Exhibition created by Jadranka Sulić Šprem and Ana Kuzman
Duration: from March 31, 2014
About the exhibition: The exhibition To the Honour of the City shows the history of the Museum itself in the period between 1860 and 1918, in other words, the time of the foundation of the Museum and the work of two very prominent personalities, Antun Drobac and Baldo Kosić. The Patriotic Museum (Museo Patrio) was founded at a session of the Commune Council on January 26, 1872, the grand opening coming in April the following year in the great hall of the Palace of the Commune, 2nd floor. Antun Drobac, after studying pharmacy in Padua, returned to Dubrovnik and opened a pharmacy in 1832. He collected bivalves, minerals, fish, snakes and various objects that were of cultural and historical interest. His collection, supplemented with objects from the collection of the Chamber of Commerce and Trades, formed the basis for the foundation of the Patriotic Museum. After learning of the insecticidal activity of pyrethrum or Tanacetum cineraria folium (Trevier.) Sch. Bip., he became the first serious producer and the first merchant in the powder made from dried pyrethrum petals. The production and sale was of great economic importance for the Dubrovnik area and for the whole of Dalmatia. He kept up with the state of the art in pharmacy and prepared ether for the first operation performed under ether inhalation narcosis, in Dubrovnik, just 10 months after the first such operation ever was conducted in Boston. After his studies in Genoa , Kosić returned to Dubrovnik, where he worked as a teacher of calligraphy and drawing, in elementary and later in high schools. After the death of Drobac he was unanimously elected Museum director. He kept a detailed inventory book in which a total of 1644 entries are written in order. Most of the entries that he made are of natural objects, i.e., objects that constituted the first collections of birds, fish, molluscs, reptiles and amphibians as well as mammals of the Dubrovnik region. He determined the objects himself and also conserved them; his great proficiency in making his dermoplastic preparations has been admired by experts from at home and abroad. He published scientific papers about the objects and collections that he had processed.
