- What They can Teach Us About Exhibiting New Medicine

At this congress, we gather to discuss ways in which medical museums might successfully approach contemporary medicine with its artifacts that defy traditional display and collection methodologies. It is my conviction that by looking to pre-modern displays as well as private and otherwise quirky or niche collections–the kind I have made it my aim to visit, study, and document in my work with Morbid Anatomy–museums could find useful strategies to reinvigorate display, engage viewers in new ways, draw in new visitors, make medical museum more relevant, and bring to life contemporary medicine on display.

Small museums, private collections, and untouched early museums have a charm and affect all their own. They amaze, inspire and delight; They thrill and incite curiosity; They invite participation and a direct, multi-layered encounter with artifacts; They confuse contemporary disciplinary boundaries. In the recent New York Times article “The Thrill of Science, Tamed by Agendas”–which became something on an internet meme among science museum types–Edward Rothstein lamented the rise of the blockbuster-focused contemporary commercial science museum and advocated for a return to the principles of the small or pre-modern museum, praising institutions such as The Wellcome Collection and the Boston Science Museum whose exhibits are inspired by cabinets of curiosity and other non-traditional museum displays.

Curiosity–the prime organizing principle of such early collections–is a catalytic agent, a human emotion, a prime scientific motivator which has gotten a bad name over the past 150 years or so. Curiosity often gets dropped from the curatorial mix in the name of truth telling, sober-minded science, and linear, discipline-obeying, simple stories. It is my conviction that curiosity and wonder could be an excellent way to seduce visitors into an emotional encounter with the history of medicine, and, ultimately, to want to learn and know more. Early museums, private collections, and small untouched museums can offer us valuable instruction in this arena.

The relationship between private or arcane museums and public collections is a charged and complex one. Yesterday’s cabinet is, or has contributed to, today’s institution. Today’s private collector is tomorrow’s museum benefactor, or, in some cases, founder. Medical collections are no different, though the private genesis is perhaps even further hidden, obscured by notions of science and its agents as divorced from human concerns and agency, as truth-telling and somehow above human drives and desires. Indeed, science uses collections as a source of knowledge production and a form or knowledge communication, but that–as with any form of collection–is not the whole story.

The Anatomical Venus–centerpiece of many university, medical school, and popular anatomical collections–is a wonderful example of the rich variety of meanings an artifact can express. Gentleman’s collectible, unrivaled medical teaching tool, curiosity for the cabinet. Beautiful, useful, educational, yes, but also conflicted, flickering on many provocative edges: art and science, life and death, eros and thanatos, body and soul, science and magic.

Where does that leave the viewer? And the curator? In an institutional context, a curator is often forced to choose a single approach, one agreed upon by committee, one that tells an institutionally advanced story. The private collection–or the collection essentially unchanged since its inception, such as Teylers Musuem in The Netherlands–is not bound by contemporary limitations of single meanings, story, edification, narrative, divided disciplines. These overlooked collections, instead, are allowed to bristle with semiotic promiscuity, to play along the edges of the subtle and personal, to deal in allusion, and juxtaposition, arranged by choices aesthetic and suggestive rather than edifying.

When cabinets of curiosity, the forefathers of the modern science museum, were assembled, art, science, and mysticism co-mingled with ease; To engage visitors on the topic of contemporary medicine–with its paradigm-bending wonders and terrors that still reside for many in the non-linear, non-rational world of emotions and imagination–a return to this multi-disciplinarity and open-ended exploration could well be a productive strategy. The implications of contemporary medicine thrill, terrify, and engage not just medical historians and specialists, but also the general public. That hot new ism post-humanism revolves around the notion of the technologically-enhanced post-biological body made possible or being promised as a possibility by modern medicine and technology. Some fear these new technologies, seeing them as going “too far,” as the hubris of man playing God; others embrace the idea of the potential of a new kind of humanity free of body with all its fragility, its animal needs, and its haunting shadow of death. But either way, the response is a passionate ,emotional, and curious one. Ideas of contemporary medicine have the potential to challenge our notions of what it is–or what it has historically meant–to be human, commanding emotional engagement and inspiring new philosophies. With the proper displays, curators could meaningfully tap into these strong and passionate emotions–as did early collections–to engage viewers in an imaginative reckoning of these new technologies.

Advances and possibilities inherent in contemporary medicine and neurobiology transcend the disciplines of medicine and the history of medicine, and are being meaningfully grappled with by a wide variety of disciplines, such as the literature, science fiction, the arts, poetry, cultural theory (ie. Post Humanism), film, and philosophy, to name just a few; These other disciplines could be meaningfully re-introduced into the museum environment, their perspectives, works, and findings included in and influencing exhibitions and illuminating artifacts. In such a way, medical museums could join forces with other disciplines in grappling with important and profound questions raised by contemporary medicine, such as: How do the advances in modern medicine effect our sense of identity and corporeality? Where does the personality reside, as advances in neurobiology–as well as social psychology–complicate our ideas of self-hood, free will, and autonomous individuality? What will the future human being look like? What is the future of the non-augmented human body?

By bringing the work of other disciplines into the medical museum, curators could help articulate and explore the anxieties and potentials of these new technologies without necessarily providing solutions, answers, or linear narratives, while also engaging curiosity and wonder to bring enigmatic artifacts to life. For example, visual artists could be commissioned to depict the invisible-to-the-naked-eye drama of nano-technology and the body. Science fiction writers might be tapped to create alternative exhibition labels or write Frankenstein-like fictional responses to new medicine. Cultural theorists might be invited to debate Utopian vs Dystopian futures suggested by new technology–for example, what would really happen if we could vanquish death?–while cultural historians could be invited to contextualize the long history of the human desire to transcend the body and defeat death in myth, religion, and now science and medicine. This could provide medical museums with the opportunity to increase their relevance by becoming centers of a kind of cross-disciplinary discussion of new medicine and its implications; it might also bring new audiences to the museum, not to mention invigorating the display of difficult to exhibit artifacts.

In this way, perhaps museums could become important sites of engagement and inquiry into deeper questions and ethical issues that new medical science and technologies bring to the fore, committed to moderating the hyperbole and misunderstandings which often characterize portrayals of contemporary medicine in the popular media. In order to explore a topic such as contemporary medicine–one whose story is still being written, with many questions still to be explored and implications to be grasped, and one whose artifacts are more fascinating for their implications than their materiality–the open-ended, associative, multi-disciplinary, exploratory and curiosity-engaging methods of early collections could well be an ideal strategy with which to draw the public in and make medical museums relevant and important to the community.