Bodies Turned Objects: Transinstitutionalization, Disability, and Indigeneity in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This dissertation is about how bodies traveled after death to, from, and between scientific and medical collections in nineteenth century United States and Western Europe. I investigate how museum curators, scholars, physicians, and other professionals trafficked, collected, and studied bodily materials labeled as “pathologies,” “curiosities,” “monstrosities,” and “abnormalities.” I also trace the collection and theft of the bodies and body parts of Native and Indigenous peoples, especially those who practiced culturally important bodily modifications or “deformations,” as well as the broader meanings and implications for families and communities. This dissertation reveals a tangled web of bodies that were sourced from all around the world traveling between collections throughout the United States and Europe. I examine how professional scientists and medical men created meanings for the bodies they were collecting and how those meanings were then used to justify, amongst other things, the collection of yet more bodies. Those meanings, assigned by scientists and physicians, placed those bodies within logics of race, disability, pathology, bodily normativity, and Indigeneity. I show how vast collections of bodies were the working objects of the nineteenth century life sciences, which has given the bodies within those collections a long post-mortem ‘life’ that extends to the current day. I use three major lenses to analyze the bodies as they traveled through these collections: 1) transinstitutionalization, 2) de-identification and re-identification, and 3) proxification. By using these lenses to focus on the bodies as opposed to specific men of science or medicine (or the collections they governed), I provide a new analysis of what people’s bodies were doing, affording, and authorizing in the production of scientific knowledge.