Episode 24: The strange and fascinating history of the Anatomical Venus
00:51:33
Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg
Guest: Dr. Amanda Mahoney
Producer: Leila McNeill
Music: Fall asleep under the million stars by Springtide
Rate. Review. Subscribe.
The hosts dive into the long history of the Anatomical Venus, a three-dimensional life-sized dissectable female wax model. They discuss its origins in the Middle Ages and the lasting influence it has had on biological theories about race. Amanda Mahoney, curator of the Dittrick Medical History Center and Museum at at Case Western Reserve University, joins into to talk about the ethical considerations curators need to take into account in today’s museums.
Show Notes
The Anatomical Venus: Wax, God, Death & The Ecstatic by Joanna Ebenstein
Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection by Katharine Park
Replicating Venus: Art, Anatomy, Wax Models, and Automata by Corinna Wagner
“Indecent and Demoralising Representations”: Public Anatomy Museums in mid-Victorian England by A W Bates
The Lasting Influence of the Waxen Venus on Studies of Anatomy by Sarah Bond
Transcript
Transcription by Rev.com
Rebecca: Welcome to Episode 24 of the Lady Science Podcast. As always this podcast is a monthly deep dive on topics centered on women and gender in the history and popular culture of science. With you every month are the editors of Lady Science Magazine.
Anna: I'm Anna Reser, co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Lady Science. I'm a historian, writer, and editor studying 20th-century American culture and the history of the American Space Program.
Leila: I am Leila McNeill, the other founder and editor-in-chief of Lady Science.
Rebecca: And I'm Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science's managing editor. When I'm not working with the Lady Science team, I can be found talking about museums and public history around the internet, and in person around Philadelphia.
Rebecca: Today we're going to be talking about the fascinating and very strange history of women's dissection and the display of women's bodies in museums. In particular, we're going to be talking about the Anatomical Venus. And for those of you who aren't familiar with this, you're in for a bit of a wild ride. This is a pretty fascinating and wacky story. Later on in the show, Amanda Mahoney of the Dittrick Museum of Medical History will join us to talk about some of the issues that are wrapped up in displaying sensitive material in museums today.
Rebecca: But first, to get us started, let's travel back in time to 18th-century Florence and the workshop of the La Specola Museum. Between 1780 and 1782, Italian sculptor Clemente Susini created his first Anatomical Venus. It's sometimes called the Medici Venus or the Demountable Venus. So what was that, anyway? This was a highly realistic, life-size wax model of a naked woman that could be kind of "dissected" in seven layers. The seven layers started with the outermost level on the model's trunk area and ended with revealing a tiny little fetus curled up inside her womb.
Rebecca: But there's more. It gets weirder. She had a full head of human hair and also eyelashes made from human hair and glass eyes. For some reason, she wears a string of pearls around her neck, and her head is tilted back on a soft cushion, face slightly upturned, and she has a rather erotic expression, almost like she's in sexual ecstasy. And I wish I were kidding or exaggerating, but I'm not. If it couldn't get any creepier, because the Venus was made of wax, her skin looks kind of dewy and malleable. And so this thing is definitely veering into uncanny valley territory. And we'll be sure to include a link to a picture of one of these in the show notes because boy, oh boy. But for all of Susini's effort to make her realistic, he kind of forgot one thing. So earlier I said that when you take her apart there's a fetus inside her womb. But outwardly she shows no sign of being pregnant. So, so much for accuracy.
Rebecca: Susini wasn't the last person to create a wax model woman like this one. More versions of the Anatomical Venus followed. These sister Venuses are sometimes called Slashed Beauties or Dissected Graces. They differ in pose and appearance and some are frozen in different stages of dissection. Some are brunette, some are blonde. Some have an arm casually resting above their head to sort of sensually frame the lifeless face. Others have kind of both arms at their side in a much more passive position. Some have their eyes open, and some are closed.
Rebecca: But for all these differences their dissection all ends in the same place, with a fetus in the womb. You can still these Anatomical Venuses on display in museums in Europe today. In 2016, the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn featured some in a temporary exhibit. So, on behalf of baffled museum visitors who see the Venuses today, what the hell is going on here?
