochondriac Ticket gives you access to all three Evening Consultations at a healing discount (DKK 395). Buy a Hypochondriac Ticket here
- After the talks, we’ll offer a glass of sparkling wine (included in the ticket), and the museum’s exhibitions will remain open until 9 pm.
- The talks will be in Danish.
Evening Consultation: Mole Fat and Monkey Testicles – Can Animals Cure Humans?
From beaver secretions for treating rheumatism to mice baked in pastry to cure bedwetting. Humans have used animals to treat illnesses for as long as we can remember. At this Evening Consultation, we’ll explore the use of animals in folk medicine before taking a look inside the laboratory, where cutting-edge research on monkey testicles is investigating the problem of declining male fertility.
What were the ashes of a burnt viper or secretions from a beaver’s rear end supposed to cure? For more than 800 years of Danish history, early doctors and folk healers have offered remedies for all kinds of ailments. Inge Kjær Kristensen is an archaeologist and cultural historian who has researched traditions of folk medicine and the use of animals and human body parts since the 1990s. Drawing on her book Bævergejl og muldvarpefedt (Beaver Secretions and Mole Fat), she will explore the surprising remedies of folk medicine – many of which seem strange, bizarre or downright hair-raising to us today.
Male fertility is declining – could our close relatives, the great apes, help us understand why? Why are humans so poor at producing sperm when ape sperm is so lively? This is being investigated by Professor Kristian Almstrup from the University of Copenhagen and Rigshospitalet, together with an international team of researchers. They have the world’s largest collection of great ape testicles and study testicular tissue from chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. Great apes share much of their genetic makeup with humans, and looking inside their testicles can tell us more about our own biology – and the future of human fertility. Could evolutionary forces even be at play?
Speakers:
Inge Kjær Kristensen, archaeologist, cultural historian, author and senior researcher at Museum Salling
Kristian Almstrup, Professor at the Department of Growth and Reproduction at Rigshospitalet and the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Copenhagen
Evening Consultations at the Medical Museion – Autumn 2026
We humans are constantly searching for new knowledge about ourselves. How can we treat disease? How does the body work? How can we heal our ailments? To develop new medicines and better understand human physiology, we often turn to the animal kingdom for answers. This season of Evening Consultations explores what animals can teach us about the human body, health and medicine.
We’ll go right inside researchers’ laboratories and explore how everything from ants to large marine mammals can help us understand ourselves. What do monkey testicles have to do with declining male fertility? Can mole fat and burnt viper cure disease and other ailments? Can a fish make the human heart beat in sync? Can ants help solve the problem of antibiotic resistance? Can you CT-scan a whale and learn more about how the human body heals? These are just some of the questions we’ll explore during this autumn’s Evening Consultations.
About Evening Consultations
The Evening Consultations at the Medical Museion are a series of talks in which experts and researchers explore and take the pulse of the past, present and future of health science. Evening Consultations are recommended for the incurably curious and anyone looking for a little food for thought.
The Evening Consultations take place in the 1787 auditorium, originally built as the Royal Academy of Surgery. After the consultation, we recommend enjoying a glass of sparkling wine and taking a stroll through the museum’s exhibitions.
Remember that a Hypochondriac Ticket gives you access to all three events at a healing discount.
