Monsters in the Cabinet explores the material, philosophical, and political afterlives of the human bodies (and their parts) populating the museums of early nineteenth century surgeons. I compare two contemporaneous surgeons–one in Paris, one in Amsterdam–who collected ‘monstrous’ human bodies with the belief that that these bodies provided unique insights into the secret workings of nature. Yet where one saw monsters as nature’s errors, the other saw them as nature’s creativity. Taking cues from disability studies, I explore how these different philosophical interpretations of monstrosity informed the development of state policies affecting living people with non-normative bodies. My work connects the rise of professional surgery, elite naturalist discourse, and marginalized lived experience by examining the afterlives of bodies entombed within anatomical displays.