Anna: So in the 18th century, dissectable models weren't completely unheard of. Earlier iterations, though, were kind of smaller figurine-type of models that would be made from ivory or wood. Some were male figurines, but they were mostly women. And they also had a tiny fetus sometimes attached to the figurine by a red string, uh, umbilical cord, I guess? Also, so you don't lose it?
Leila: I think the umbilical cord is what they were going for.
Anna: Handy, though.
Rebecca: Yeah, it's probably useful for, like, not losing track of pieces.
Anna: Oh boy.
Leila: In case you give it to your toddler to play with.
Anna: So these kinds of models lacked the hyperrealism and anatomical detail and accuracy of Susini's because his intention in creating the Anatomical Venus was functional. The Anatomical Venus was meant to teach medical students, artists, and the general public about anatomy without sort of having... dissecting real bodies, real cadavers. So one of the big proponents of using wax models in lieu of cadavers was Felice Fontana. He was a natural philosopher and court physician to Leopold II. And Leopold himself instructed Fontana to oversee the creation of a new museum. He wanted to create the Museum for Physics and Natural History in Florence, which is more commonly known as La Specola.
Anna: So Fontana wanted to render the entire human body--organs, bones, muscles, everything--in wax and put it on display for the general public in La Specola. And with wax, Fontana said, "We would no longer need to conduct dissections and students, physicians, surgeons, and artists would be able to find their desired models in a permanent, odor-free and incorruptible state." So by simulating life with wax, they could conceal anatomy's relationship to death, which is distasteful for some people. In her book, The Anatomical Venus: Wax, God, Death & the Ecstatic, Joanna Ebenstein says, "The wax models produced by the workshop at La Specola were posed as if alive, healthy, and pain-free in an attempt to distance the study of anatomy from the contemplation of death and bloody internal organs."
Leila: Fontana's ideas for the perfect wax model became a reality when Clemente Susini became lead modeler at La Specola and created the Anatomical Venus. Susini and his workshop produced thousands of realistic wax models, and that included individual organs and body systems and stuff. But the Anatomical Venus was the crowning jewel of the museum. And drawing on the visage of the Roman goddess Venus likely added to the appeal of the wax model. Ebenstein says that Susini's choice to use the image of Venus "drew on the historical and artistic figure of the Roman goddess of love, beauty, and fertility, evoking a long history of paintings and sculptures of placid, idealized nudes."
Leila: And probably the most famous example we would recognize today of this kind of historical artistic imagining of the goddess is Botticelli's The Birth of Venus in which the goddess springs to life fully formed, like, sailing on an enormous seashell. In fact, the Anatomical Venus joined Botticelli's Venus on the list of stops on the European Grand Tour, which was a trip that upper-class European men and sometimes women took around the continent when they came of age.
Anna: See all our famous nudes.
Rebecca: Yep. Yep.
Leila: Europe's finest famous nudes.
Rebecca: We're joking but not joking.
Leila: But not really.
Rebecca: Not really. If you read about the Grand Tour it's basically, like, "Go look at a bunch of nudes and learn some science." So realism aside, the Anatomical Venus also embodied ideas and beliefs that were particular to the Enlightenment era. For one thing, Enlightenment scientists and philosophers were big proponents of public education, or at least education for citizens, and believed that education was a fundamental part of citizenship. So creating these realistic wax models and putting them in museums was seen as a way to educate the people in scientific principles and natural laws.
Rebecca: But according to these thinkers, understanding scientific principles didn't just make a person a better citizen, it brought them closer to God. So kind of an Enlightenment two-for-one. The human body was a product of divine creation and, so the thinking went, to understand the inner workings of the body was in a sense to peek into the mind of God. But the Anatomical Venus wasn't just any human body. It was specifically a female body... womb, fetus, and all. So that begs the question, why women? Why was the inside of a woman's body in particular supposed to reveal some deep truth about the universe?
Anna: To answer that question we have to go back in time again even further into the Late Middle Ages.
Leila: It's a place we rarely visit on this podcast.
Rebecca: It's true.
Anna: Hello.
Rebecca: Honestly.
Leila: Hello, Middle Ages.
Anna: It's Medieval Times.
