Behavioral Scientist Reads
The podcast that explores what it means to be human through conversations at the intersection of science and culture, and books that illuminate who we are and who we can become.
Published by Behavioral Scientist magazine.
behavioralscientist.org
Behavioral Scientist Reads
Episode 3: ‘Seeing Is Knowing’
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
In Flights, we encounter human anatomy in a number of ways—body parts in jars, wax figures, and the search for a secret preservation formula. Why did this kind of bodily preservation begin? How did it transform medical science and our understanding of where we come from? And what are the ways we can accurately understand and interpret this work from our modern vantage point?
- 00:00: Introduction to the episode
- 12:01: Interview with Sara Ray, the senior director of interpretation and engagement at the Mütter Museum, begins
- 12:01–54:51: The history of anatomical preservation
- 54:51–1:22:34: The past and present of the Mütter Museum
- 1:22:34 –1:26:48: Sara Ray answers the three traveler’s questions
—
Episode 3 features historian Sara Ray, the senior director of interpretation and engagement at the Mütter Museum. The episode was produced and edited by Evan Nesterak, and it was mixed by Stephanie Tam. Our theme music was composed by Nina Humphreys.
Thank you to the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy at Princeton University for sponsoring Behavioral Scientist Reads and helping to make the podcast possible.
Find out more at bookclub.behavioralscientist.org and behavioralscientist.org.
Published by Behavioral Scientist magazine.
Hello everyone, Evan Nesterak here.
Stephanie TamAnd I'm Stephanie Tam.
Speaker 2Welcome to Behavioral Scientist Reads.
Speaker 3The podcast that explores what it means to be human through conversations at the intersection of science and culture and books that illuminate who we are and who we can become.
Speaker 2Hi Stephanie. Hey Evan. Have you ever read a novel where anatomy and how should I put it, bodily preservation features as much as in flights?
Speaker 3No, I have not.
Speaker 2I'm in the same boat, and I'll confess that these sections, while intriguing, threw me off. I found the travel flow much easier to get into, and even the longer sections that initially seemed unrelated, I eventually was able to pattern match to, but I wasn't sure how anatomy fit in. What was your initial reaction?
Speaker 3Yeah, I was also not sure what to make of it. I think it's fair to say I have mixed feelings around public displays of human remains. I had similarly conflicted feelings around encountering this collection of shrunken heads and other cultural quote-unquote oddities from Ecuador at the Pitt Rivers Museum when I was a graduate student at Oxford. And I feel like there's something that is both morbidly fascinating and possibly worthwhile to explore here. On the one hand, I think these things can be an opportunity to learn about other cultures and the human body. Kind of like a scientific and anthropological exercise. But on the other hand, the way it's been historically done has often been problematic, like part of the colonial impulse to collect, display, and in the process of doing so, exoticize and dehumanize the people whose bodies are involved. So, in a lot of cases, it feels like there's an unequal powered balance in terms of who gets to display other people's bodies and who gets put on display. And interestingly, the Pitt Rivers decided to replace that display several years ago with an installation explaining the museum's recent work towards the restitution of the remains. But I think each case can be different. There are also cases where bodies are donated to be displayed for scientific purposes, and that feels like a more consensual process. Like in the Body Worlds exhibit. Although, to be honest, I also had mixed feelings going through that exhibit as a kid. So maybe I'm just not a huge fan of dead bodies at a visceral level, even if I can ethically or intellectually rationalize it.
Speaker 2Yes. When I was a kid, I visited Body Worlds 2, and I probably hadn't thought about it for two or three decades until picking up flights. And if you haven't seen Body Worlds or been to the exhibit, essentially it was created by this German anatomist and kind of eccentric figure who created this technique for preserving human bodies called plastination. And so you have these bodies that are kind of like skinned, and they're in all of these different positions. You know, there's someone saving a soccer goal, there's a guy on a horse, and the horse is also preserved in the same way. There's gymnast type poses. It's pretty wild. And I remember visiting as a kid, having a similar sort of morbid curiosity, at the same time being fascinated and kind of horrified. And you'd kind of get really into looking at the figures. You know, it's this really interesting thing you're seeing. It's not like anything you've seen before. And then you'd somehow sort of snap back to reality and you'd remember you're looking at another person. And this summer, I actually saw a billboard for the exhibit while driving along the highway outside of Prague.
Speaker 3Wow. Bodies in stasis, yet on tour.
