In October 2023, the American Museum of Natural History in New York announced that it would remove all human remains currently on public view; these displays represent a fraction of the remains of around 12,000 individuals in its collections. The decision comes alongside increased scrutiny over how museums present and steward human remains, from public displays of anatomy and pathology at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia and the Hunterian Museum in London to collections long in storage with connections to eugenics and scientific racism like a brain collection at the Smithsonian Institution. A report by ProPublica published in January 2023 stated that decades after the 1990 passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), more than 110,000 remains of Native American, Native Hawaiian, and Alaska Natives are still in museums, universities, and federal agencies.
Whether ancient mummies taken from Egypt, shrunken heads from South America facilitated by violent colonial trading, anatomical specimens obtained without consent, or bones looted from graves, presenting human remains in the setting of a museum has regularly turned individuals into objects. Questions over their value for research continue to come into conflict with the ethics of possessing the dead, especially as those who were posthumously turned into museum objects rarely had the same power as those who were collecting their remains. This JSTOR reading list includes a range of views on this broad topic of human remains in museums, including examinations of the rise of anatomical museums, the limitations of current repatriation laws, the frequently racist histories of these collections, and the connection of newer displays like Body Worlds to this lineage of displaying the human body for both science and entertainment.
Ellen Adams, “Defining and Displaying the Human Body: Collectors and Classics during the British Enlightenment,” Hermathena 187 (Winter 2009): 65–97.
Ellen Adams examines how art and medicine overlapped during the 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, sci