Anna: It's like that Michael Crichton book. We're all going to get weird diseases. Though we now, most of us, know the details of how babies are made, that was not necessarily the case in the Middle Ages. People knew that the woman's womb is where a person's sex is shaped and the body is formed. But there was a great deal that they didn't know in terms of specifics, such as how boys and girls are actually made in there, in that cauldron. Why some women couldn't have babies at all, how to determine who was the father of the baby? These are questions that obviously have to do with the kind of particularly male preoccupation with patrilineal descent than, you know, maybe the larger mysteries of the universe. But they were mysteries nonetheless, and male writers and physicians thought that the key to unlocking them was hidden in the womb.
Anna: So issues of reproduction, generation, and paternity were the "secrets of women," big scare quotes. These things were considered to be secrets because, on the one hand, answers to these questions were largely unknown. But on the other, men also tended to think that women knew the answers and just weren't telling them and were hoarding all of this knowledge about their bodies for themselves and keeping it from men who wanted to know about it.
Rebecca: Which, like, not 100% wrong?
Anna: Katharine Park, in her book titled Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection... I have that subtitle memorized. She argues that the uterus took on symbolic weight that the male reproductive system just didn't. And part of that is because you can see all of the male reproductive system, for the most part. It's on the outside. Park says, "Understanding the secrets of women became one of the principal goals of 15th- and 16th-century medical writers, both because the topic was important in its own right and because it was thought that anyone who could probe the complicated and mysterious workings of the uterus would have little trouble understanding the rest of the comparatively simple human frame. This is why the womb appears as a, or arguably the, privileged object of dissection in medical images and texts."
Leila: And because the womb seemed like this unpenetrable cauldron of life, it was thought that only dissection could reveal its truths. And in this way, Park says that uterus came to stand in for the body's hidden interior. In fact, the first ever image in a printed book of an internal organ drawn from a dissected body was the interiority of a woman's body with, I'm sure you can guess it, a womb containing a tiny fetus. The image was titled Figure of the Uterus from Nature and was taken from the 1494 Italian text Fasciculo de medicina. And with few exceptions the anatomists who conducted these dissections of women's wombs were men. The message this sends, I think, is pretty clear: that women hold the secrets and men reveal them.
Leila: And so for Susini, by the time he comes onto the scene a couple centuries later, a Venus was likely the only logical choice as a subject for him. And when the Anatomical Venus was first revealed she was a big hit. But in the 19th century, the Venuses were viewed as more obscene and morbid than educational or spiritually uplifting. And, just overall, public anatomy museums were going out of vogue. Dissection and anatomy would still be used as training for surgeons and physicians, but there were concerns that anatomy "meddled in things it should not." Unlike in the Enlightenment era where most were agreed that the hidden interior of the body could teach divine knowledge, anatomists and museum proprietors of the 19th century weighed the possibility that anatomy and dissection encouraged atheism.
Rebecca: But the Venus didn't completely disappear from either anatomy or art during this time. She just took on different forms. One nineteenth-century version of Susini's Anatomical Venus was Pierre Spitzner's Sleeping Venus, created in 1860. She's still life-size with hair and eyes, but her expression is much more ambiguous than Susini's openly erotic depiction. The model is also clothed in a white nightgown covering her breasts, and her vagina is covered by a surgeon's hand wielding a scalpel.
Anna: Which, you know, that's better.
Rebecca: I know. It's, like, it's peak Victorians, I feel like.
Rebecca: She has only one small opening in her stomach where she's been clearly, cleanly cut open. And even though you can look inside the opening and see a fetus, it's this bloodless, organless cavern instead of the rather bloody affair of Susini's Venus. Elizabeth Stephens argues that this Sleeping Venus represents a "new view of maternity in which female pleasure has been erased from the scene and the vagina has been replaced by surgical instruments." She calls this the figure of the "passionless moral mother." And yeah, of course they did. Like, this is, I feel like, early modern and Enlightenment people, everything was just all out there and a little bit sexy, and then the mid-19th century rolls around and we can't have anymore of that.
Leila: Yeah. Like, still sexy, but secret.
Rebecca: Yeah. Yes, and lots of, like, imagery of, like, sex and morality mixed together in weird ways, yeah.
Anna: I like the difference between Susini's model and this later one that the inside of the body is just like a peephole and there's a fetus in there. But there's no guts. Like, there's no-
Rebecca: Right.