Speaker 2Exactly. I mean, Tokarczyk takes us on quite a tour of anatomy and history. Here's a quick rundown of what we encounter. We've got places like Wunderkammer, German for Cabinet of Curiosities, and Kunstkammer, that's an art chamber. We've got objects in all manner of body parts and jars, dry specimens and skeletons. We've got wax figures as well as a glass man. There are people, Frederick Rous, the famed Dutch anatomist from the 17th and 18th century, the Tsar of Russia, Peter the Great, who buys Rouse's collection, Angel Solomon, a man who served in the royal court and was mummified when he died and put on display, and Philip Verheyen, the Dutch anatomist with an amputated leg. And there are processes too. We learn about Rouse's special fluid for preservation and encounter plastination via stuffed cat that plays queen when you open its chest. Stephanie, how did you feel all these pieces and this overarching theme of anatomy fit into the novel?
Speaker 3Well, I was initially pretty puzzled. The fixation on preserving the human body is interesting, but at first it kind of seemed to me to be at odds with the theme of movement, the novel's emphasis on fluidity and change. You know, the thesis that comes up at one point in the book, a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest. Change will always be a nobler thing than permanence. So it made me ask why this obsession with preservation? But then I thought maybe that was part of the point that these two themes are actually working together to map out a universal human tension. So the travel movement and anatomy preservation might be two stars in Tokarczyk's constellation. And they form a conversation about the twin human impulses towards change and fluidity on the one hand, and stasis and stability on the other hand. It is interesting though. I just went back to that quote about a thing in motion recently, and I realized it actually doesn't end there. The sentence continues quote, that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity. End quote.
Speaker 2You know, something similar that came up for me that links movement and bodily preservation was the idea of trying to outrun our anxieties and insecurities, the biggest one probably being our own death. And we often try to outrun these kinds of fears through constant motion. Maybe we don't stop working, maybe we move cities frequently or shuffle through hobbies or passions. When we're in motion, both physically and psychologically, I think we don't have as much time to think about these uncomfortable topics. So there's something interesting about Tokarchuk forcing us to view our bodies in these permanent states in a way it's confronting our fears head on because we're seeing our mortality up close. But even then, there's still this very human impulse to think of bodily preservation as a kind of hack to exist after we die. So even when we confront it, we're still trying to bypass it.
Speaker 3Wow, yeah, that's really interesting. I hadn't necessarily thought about the idea of trying to outrun our deaths, but I like that.
Speaker 2In any case, I I don't know if I landed on anything that was totally satisfying. So I knew I wanted to learn more, and I knew exactly who I wanted to reach out to. So at the end of the novel, there is an itinerarium which lists these anatomical collections from around the world that the narrator visits. And each collection corresponds to a section in the book that begins with quote, each of my pilgrimages aims at some other pilgrim. End quote. And the ninth and final place listed in the itinerarium is the Muter Museum in Philadelphia, which I visited when I lived there, and it's not a place you forget. So the full name is the Muter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, and apologies to our German speakers out there for the Americanized pronunciation. The museum traces its origins to the 1850s when a Philadelphia surgeon, Thomas Dent Muter, donated his collection of 1,700 teaching specimens, along with a sizable financial contribution to the college. And at the time, physical specimens were essential to training new physicians. So Mooter and eventually other doctors donated their collections and their tools and their models to the museum to help further medical education. Today, the Mooter houses over 25,000 objects in what they call a 19th-century cabinet museum setting. I mean, we're talking the largest skeleton on display in North America at 7'6, a tumor removed from President Grover Cleveland, half of Einstein's brain, 139 skulls collected by an Austrian anatomist in order to debunk the racist claims made by phrenologists. There are fetuses, a megacolon, a plaster cast of Siamese twins. It really is an incredible collection, one of the very few like it that you can visit. I also think it's fascinating that the name of a museum which houses so much life and death translates to mothers in German. Needless to say, the Muter Museum seemed like the perfect place to help us figure out more about what we encounter in flights. So I reached out and I was able to link up with the museum's senior director of interpretation and engagement, Sarah Ray, to learn more about the fascinating history of anatomical preservation. Sarah earned her PhD in the history and sociology of science from the University of Pennsylvania. And what's amazing is that Sarah did her dissertation on 17th to 19th century Dutch anatomists and their specimens and preservation techniques. Specifically, she researched the history of teratology collecting at the time. That's the systematic collection of fetuses with congenital abnormalities. So Frederick Rous, and that's spelled R-U-Y-S-C-H, who we encounter in flights during his live dissection in Amsterdam, was a key figure in research. I mean, her dissertation opens with a quote from him. She also studied the history of the czar buying Rouse's collection, and she's a writer too. That is amazing. So I sat down with Sarah and just started asking questions. And Sarah was an amazing guide explaining why this kind of preservation began, how it transforms science and our understanding of where we come from, and how we can accurately interpret this work from our modern vantage point.
