Boerhaave Museum's history began in 1907, when a Historical Exhibition of Natural Science and Medicine was held in the Academy Building [nl] of Leiden University.

[4] In 1928 a foundation was initiated by physicist Claude August Crommelin, who worked at Leiden university, for a museum for the history of natural sciences.

It was renamed to "The Dutch National Museum for the History of the Natural Sciences" (Rijksmuseum voor de Geschiedenis van Natuurwetenschappen).

The result is science with a human face, inspiring curiosity and amazement as well as engaging a wide public in debates on important scientific and ethical questions issues of our time.

A small collection of objects (largely Egyptian antiquities) that survived from the now gone Leiden Theatrum (one of the oldest museums of Europe [citation needed]) are shown as well.

[12] Four large allegoric paintings (± 1610) show in stages how the appreciation of a patient for his physician declines, from being a true savior when the illness is at its height, towards being a devil when the bill has been delivered.

This large room is dedicated to physician, botanist and chemist Herman Boerhaave, physicist Willem 's Gravesande and instrument-maker Jan van Musschenbroeck.

Air pumps (1670–1730) and demonstration devices, notably several Magdeburg hemispheres, were made to explore the properties of the newly discovered vacuum.

Carl Linnaeus published his famous Systema Naturae in 1735, during his 3-year stay in the Dutch Republic, in which he also earned a degree in medicine, and closely worked together with Boerhaave.

The room is conamed after the brothers van Mussenbroeck: Pieter a professor, credited with the invention of the first capacitor in 1746: the Leyden jar, and Jan a famous instrument maker, who shipped his hand crafted precision thermometers all over Europe.

Several wooden cabinets with microscopic slides are testimony of the craftsmanship than went into collections of ready made samples, which at the time were highly fashionable among well-to-do citizens who took an interest in scientific developments.

The room is dedicated to famous 18th-century anatomist Bernhard Siegfried Albinus and his brother and successor Frederik Bernhard Albinus, showing a few of the over 750 wet and dry anatomical samples that Bernhard Siegfried collected, and a wide variety of medical instruments (most 1670–1700) collected by his brother: several amputation saws and knives, cauterizing irons, a wide variety of forceps and clamps, spatulas, an elevator, a bullet extractor and brace, several (drill) crowns, two drills, a lenticular, several elevatoriums, a chuck key, a coach screw, a retractor, lithotomy scoops, a Phimosis knife, gorgerets, a catheter, a bistoury cache, a combined syringotome and seton needle, a wound retractor, lithotomy directors, probes, a tobacco enema Sebald Justinus Brugmans was a Dutch botanist, physician and professor of natural sciences.

Shown are a collection of 19th century animal organ specimens (protected against decay with wax and varnish) which had been prepared for research (e.g. comparative anatomy), and educational purposes (e.g. veterinarian school).

Part of the collection in the room was prepared by Jan van der Hoeven (1802–1868), professor of Zoology, Comparative Anatomy, Anthropology, Mineralogy and Geology at the University of Leiden.

Van der Hoeven studied members of 'exotic races' (as it was called at the time), and produced a large amount of visual materials (drawings, engravings, lithographs).

Devices to study, demonstrate and explain the physical qualities of light: prisms and lenses, a heliostat and carbon arc lamp (with clockwork)(1820–1870).

A collection of applied optics: a camera, sextant, stereoscope, several telescopes, mechanical lantern slides, a repeating reflecting circle (?

), a phantascope (two discs, one with slits, one with images, which when rotating in opposite directions create a cinematographic effect), a projection lantern (1770–1860).

French doctor Louis Auzoux (1797–1870) pioneered the use of papier-mâché for highly detailed and colored anatomical models, with detachable parts, which allowed mass production for educational purposes.

Dutch scientist Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff (1852–1911) was the first person to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for his discovery of the laws of chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure in solutions.

Also a variety of elementary equipment for a chemical laboratory: a distilling apparatus for water (1860), dilatometers, thermometers, hydrometers, alcohol meters, an oleometer, a colorimeter (1880), pycnometers (some with thermometer), pipettes, burettes, volumetric flasks, a boiling flask, a spectral burner and spectroscope (1880), polarimeters, a kipp generator (1850), sample collections of experimental chemicals (some in wooden boxes), an evaporating basin, gas burners, an oxyhydrogen voltmeter, apparatus for electrolysis, an analytical balance, cork presses, a refractometer (1910), a flash point apparatus for petroleum, a circular slide rule.

Also large (from today's perspective) devices, mostly made from wood and copper, to measure and display electricity (1900–1930): volt meters, a resistance box, radio valves, a universal bridge, mirror galvanometers, a quadrant electrometer .

Equipment to study the properties of light (and radio waves in general), including the wave–particle duality (most 1900–1910): a slit, a polarizer, a photo-electric cell, a Fresnel double mirror, lenses, an induction coil, a photosensitive resistor, a spectroscope, an oscillograph, a wireless receiver, a microphone, standards of self-induction.

Also Zeeman's Nobel Prize diploma and medal and a lab diary, an electromagnet with polar pieces, 3D plaster models to visualize thermodynamic properties (e.g. phase transitions).

Pieces at display include: a gigantic microtome, the first heart-lung machine (prototype) by inventor Jacob Jongbloed (1948), the first kidney dialysis machine by inventor Willem Johan Kolff, X-ray equipment, an iron lung, galvanometer tools, a bow and arrow used to draw ultra thin quartz fibres (by shooting away a droplet of molten quartz), the original golden Nobel Prize medal from Willem Einthoven (for developing the first practical electrocardiogram in 1903) The room houses two electron microscopes (1947–1950) and related equipment (gold vaporiser, lens, object holders, a cooler, a goniometer), a collection of compound and specimen microscopes (some binocular) (1840–1870) plus accompanying microscope lamps and a tool box, a binocular polarisation microscope (1850), several microtomes (a.o.

The museum also contains a fountain pen that was gifted in 1921 by Albert Einstein to Paul Ehrenfest, then the director of the physics faculty of Leiden University.