Anna: It's so weird that the one thing that's retained is the fetus because that's what is, you know, important or interesting, but not all of the, like, sort of anatomical workings of the uterus and how that supports the fetus or anything. It's just, like, it's in there. So you can look in there and that's where it goes. Okay, good.
Rebecca: Yeah.
Anna: No boobs out here!
Rebecca: Yeah, it fits very well, I feel like, with the Victorians and their obsession with both, like, cleanliness and also, like, moral purity of women in particular. Which is not to say that it's, like, worse than the other version, which is also really creepy, but just, you see the way that the views of women and views of the nature of the universe have changed even in just, like, a couple hundred years.
Rebecca: But even in the twentieth century, we have our own version of weirdness and the Venus because she hasn't entirely disappeared from anatomy or museums. You guys maybe remember the Body Worlds exhibition that toured around the world in the 1990s and early 2000s. Unsurprisingly, one of the female cadavers was a woman six months pregnant and she was posed reclining on her side with her arm reaching behind her head and pushing her breasts, wombs, and fetus forward towards the viewer, which frankly sounds kind of familiar to me.
Leila: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I remember seeing this in the museum.
Anna: In person?
Leila: In person, yeah.
Anna: Ugh.
Leila: And-
Rebecca: Yeah, I never... I was always like, "Nope."
Leila: This one and the one of the guy on the horse with the anatomy horse, those were the two where people just, like, crowded around and, like, I don't know... it gave me really weird feelings.
Anna: Yeah.
Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah.
Anna: Ugh.
Rebecca: And it's definitely one of those things where, not to get too deeply into it, but the more you learned about, like, how that exhibit came to be, the ickier the story around it became.
Leila: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
Rebecca: So yeah. It's a weird one.
Anna: So another important thing to remember about these images of anatomized bodies. They weren't just gendered, they were also racialized. In an article published in Hyperallergic earlier this year, Sarah Bond wrote about the influence that the Anatomical Venus has had on the study of race in biology. By reproducing the idealized form and facial dimensions of the European Venus, Enlightenment anatomists and artists of the 18th century sort of influenced early theories about biological race, which then became more formalized in the nineteenth century. Bond says that while standards of beauty for white women and white men continue to be likened to these marble Venuses and Apollos, the bodies of black people were compared to apes. And the contrast is made sort of really painfully clean when, in 1839, wax artist Antonio Sarti opened the Museum of Pathological Anatomy in London. The centerpiece of the museum was an Anatomical Venus and a wax Adonis, but the wax models of Africans were literally displayed with tails.
Rebecca: Oh boy.
Leila: And back in Episode 16 in our episode about colonialism and museums, we talked about the case of Sarah Baartman, a Khosian woman who was taken from her home in Africa to be studied by European anatomists and zoologists. And she became known in Europe as the Hottentot Venus for her reportedly large labia and buttocks. And scientists weren't just interested in anatomy to educate themselves and the public, they were also searching for human difference. Difference between men and women, and difference between white Europeans and brown and black indigenous people. Cuvier, George Cuvier from France, concluded that Baartman was a missing link between animals and humans and she represented a primitive form of humanity. And when she died, Cuvier had her body dissected preserving, among other things, her vulva. And so both the Anatomical Venus and the Hottentot Venus were meant to be sexual, but any sort of humanity given to the white Anatomical Venus was completely denied to Sarah Baartman, who was literally reduced to her sexual organs.
Rebecca: Which, like, she was the real person.
Leila: Right. Yeah, she was a real person.
Rebecca: That's the craziest thing about this. It's like she is compared and considered lesser than a weird creepy wax figure.
Anna: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah and this, like, extremely longstanding, like, millennia-longstanding idealization, stereotypification of the perfect white woman and, like... yeah.
Leila: Uh-huh.
Anna: It never seemed to occur to anybody that that image of perfection only existed in an artificial form. I don't know. It's so... the whole thing is very strange.