Speaker 3Cool. I'm excited to listen.
Speaker 2Sarah Ray, welcome to Behavioral Scientist Reads. Thank you so much for having me. Terrific. So I think most readers of Flights, when they first encounter Wunderkammer, these cabinets of curiosities and descriptions of body parts and jars, odd specimens stuffed and displayed, they're a bit taken aback. It's an unexpected thing to encounter, I think, in a novel. And it's not something we encounter often. We don't just casually bump into this kind of history and these kinds of ideas. So for the uninitiated, what is a Wunderkammer or a cabinet of curiosities? And what do we know about why and where and when they were created?
Sara RayYeah, so uh Wunderkammer is really what I would call the first iteration of what we would recognize as a modern museum. So it literally translates into cabinet of curiosity or cabinet of wonder. So wunder, you know, wonder and kamer, um, you know, cabinet. And now people tend to use that phrase to broadly refer to kind of like any old museum that seems weird, right? So, like, you know, the Mudder Museum, which is what I'm the senior director of, people refer to us as a cabinet of curiosity all the time, and it drives me nuts because we're we're not a cabinet of curiosity. So, what a wunderkammer is, is really what often is sort of an eclectic collection that was put together by a single collector really to demonstrate the particular type of awe that that collector felt towards the natural world. Why I say eclectic is that they tend to be just what to us seems like a very disorganized and haphazard amalgamation of animals and skeletons and plants and just stuff from around the world without much of an organizing principle, right? So if you can just sort of imagine walking into your most eccentric friend's weird living room and just seeing all the random stuff that they've collected because they think it's cool, that's sort of what you should see a Wonderkamer as. So Wunderkamer's really start to pop up in the age of exploration, right? So this is when there's the age of seafaring, where Europeans are just going to all corners of the globe and able to bring back things that seem so non-European as to be like you have to see it to believe it, you know, animals and plants and minerals and cultural objects. That age of exploration, renaissance, and the Baroque period is like the age of the Wunderkammer. And one of the most important characteristics of a Wunderkammer versus, you know, a modern museum is the lack of organizing principle that would be legible to anyone else. Like it really is just meant to be a sort of expression of a single person's awe, right? And a single person's fascination and understanding of the natural world. So no two wunderkamers look alike, and the systems utilized to organize those two wunderkamers have nothing in common with each other because the people collecting them have nothing in common with each other. And then starting in the 18th century, when all of those encounters with the natural world start to be more systematic and people really are interested in bringing the sort of chaos of nature into rational order, that's when you start to see this slow shift towards something that would be more recognizable as just a modern museum.
Speaker 2Something that I think comes up in flights quite a bit is this idea of collecting oddities. So I'm curious how defects or differences play out in these collections versus just sort of displaying the more regularity of the natural world. So I'm curious how oddities play a role because there's a there's a focus on that, and I'd love to kind of position that and understand that more.
Speaker 1Yeah, I mean, I think the both the most foundational part of answering that question is also the one that that is the most, I think, mysterious and mind-bending for people is that we take it for granted that there is a clear distinction between oddities and normal. And there just isn't, you know. And if you think about the period of time that these collections were being assembled, people are assembling materials that are coming from all corners of the globe. And the fact of the matter is that nobody in Europe had any idea what is just sort of a variation of nature, which might be normal. It's just a sort of version of normal that had not been encountered before, versus something that is truly anomalous by nature. And so a huge rationale behind this collecting was to discern the answer to those questions. And so that's why if you look at a lot of early wonder books, right? So there's not only Wunder Commerce, which are like physical collections, but wonder books, right? And today they're sort of like fun and wild to look at because they're, to us, it's such an intermixing of things that are obviously fantastical, right? Cyclopses and mythical races that just don't seem to have any place in reality, and sea monsters and monstrous humans that have faces on their chests, and also literally page by page, alongside stuff that we know is real, like rhinoceroses and toucans and pineapples and stuff like that. We take it for granted that there was a very clear distinction between those two categories, but there was not. The reason why we have a clear distinction between them is because of this period of very intense collection and very intense scrutiny about the completeness of nature. And it took hundreds of years to really shake out what was what. And the thing that I always found really fascinating about my own work is that, again, we sort of take it for granted that normal is a self-evident category, but it's not. Being able to triangulate normal as a category depends on you first discerning all of the things that don't quite fit and also why they don't fit. So again, using these collections as a way to create a rational order and then rationalize anomalies within that rational order, but the anomalies always come first, and then the articulation of something that's normal always comes second. My favorite definition of all of these things, and one that I think is really helpful, is to go to one of the first medical wonder books called On Monsters and Marvels by a French surgeon called Ambroise Paré, who's like the surgeon to the um to the French king. He defines monster as something occurring outside of the ordinary course of nature. And what I've always loved about that definition is that it has nothing to do with being a defect. We really project the word defect onto this classification of monstrosity or anomaly, but that was not the case. It was just things that are outside of the ordinary course of nature whose cause is kind of misunderstood. So things like volcanoes, monsters, things like comets, monsters. Not because they're defective, but because they clearly exist. Nature is clearly producing them, but they seem to exist outside of the rational order that we have, and the cause of them is totally unclear. Our modern view of some of these collections and this period is really out of sync with the rationale for why these collections existed in the first place. And that's to me what makes them so compelling is not that they're collections of oddities and oddities as something that just self-evidently exists, but because they really demonstrate this incredibly fascinating and generative time where people allowed nature so much agentive creativity.
