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When Your Insides are Out:
Museum Visitor Perceptions of Displays of Human Anatomy 1
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What is your first thought when you see this photograph?
 Is it different than seeing this model?
 Or how about this anatomical preparation?
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Are you fascinated? Repulsed? Intrigued? Disturbed? These are just some of the human remains and depictions of human anatomy that you might encounter on a daily basis at our museum. Although the physical anthropologists on our staff come to the museum with experience in dealing with human remains, for most of the other staff members our daily encounters with human remains and human pathology can be new. Staff members adjust to this new experience in a variety of ways.
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Some find certain specimens sad …
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… while other specimens "look happy."
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Some images are disturbing …
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Others are beautiful
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| If this is the range of the reactions among our staff, what could our visitors possibly be thinking as they tour the exhibit floor at our museum? To answer this question, we carried out a study, "The Use of Human Remains in Museum Exhibits," and would like to share with you some of our experiences and findings from this study. |
A Brief History Of The National Museum Of Health And Medicine
It is not our intent to give a full accounting of the history of our museum, but we would like to point out a few details of our past that will provide a context to understanding our current exhibition program. The museum was founded as the Army Medical Museum in 1862 when Army Surgeon General William A. Hammond sent orders to the Union surgeons to collect and forward to Washington, D.C. "specimens of morbid anatomy." 2 These specimens were the amputated and resected limbs of soldiers who had been injured in battle as well as the pathological organs of those who had succumbed to the deadly diseases of diarrhea and dysentery. This collecting initiative was started not with an eye to generating a collection of specimens suitable for public display but for a medical and epidemiological study that resulted in the publication of the comprehensive "Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion." 3 |
| Since the Civil War, the museum has continued to collect human remains from military and civilian sources as well as through the acquisition of orphaned collections. But our museum is not solely a museum of human remains. The museum also preserves and maintains the historical collections, the Otis Historical Archives, the neuroanatomical collections, and the Human Developmental Anatomy Center.
 As essayist Steven Weil states, "the real guts and glory of every museum is in its particularity, not in what it does in common with others". 4 We are awash in particularity, and that particularity has to do with guts. Barring a brief interlude in the 1970s when the museum was without public floor space, the staff has put anatomical specimens on display for public viewing for the last 138 years. The result has been the development of a certain renown for being the "body parts museum." 5
The Exhibition Of Human Remains
 The American Association of Museums (AAM) addresses the issue of holding and displaying human materials rather obliquely. It states in its 1994 Code of Ethics, "the unique and special nature of human remains and funerary and sacred objects is recognized as the basis of all decisions concerning such collections." 6 AAM gives us permission to treat these materials as set apart from other types of collections, but makes no pronouncements on how those collections are to be handled. The International Council of Museums (ICOM) gets more specific. The 1987 ICOM Code of Ethics states, "Although it is occasionally necessary to use human remains and other sensitive material in interpretative exhibits, this must be done with tact and with respect for the feelings for human dignity held by all peoples." It also states, "where a museum maintains and/or is developing collections of human remains and sacred objects these should be securely housed and carefully maintained as archival collections in scholarly institutions, and should always be available to qualified researchers and educators, but not to the morbidly curious." 7
These ICOM statements beg questions on a number of levels. The first statement, referencing an occasional need to display human remains, does not seem to be directed toward medical museums. Medical museums by their very nature can be expected to have an inherent need to depict human anatomy, and one powerful exhibit strategy is the display of human remains. Without delving into the quagmire of displaying human remains for cultural and ethnographic purposes, we suggest that a medical museum's institutional dilemmas about the appropriateness of display fall into somewhat different arenas.
 According to ICOM, morbid curiosity is an inappropriate motivator. But we question this - what is morbid curiosity, who is allowed to indulge it, and to whom it is ascribed? We cannot believe that researchers and educators are not at times motivated or touched by morbid curiosity. Neither do we believe that morbid curiosity is a bad thing. Webster's defines morbid as "of or caused by disease." 8 We do not believe that curiosity about diseases, their effects on the human body, or the causes of disease to be a negative. We believe that "morbid" curiosity is as valid as curiosity about what causes the tides, who invented the telegraph, or the source of light in a Caravaggio painting.
 At our museum, the decision-making about what is considered "appropriate" for display has been in large part determined by the sensibilities of the individuals in charge of any given exhibit project. These sensibilities are mediated by staff perception of what visitors think about our exhibits - a perception that has not been necessarily accurate. Part of the perception is also shaped by our knowledge of our visitor base, but that knowledge is incomplete. We know that roughly one-quarter of our visitors come as part of a scheduled tour, most often as part of a school group guided by a museum docent. Just under half of our visitors are family groups or individuals. Another 10 percent come to see a special event or program at the museum, and the remainder arrive in unscheduled groups and tour the museum on their own. We also know that the number of visitors have been on the rise. Our museum has experienced an 11 percent jump in attendance from 1996 to 1997, and a 21 percent jump from 1997 to 1998.
We also know about our visitors through our comment book, but comment books are unreliable vehicles for determining general audience response. They tend to attract those who either had a really good time during their visit or had a particularly bad experience. We have anecdotal reports from our docents and from the collections staff, but we haven't really known much about what our visitors have been thinking about their museum experience. Continued... | 1 | 2 | 3 | |
1 The following is based on a presentation given at a conference exploring issues related to human remains held at Colonial Williamsburg, Va. November 1999. The proceedings of this conference have been published: "Human Remains: Conservation, Retrieval and Analysis. Proceedings of a Conference held in Williamsburg, Va., Nov 7-11, 1999," ed. Emily Williams (Oxford, England: Archaeopress, 2001).
2 William A. Hammond, "Circular Number 2" (Washington, D. C.: Surgeon General's Office, 1862), reproduced in Robert S. Henry, "The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology: Its First Century 1862-1962" (Washington, D. C.: Office of the Surgeon General, 1964), 12.
3 "Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion" (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1879-1885).
4 Stephen E. Weil, "Rethinking the Museum and Other Meditations" (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1990), 50.
5 see Mary Clemmer Ames, "The Army Medical Museum - Its Curiosities and Wonders," in "Life and Scenes in the National Capital, as a Woman Sees Them" (Hartford, Conn.: A. D. Worthington & Co., 1874), 475-490; Alan Green, "No Guts and No Glory," Washington City Paper, 22-28 October 1993, 24-31; Richard Thompson, "Richard's Poor Almanac: The Big Leg," Washington Post, 17 October 1999, sec. F, p. 2; among others.
6 "Code of Ethics for Museums" (Washington, D. C.: American Association of Museums, 1994), 9.
7 "Code of Professional Ethics" (Paris, France: International Council of Museums, 1987), 25.
8 "Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language," ed. David B. Gurlnik (New York: William Collins Publishers, Inc., 1979), 391. |
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