Leila: Yeah, one thing that Rebecca and I were talking about before we started recording was like how, like, I don't think that there's any way that, like, I could or a modern person could look at these things now and try to see them in the way Enlightenment people did. As much as I could try, like, to get my head in that space, not just because I don't hold those types of religious views, but because I think we have such a deeper understanding of male violence and fetishization of violence against women and that these anatomical models, these women frozen in death but also frozen in some sort of, like, sexual ecstasy hits on those images in popular culture that we now have of how men can treat women, I think.
Anna: Yeah.
Rebecca: Yeah.
Anna: I think it's also like there may be a tendency to dismiss the weirdness of the Anatomical Venus because of that kind of inability to get in that Enlightenment head space because, like, I could see an argument being made, or you're just like, "Oh, well, there are these, like, take apart models of anatomy that med students still use today," you know, that "We had them in my science classrooms." Like that kind of thing. But I think it's really important to understand the context of, like you said, the particular religious beliefs, the kind of, like, cosmology of the Enlightenment and how that was related to images of the body that we don't share now. Like you don't go into your anatomy and physiology class in college and talk about religious ecstasy and-
Leila: The microcosm of the universe inside the human womb.
Anna: Yeah, exactly.
Rebecca: Right. Yeah, yeah.
Anna: These are... they may be, like, visually similar but, like, ideologically and, like, yeah. We're talking about two completely different worlds, really. And it's important to remember that and, like you said, it's important to remember that it's also a world in which black and brown people aren't human beings that are, like, a different, lesser species of being. All of these kind of contexts things should play into the way we look at these images.
Leila: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rebecca: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And I think that also, like, in, you know, our... just yeah, there are so many things that kind of go into how it's hard to get into that mindset. And I think the fact that there are... Since Jack the Ripper, there have been photographs of... therefore, like, real, realistic, you know, they're photographs. They're realistic depictions, literal depictions of women being torn apart by men. And while violence against women has always existed, it wasn't always, like, a click away. It wasn't always, like, a book away, you know, even for the 19th and 20th century in the way that it was then.
Rebecca: And so I think there was probably, like, a fascination with realism that we are just kind of wigged out by. Like, the phrase uncanny valley exists, like, came about when it did for a reason. And that's because we, I think, in part because we have photography and we have mass media. And when you have neither of those things it's probably a little bit easier to... and when you instead you have depictions of, you know, angels and saints in religious ecstasy, then it becomes more in that category of things than in the category of sexualized violence that it seems to now be more like.
Anna: Yeah, and think about if the first image you had ever seen in your entire life of the inside of a human body or the inside of a woman's body or internal organs was a three-dimensional life-size wax model, as opposed to, like, you know, we're exposed to that kind of thing when we're very young in movies and TV and, you know, the internet and stuff. But just imagine what it would be like if that was your first exposure to seeing the inside of a body. Like, at scale. Like, I think, yeah, it's just really difficult for us to imagine what it would be like to live in the kind of world of images of the 18th century and how that would condition the way you would look at something like that. Because it looks creepy to us because we, you know, know a little bit about it and it is kind of creepy. But for people then it would have been absolutely staggering to see something like this.
Leila: Well, and I think it's interesting, Rebecca, that you brought up Jack the Ripper because I was thinking about that while I was researching for this. And, like, because it was in the 19th century when these types of depictions of anatomical women was seen as obscene and morbid, and then the nineteenth century was also... and that was in London and that was also where, you know, Jack the Ripper was doing his thing... that I don't know if there were. I didn't see anything but I also didn't go looking for this connection. Like if there was anybody at the time trying thinking about those connections. Like, what does it mean when we have these images of cut-open women on display in public and then someone is going out into the night and doing that exact same thing to live women? I don't know if there's any sort of historical connection there but it does seem like there was this cultural moment there in London in the 19th century. Well, I mean there was always some sort of weird cultural moment in London in the nineteenth century but, like, this one in particular.
Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. And I think it does get back to sort of what... I don't know, just the way that, yeah, you can't escape the way that this ties into depictions of women and depictions of the body. And that's why it's fascinating the way that it changed from the 18th century to the 19th century, and even from the medieval period to the eighteenth century and the way that how women are depicted is tied up in so many things that don't have to do with women as people, but have to do with other ideas about how the world works and what God is and what morality is, and that all of these depictions of women have way more to do with how men try to make sense of the world than what women are like.
Leila: That is a great way of putting it, actually.
