A1. Human Remains in and for Historical Research. What Can We Do?Chair: JoAnn Zeise, University of South Carolina
- Hugo Rueda Ramirez, McGill University: Ethics of Care in the Medical Museum: From Caring About to Caring For WITHDRAWN
- Joanna Radin, Yale University School of Medicine, and Megann Licskai, Yale University: Brain Trust: Human Remains and Historical Praxis at an American Medical School
- Deborah Dubald, University of Strasbourg, and Tricia Close-Koenig, University of Strasbourg: Caring for the Neglected: Writing the History of the Strasbourg Histopathology Collections
This panel will bring together scholars from Europe and North America to address questions related to how historians (can) use collections of human remains – and how they can contribute to questions related to the sensitivities of legacy/historical human tissue collections. Ethical issues related to human remains and human tissues are often discussed within museum studies and anthropology, but there are not many medical historians engaged in the discussions, despite the fact that the questions are historically rooted. Medical historical studies address the history of medical collections and the many facets of death, bodies and medical practices, and this can be a way to confront ethics or questions of contestability.
Medical collections and medical museums are places of heritage and preserve human remains, that is they are places rich in materiality and historicity. Although the origins are always traced to a biomedical collecting way of knowing, their current state and status is varied: from wholly neglected to properly preserved and curated, from scientifically obsolete and isolated from medical spheres to integral place in an anatomy department. In all cases, the notion of heritage, as a common good to be passed on from one generation to the next, can be contemptuous when speaking of human remains, medical or otherwise. Heritage can be criticized for conveying a universalist viewpoint, where in fact human remains are deeply situated. Situated histories are an important part in evaluating and undertaking historical perspectives of medical collections, be it a history of a collection or of the individual preparations in a collection. This panel will bring together ongoing work by historians, the practicalities and difficulties of working with historical human materials, as a means of drawing out just where sensitivities lie and what to do with them.
