entific 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 be autopsied and dissected into specimens for study and display. The article also highlights why museums were established at many medical colleges in the nineteenth century to promote and give credibility to the medical profession.
Wendi A. Lindquist, “Stealing from the Dead: Scientists, Settlers, and Indian Burial Sites in Early-Nineteenth-Century Oregon,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 115, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 324–343.
After Chinook leader Comcomly died in 1830, his skull was stolen from his grave in 1835 by Hudson Bay Company physician Meredith Gairdner. It was sent to fellow physician John Richardson in Great Britain, where it became part of the museum at the Royal Naval Hospital in Haslar, England. Wendi A. Lindquist centers the story of Comcomly’s skull, from its theft to its display and journey to the Smithsonian Institution in 1956 and finally to its reinterment in 1972, in an examination of the use of looted skulls in the racist pseudoscience of phrenology and how remains and objects taken from graves became the basis of this research in museums in the nineteenth century. Writing about the US Exploring Expedition that collected “ethnographical specimens” for the future Smithsonian Institution, Lindquist observes that “although the museum planned to allow scholars access to the objects, the skulls would serve primarily as symbols of the strange and ‘savage’ people encountered throughout the voyage.”
Louis Menand, “Morton, Agassiz, and the Origins of Scientific Racism in the United States,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 34 (Winter 2001–2002): 110–113.
American physician Samuel George Morton used the hundreds of human skulls he collected—now the Samuel G. Morton Cranial Collection at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology—to classify and rank human races by their supposed measurements. His racist and scientifically unsound studies were widely published and circulated. Louis Menand highlights how this scientific racism influenced Swiss-born biologist Louis Agassiz when h