Rebecca: Yes.
Anna: I was going to say if you were to read the history of the body from the pages of, like, medicine and medical writing through the centuries, the history of the body is the history of the male body. But if you were to read it from the pages of, like, art history and religious history, the history of the body is the history of the female body. Like, it's really fascinating the kind of disconnect between, you know, what people are writing about the body as being, like, the male body as default, and then what people are actually seeing and looking at and images they're making and what's really kind of captivating people's imagination.
Leila: Well I think that's a good time to transition into talking about these types of things in our current museums. So now we're excited to welcome Dr. Amanda Mahoney to the podcast. Dr. Mahoney is a historian of medicine and a registered nurse and she is the chief curator of the Dittrick Medical History Center and Museum at Case Western Reserve University. Thank you for joining us, Amanda.
A. Mahoney: Thanks so much for having me.
Leila: Yeah, no problem. Let's just get started with telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do.
A. Mahoney: So I am a curator and a history of medicine, history of health educator. My historical specialty is clinical technology of the mid-20th century with special attention to nurses working in hospitals. I'm new to the position at the Dittrick and I've been brought on to explore an educational mission for the museum. I get really nerdy about things like urinary catheters [inaudible 00:32:13] and I would describe myself as being very interdisciplinary. So I work with collaborators from all sorts of different disciplines and all sorts of different backgrounds so I have... I was about to say I have my fingers in a lot of pies but I hate that metaphor. But I can't come up with a better one.
Rebecca: And can you tell us just also a little bit about the Dittrick Museum and how it came to be and what its collection is like?
A. Mahoney: So the Dittrick has a long and fascinating history. It's actually existed since around 1894. It was part of the Cleveland Medical Library Association, which was an association of medical men in Cleveland, Ohio, who banded together to create, like, a club and a space to exchange medical knowledge. Clinical journals were the way that new medical knowledge was disseminated in the late 19th century. They were expensive and had limited print runs. In the absence of sort of dominant medical libraries within universities that we see today, there were a number of these private clubs that cropped up across the United States with the similar purpose to pool together resources and have a space to present papers, to share new journals.
A. Mahoney: The building that we're in, which is known as the Allen Memorial Library, opened its doors in 1926. It is a combination of a just absolutely breathtaking library, reading room, and it was also kind of a club house. So members could come read medical journals, listen to a lecture, exchange ideas with friends and colleagues, and also have a very nice dinner and a lovely cigar. And these are the same people that built the early collection of the CMLA, world class collection of rare books, and also of medical or clinical artifacts. The museum is named after Howard Dittrick and also his wife Gertrude Dittrick who build the collection, partially through buying things when they were traveling the world and also through building relationships with other physicians and clinicians in the area who were doing groundbreaking research or retiring and trying to get rid of their stuff.
A. Mahoney: The early part of the collection, sort of the pre-1960s, 1970s bulk of the collection, are objects and implements that prominent Cleveland physicians thought were important to the history of medicine. Starting in the 1960s and 1970s some professional curators, both of whom were women, actually, which is really rare especially in the history of medicine, came in and brought in the scope of what went into the museum. They looked for artifacts related to everyday patient care. They looked for everyday objects related to great discoveries. So, for example, we not only have some of the early defibrillator technologies that were developed in Cleveland, we also have a gurney, a bedside table, and a few other items from the emergency room where the first successful resuscitation after a heart attack occurred. So I'm very lucky in that this collection spans a lot of medical and clinical history even though it had this very narrow beginning, a very narrow conception about what the history of medicine should look like in a museum.
Anna: I wanted to ask about your job as a curator and a historian of medicine and how you kind of approach putting together a museum exhibit about the history of medicine and, I don't know, if you could just kind of give us some of the crunchy process of that, I'm really interested.
A. Mahoney: So it's a messy and iterative process. One thing that I have learned over the years is that never, ever, ever make decisions about what an exhibition should look like and what should be in it in a vacuum. You need to get lots of opinions and lots of eyes on your ideas from the very beginning of the project because sometimes the very question that you're asking or looking to answer with an exhibit is not the right question or concept for your particular audience. I like to work in a team. We have a staff of three at the Dittrick. And then I have a network of colleagues and friends within Case Western Reserve University to help identify areas of interest. I also have a number of colleagues in the museum and history of medicine world who I reach out to if they have expertise in a specific area or if they have more experience teaching a particular topic than I do. And then there's also Twitter, which is a great place to sort of keep track of what other people are doing and get a quick two cents on, "Hey, is this interesting? Is anyone working on this?" So that's kind of how the concept part comes to be.