Speaker 2Well, you bring up some of your work, and and I think this is a really nice time to bring up the quote that you begin your dissertation with from is it Royce? Am I saying that?
Speaker 1If you could think of Mouse, but with an R. Yeah, so Rouse. And if you really want to get sexy with it, Rouse.
Speaker 2Okay, perfect. Your dissertation opens with a quote from Frederick Rous, a Dutch anatomist who we actually meet in flights. And when we meet him, he's performing a public dissection of a body of a deceased and preserved Italian woman who was, according to the novel, hanged for killing her child, and she's been preserved for two years and with his magical fluid. But back to the quote that you chose from Rouse, and I'll just read it really quickly. You've been spouting falsehoods about us for long enough. Now that you have the opportunity to see us, both from front and back, top and bottom, tell the world who and what we are. Well, the quote jumped out to me because a line that Tokarczyk repeats in flights quite often is seeing is knowing. And so I would love to know what Rouse is saying here and why it was so significant to you.
Speaker 1I always love this quote because it to me it's just so evocative. You know, what I find fun about it in context is that like he's so annoyed. This guy is just like so pissed off, I think, when he's writing this is from his completed works. And really the thing that he's frustrated about is um, you know, the the inability basically to verify claims. And he's coming 150 years, 100 years after a lot of these kind of wonder books start to pop off. And at that point, the thing that's frustrating about them is that they're all purporting to be real natural histories, but there's no way to verify any of the claims made within them, right? It's just for all intents and purposes, the sort of travelogues of some random guy that's like, oh yeah, I totally went down to, you know, Brazil and I saw a three legged bird that could do backflips and could sing songs. And there was literally no way to verify if that is true. And so for Rouse and for a lot of people that are coming out of this fairly new tradition of experience. Science, which I'll say more about in a second, that is just anathema to what science is. In order for something to be a fact, and in order for something to be considered a fact of nature, there has to be some way for other people in your scientific community to verify that it is based in reality rather than just your misinterpretation, right? Or your sort of like desire to sell books. And so he had really hit a breaking point with this. Like they're just making claims. Like everyone's out here just saying whatever. And like it just has totally debased the sort of ability for science to actually produce knowledge and build any forward momentum on this sort of like evaluation of an expanded nature because we have no language, we have no toolkit for being able to verify the claims that other people are making. And so that's where he sees his technique of anatomical preparation as being so incredibly valuable. And so what he's saying in this quote is like, you don't have to take me at my word. You do not have to read my research reports and just say, hey, Frederick Rouse, he's a really upstanding guy, and I'm just going to take it for granted that this anomalous fetus that he is saying he encountered is accurately described. Because I can go down to that guy's house and walk up to the attic museum that he has and literally see it for myself. And if I want to, I can take it out of the jar and I can dissect it again to verify that the claims he's making about its internal structures are accurately described. And so just to quickly close the loop on that in terms of again contextualizing it with a broader history of science, we take it again for granted in the modern day that science is experimental. And there's a good old thing called the scientific method. And one of the key parts of the scientific method is that, you know, it sort of invents ways to as much as possible strip out the individual biases or the individual perspectives or interpretation of the scientist, right? The point is that we are able to describe exactly how we conducted an experiment in terms that allow you to do the exact same experiment that I did and interpret your findings in exactly the same terms that I interpreted my findings. And that is literally the basis upon which we agree that something is a natural fact. So, right, we just take all of these random observations of nature and through those social technologies of verifying and validating each other's findings, something turns from, even if it's a very anomalous thing, something turns from just an observation into something that is universally true. So again, we take it for granted that that's just obviously how science is done, but that is an invention of the late 1600s. And so this is where Rouse's technology is so important because he's able to essentially freeze the body, right? Literally freeze it and make it sort of a stable object. He's able to demonstrate and have people validate his findings in a way that otherwise was not really possible in physiology. Even if people were doing dissections, there was no way for me to verify that the thing you found on the capillary system or the lymphatic system or the gestational system in your dissections in Amsterdam. I couldn't, you know, by the time I get up there to verify that from Paris, that body is already decomposed. And if it's something anomalous or if it's a very small or fleeting structure of the body, I am sort of in this position where I just have to take you for your word. And so this is what Rouse is offering into the conversation is essentially what is experimental anatomy, right? And he calls it that. Um, experimental anatomy, the ability to sort of extrapolate those experimental techniques for verifying facts of nature that are that are found in physics and chemistry, extrapolate those onto the sciences of the living body. And this was mind-blowing. It still should blow people's mind that someone found a way to do this in a in a period where really the the technology for doing it required an enormous amount of skill and creativity.
