Medicine’s Hall of Fame & Museum in Shawnee, Kansas, is closed, and its thousands of items are up for auction.
Dr. Bruce Hodges, 90, began collecting medical memorabilia as a hobby about 55 years ago. It started, he says, “as one item here and one item there,” until he had a handful of items to fill a curio cabinet in his waiting room.
And he kept adding to it.
“It just kind of grew accidentally until I became a serious collector,” he says, “and I’ve accumulated over 5,000 artifacts.”
Those artifacts are now up for auction.
Hodges earned a medical degree from the University of Kansas and started practicing medicine in 1964. He and his wife, Cathy, who also has a medical background, served tours as medical missionaries in Africa, where he kept collecting.
Once his collection reached 1,000 to 2,000 items, Hodges says he started looking for a building.
Medicine’s Hall of Fame & Museum opened March 1, 2020, at the former site of the Johnson County Museum in Shawnee, Kansas, but closed a week later due to COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns.
In October, the museum closed for good due to low attendance and financial challenges.
Online bidding on the collection is open through Mayo Auction and Realty, of Belton, Missouri. In-person previews will take place Friday from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Bidding on items will close on Monday, Nov. 7, Wednesday, Nov. 9, and Thursday, Nov. 10.
Auctioneer Robert Mayo says it’s a unique situation.
“You never see this vast of a collection sell all at once,” Mayo says. “In fact, you’re never going to see this type of collection be sold ever again, because it’s not one collection, it’s multiple collections.”
The inventory is divided into four categories: antiquities, Africa and Egypt, Native America and apothecary.
“And so it does take a lot of work, for sure, to catalog it and present it to all the collectors across the country that are interested in bidding on the different types of items here,” says Mayo.
There’s a 1915 Ford Model T touring car, and a doctor’s saddle bag from the 1880s with original medications. Also included are two 1940s iron lungs, one designed for children, that were once staples in polio treatment.
“And it’s very, very rare,” Hodges says of the pediatric iron lung. “Probably not another one outside of the Smithsonian Institution.”
Other items in the collection include an assortment of patent medicines, such as “miracle cures” or tonics for liver and kidney conditions, an early 1900s shrunken head from the Jivaro tribe of Ecuador and Peru, and an 1870s wood and rawhide medicine drum used by the Chippewa tribe.
Hodges says he’s disappointed the “gem of a museum” didn’t really take off as a tourist destination — he sunk his own money into the venture to keep it going.
“But finally (I) just ran out of capital to sustain it,” he says. “So, it’s on the auction block.”
Hodges and his wife recently downsized, and he says they just don’t have the space to keep any items from the collection. But he hopes that others, maybe even some budding collectors, will enjoy it.
“People would just be amazed at the collection. And it is quite a variety, if I do say so,” he says. “There’s just nothing like it in the area for a hundred miles — even beyond that. It is a very unusual collection.”
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