A. Mahoney: We're looking to engage our audiences to meet the challenges of the future. So rather than just having our educational goal to be, "You're going to come to the Dittrick and you're going to learn about the history of the syringe." To me, that's not really enough. I want students to come away from the museum with new knowledge and new questions to help them meet the horrible challenges that we're expecting the next generation to solve. So, for example, if I were to do an exhibit related to syringes, it would be about disposability and re-usability and the systems that no longer exist to reuse needles and syringes and why. So that is informed by what are the challenges that the current generation of college students and my own kids are going to be faced with and one of them is trash and sustainability. Using the Dittrick collections and our exhibits to give a historical context and ask... guide our visitors to ask some really big questions about the current state of healthcare and the current state of the world after they walk away from the exhibit.
Leila: To get a little bit more specific, we've been talking in this episode about the history of the Anatomical Venus and I think most of us today, if we saw this kind of display of a woman's body, we would probably think that it's inappropriate. So as a museum professional, I'm wondering what are some of the things that you consider when you're looking at the history of these things and having to display a woman's body or any body for educational purposes? What are some of the things that you think about?
A. Mahoney: So context. First of all, what's the context of how the object or the image was created? We have a big archival and photographic collection, as well as objects, and many of them are photographs of patients. And they're photographs of patients that were taken around the early 1900s when photography was relatively new. And no one's thinking, like, "Wow, this image could be a meme." They're taking a picture of a patient and what are the power relationships that went into the context of the creation of this object or this image.
A. Mahoney: A good example that I fortunately rarely have to deal with are anatomical specimens, like actual human remains. We have very little of that in our collection. But as I'm sure you all know, the history of obtaining cadavers for medical education and medical research is not great. You know, these were not people who wanted to leave their bodies to science and so when we have images of cadavers being dissected, what are the ethical implications of us putting that up in the museum, and of us putting that up on our website?
A. Mahoney: The context in which we're displaying something is also something that I think about. We have a number of papier-mâché models, anatomical models. They are humanized. The figures don't have skin. It's down to the sort of... it's below the fascia and kind of into the muscles and nerves and bones. And they're similar to the Anatomical Venuses that you're talking about. They're dissectable over and over again. You can take parts of them out. We have those on display. The language surrounding them talks about the objects as a technology for medical education and why they were created to meet a need for dissection and anatomical study when human cadavers were difficult to come by, difficult to maintain, and the older wax models were not holding up to being handled and existing in non-climate-controlled environments.
A. Mahoney: So context is my short answer, considering the context. Those objects do spark conversations about our cultural relationship with death and our current cultural feelings about the male gaze and the medical gaze. They're not something that I would want in my living room, but I think that there are different approaches that are still ethical. So I don't have any problem with the museum in Florence displaying those. I find them deeply upsetting, actually, the Anatomical Venuses. Of course they should have them on display; they're an important cultural moment. But I would not put them on display in the Dittrick unless I was doing an exhibit about technologies for teaching anatomy and unless I was contrasting 3D models and what we call SimMan, which is a equally terrifying, actually, mannequin that replicates clinical situations, and students and trauma teams and rapid response teams practice things like codes on these robot patients. And they are definitely in the uncanny valley, these guys. You know, maybe I would be contrasting those two things together. But I also would not put a sort of a titillating object like one of these wax figures on the postcard for the exhibit, for example, and I probably wouldn't have it be the first thing that you see when you walk in. I would probably have it be a choice to see this, to, you know, to come in and see it.
Rebecca: Besides, like, the obviousness, like, there's... the issues surrounding bodies I feel like feel really obvious and upfront. But are there other sorts of objects that maybe don't feel quite so obvious that you think can be problematic or sensitive or raise ethical concerns when you're putting together an exhibit?
