e 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 he visited Morton and his collection in 1846, writing that “Morton’s skulls had made an impression. But Morton’s ideas about race were also appealing to Agassiz because they were entirely consistent with his own theory of natural history.”
Ricardo Roque, “Authorised Histories: Human Remains and the Economies of Credibility in the Science of Race,” Kronos 44 (November 2018): 69–85.
Collections of human remains and skulls, like those amassed by Morton and others now housed in museums, were meant to be contextualized with biographical data as part of their support of scientific racism. The information that was included or specifically left out was controlled by the collectors to support these beliefs. As Ricardo Roque argues, it is “time to rewrite histories for these collections, to give them a present and a future beyond the tropes of the colonial and racialised ‘little histories’ usually associated with them,” especially when this data is continuing to be used by current scholars and for repatriation.
Friedrich Pöhl, “Assessing Franz Boas’ Ethics in His Arctic and Later Anthropological Fieldwork,” Études Inuit Studies 32, no. 2 (2008): 35–52.
In examining influential anthropologist Franz Boas’s collecting for museums, which included the exploitation of people in the Arctic and desecration of Northwest Coast graves, Friedrich Pöhl situates his practices during a time of high demand for human remains for museums in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “People violated ethical and religious boundaries without a second thought,” Pöhl writes, “ignoring completely the meaning the dead of a supposedly primitive culture might hold for the living.” Boas’s research trips included work for the American Museum of Natural History, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the Bureau of American Ethnology, the United States National Museum, and others, with Pöhl quoting Boas himself as stating, “Besides having scientific value these skeletons are worth money.”
Steven Lee Rubenstein, “Circulation, Accumulation, 