The life story of the Zenker lung

Workshop on specimens of human origin in university collections

At the workshop on specimens of human origin in university collections at the Charité Museum of Medical History on 10-11 March 2025, Lisa Stache, preparator at the Institute of Anatomy, and Sarah Wagner, research assistant at the FAU CDI and in TA6 at NFDI4Objects, presented their results on the object biography of the iron dust lung or so-called Zenker’s lung, which is located in the FAU Pathological Collection under inventory number PS 091/09.

In the context of collection cataloguing and provenance research as well as in the course of developing data models for the NFDI4Objects, the two are attempting to reconstruct the object history of the collection item. At the same time, the aim is to develop a use case for the representation of human remains based on the concept of the object biography and to further develop the digital cataloguing of collections at FAU. With the object biography as a data model, the events of the ‘life story’ of an object and the associated actors, places, time and sources come to the fore, which is why the concept not only serves to index and integrate heterogeneous and distributed data, but is also of particular importance for provenance research.

Further information and a report on the workshop can be found here.