A. Mahoney: Oh yeah, I think just about everything. We also think about, you know, I am new to Cleveland, and so I'm not 100% up to date on whose ancestral lands the museum sits on. You know, what neighborhoods were destroyed to build our beautiful building in 1926, and how do we address that so that our visitors are aware of that history? But also so that my walls are not completely covered with text, you know, explaining every historical aspect of this space and the objects. We don't think about the history that's embedded in something like a vaginal speculum, of which we have thousands.
A. Mahoney: Now the history of gynecology is not one of... it's not great, to put it succinctly, that the bodies that physicians had access to develop gynecological technologies were not often women who had volunteered themselves to be experimented upon. The spirometer is a great example. That's an object that's used to measure the capacity of your lungs. That was primarily developed by... based on deeply racist research that was conducted basically to prove that enslaved African Americans were less physically fit than their white male counterparts. And that statement's based on the history of... the work of Lundy Braun. That's not... I did not discover that and I don't wish to take credit for it.
A. Mahoney: But the whole history of the biomedical enterprise is embedded in these seemingly innocent technological objects that are all over our museum. And that's why it's so important not only just to know the history of how these objects were invented and made and who used them, but also to have folks from other disciplines and other perspectives take a look at it and look at the way that you're presenting a story of an object and see what concerns them, see what aspects of this object that, you know, I might not know about.
A. Mahoney: I think photographs are particularly problematic. There's a number of ethical issues that are just sort of invisible, I think, to a lot of folks that work in museums and who work in the history of medicine. You know, there's a long history of physicians in a photograph being identified and the nurse and the patient being unidentified. And photography, clinical photography, ranges from everything from the cadaver dissection photos that I mentioned to photos of syphilis patients being diagnosed and during the course of receiving Salvarsan. When Salvarsan first came to the United States, no one was really sure how syphilis would react and how patients would respond to it. So photography was used to track secondary syphilis rashes over time as people received Salvarsan treatment. So we have full-on facial photos of people with syphilis undergoing treatment, images that were meant for clinical analysis in exchange of information about the drug. Never to be digitized, never to be blown up on a wall in an exhibit about pharmacology.
Anna: Well, I just wanted to ask about just the kind of mission, or the concept of a medical museum today, and kind of, I don't know, what do you hope I guess that visitors will take away from their experience at your museum or just at any medical museum? What is the kind of role of this institution for us now?
A. Mahoney: Medical museums should be informed by bioethics and our communities. What do our communities want to see? What questions do they want asked and answered by exhibits and programming and collections? And do your best to match your mission to those needs and your exhibits and your content to what people are looking for.
A. Mahoney: I think, too, that there are images and objects that are tropes in the history of medicine and within medical history museums that we don't even think about them. We don't even think about the ethics of them. For example, the really classic images of children on starvation diets for diabetes and then the children receiving insulin early in its discovery and the before and after shots. You know, those are used all the time, and we see them all over the place. And I didn't really stop and think about, like, "Oh wait, that kid and that kid's parents probably weren't thinking that they were going to go be in a museum." You know, that they were going to be viewed over and over again by museum visitors or that they were going to be on the cover of a book. And I think that that's what medical museums need to do... is sort of stop and think about some of these objects that we've celebrated and studied and explored for so long, and what are the questions that we haven't asked that we should've?
Leila: Well I think that the Dittrick is lucky then to have someone like you who is asking those questions.
Rebecca: Yeah.
Leila: And making sure that the people on your team are asking those questions. Thank you so much for being here in this digital space and sharing your expertise with us.
A. Mahoney: Oh my pleasure. It's a really interesting conversation.
Leila: So that's going to do it for us today. And if you liked our episode, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts so that new listeners can find us. If you have questions about any of the segments today, tweet us at @ladyxscience or hashtag #ladyscipod. For show notes, episode transcripts, to sign up for our monthly newsletter, read monthly issues, pitch us an idea and more, visit ladyscience.com.
Leila: We are an independent magazine, so we depend on the support from our readers and listeners. You can support us through a monthly donation with Patreon or through one-time donations. Just visit ladyscience.com/donate. And until next time, you can find us on Facebook at @ladysciencemag and on Twitter at @ladyxscience.
Image credit: Anatomical Venus (Wikimedia Commons | CC BY 4.0)
