he Enlightenment in Great Britain, including how human remains and fragments of ancient sculpture were presented together in house-museums formed by collectors. Her exploration of how Classical archaeological pieces were exhibited and the interest in classification and anatomy includes a discussion of surgeon John Hunter, whose collection is now at the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. “The process of naming or labelling objects in displays was standard for antiquities, while medical remains were deliberately de-personalized—the display of body parts was somewhat more palatable if they were objectified to the extent that they became anonymous,” Adams writes.
Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, “Objects and the Museum,” Isis 96, no. 4 (December 2005): 559–571.
Samuel J. M. M. Alberti’s broad survey of how the meaning of objects is changed when they enter museums includes a consideration of human remains, such as those in anatomical museums that were frequently acquired from patients at teaching hospitals without consent. “Human remains collected from elsewhere moved along the same acquisition routes as plants, animals, and books, in the process shifting from subject to object,” he writes. He also notes that the response to the display of human remains has shifted over time, as it has for other museum displays, based on the relationship between the viewer and what is exhibited and how.
Gabriel Moshenska, “Unrolling Egyptian Mummies in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” The British Journal for the History of Science 47, no. 3 (September 2014): 451–477.
In January 1834, surgeon Thomas Pettigrew hosted one of his events that were causing a sensation in London: a mummy unrolling. This Egyptian mummy, which was dramatically unfurled at the Royal College of Surgeons from its bandages for a public audience, then went on view at the Hunterian Museum. Gabriel Moshenska examines the spectacle of these human remains in nineteenth-century Britain. “Egyptian mummies were exotic objects, souvenirs, museum exhibits, scientific or medical specimens, experimental objects, archaeological sites, texts, cadavers and finally individuals: like the relics of saints, mummies were both people and things, parts and wholes,” he writes of these remains that continue to be showpieces for contemporary museums.
Lisa O’Sullivan and Ross L. Jones, “Two Australian Fetuses: Frederic Wood Jones and the Work of an Anatomical Specimen,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 89, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 243–266.
Human remains in museum collections have frequently been recognized as specimens rather than individuals, taking away their identities as parts of a family and community. It is in this context that Lisa O’Sullivan and Ross L. Jones consider the case of two Indigenous Australian fetal specimens who appear in a 1933 issue of the Journal of Anatomy and were described by British anatomist Frederic Wood Jones, who collected numerous remains of Aboriginal people that became part of several museums. “The fetuses take their place in broader debates about the use of dead body parts, particularly organs in medical practice; an understanding of postcolonial legacies of collections of Indigenous biological material; displays of human bodies and body parts in public contexts; and ownership of biological materials,” they state.
Stephen C. Kenny, “The Development of Medical Museums in the Antebellum American South: Slave Bodies in Networks of Anatomical Exchange,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 32–62.
“Museums are an important part of the story of the development of medical education and the medical profession in the United States, and the appropriation of slave bodies emerged as a central element of their growth in the South,” writes Stephen C. Kenny in an article that thoroughly investigates how enslaved people were used by medical colleges and to build museum collections. As Kenny emphasizes, this practice reinforced racial hierarchies in the American South, where white people had far more power in assuring their bodies would not b