This article analyses how samples of pathological anatomies were transformed into collectible objects in 19th-century Mexico, revealing a process that involved multiple locations and the mixture of the practices of physicians, anthropologists, and amateur collectors. Historiography has focused on the Museo de Anatomía Patológica (Museum of Pathological Anatomy), an institution devoted to the training of medical students created in 1853 at the Escuela Nacional de Medicina (National School of Medicine) in Mexico City. Archival evidence shows that medical collections existed far (...) beyond this space; namely, in private collections and museums organized in the provinces by local physicians whose existence was overshadowed by the metropolitan institutions. As this article discusses, anatomical specimens connected these two circles around the question of how to define “Mexican pathologies.” Through an examination of the collections held at the Museum of Pathological Anatomy and the Museo Michoacano in Morelia in western Mexico, this article analyses those debates in a context where this evidence was also used to highlight the differences between Mexicans, Europeans, and people of indigenous ancestry. Whereas this conceptualization embodied the way in which diseases differentially affected the indigenous, mestizo, and Mexican peoples, for doctors in the provinces, “Mexican pathologies” also referred to anatomical signs of abnormalities or primitiveness in the indigenous population. Tracing the professional career of Dr. Nicolás León (1859–1929), a well-known collector and physical anthropologist, the paper describes the geography of the exchanges of anatomical specimens and the complex relationships that emerged among actors in the Mexican provinces and the capital as they sought to identify pathologies associated mainly with the local native population. In addition, it shows that the production and circulation of specimens of pathological anatomy were connected to a wider circle of providers that extended far beyond medical museums and experts in medicine, and who exhibited these Mexican pathologies as part of the—almost always unfinished—forging of the national. (shrink)