Speaker 2We get some bits of background on Rouse in the book, but like the whole book, they're a sort of fragment and a constellation. And so if you could just give us a little bit of a baseline about Rouse's collection that he built up over the years, and it's really intriguing to hear this link between the stays where we're kind of imagining and envisioning the world, and then this middle spot where we're finding Rouse, where we've got this stuff on shelves, we can see it, and then the experimental stages that come later and the communication technologies that you mentioned. So transport us into this middle zone in Rouse's attic where people are coming to basically see a liver or whatever else might be on a shelf. It's kind of mind-blowing as we think of technology as often electronic these days, and yet this technology was sitting in an attic in a jar, but yet it was it was mind-blowing. So transport us there if if you can.
Speaker 1Yeah, and I mean I I use the word technology really, really intentionally, even though I know for a lot of people listening is going to sort of be like, that's not a technology, you know, a computer is a technology. No one would have any sort of qualms about me referring to photography as a new technology or an MRI as a new technology or an FMRI or Catska, any of these sort of ways that people develop with a new tool to visualize the body. And all this being asked here sort of extend that backwards into the visual technology of being able to capture the human body at all into a stable object, right? So it's a it's a visual technology. So Rouse is using really novel methods for stabilizing and preserving soft tissue. That is a technology. He was using human innovation to intervene into natural processes to create a new way and a new method of being able to see and directly study a natural phenomenon, in this case, physiology and anatomy. And so it's a precursor to something like photography. And what it did was it enabled comparison and empirical comparison. So if I'm interested in gestation, which is something that I can't observe directly because it's happening inside of a person. And by the time I have the ability to see the products of gestation, it's sort of done, right? But I don't really have any ability to study the process. Rouse's visual techniques of being able to preserve fetal material. And most of this was obtained during pregnancy losses. He worked. He was the supervisor of Amsterdam's municipal midwives. And pregnancy loss was very common. It still is very common. And he used his access to people experiencing pregnancy loss as a way to collect fetal material from all types of different gestational ages, all types of different bodily forms. And by preserving them, it enabled them to be something more than just like one-offs and enabled them to be collectively moments of this hidden dynamic physiological process that by putting them into direct comparison with each other enabled you to sort of map out what that dynamic process looked like. The best way I've ever thought about it is like a flip book. Each page of a flip book is just a static image. But when you put them together and you utilize them, we like start flipping the pages, it creates a dynamic picture. That is how they're being used as single static images that themselves, in a standalone way, don't necessarily teach you anything comprehensive, but when put together, start to paint this really vivid portrait of a process that can't be directly observed. And so again, kind of really creates this different vivid portrait of what is going on inside the body that would not really be apparent, A, through description, B, even through like two-dimensional representation like you would get in drawings, but C, even just by like throwing this stuff in a vat of alcohol and calling it a day, Europeans that were coming back from the new world, they had figured out that you could, you know, you find that interesting touc. And I really want to bring it back to Europe and show people that I'm not just lying about this crazy bird. I actually have a physical specimen of it. People had pretty quickly figured out that if you just like throw the toucan in your big barrel of vodka that everyone's drinking out of on the voyage home, that it will preserve the body. It's not going to preserve it perfectly, but in compared to like just keeping it out on your multi-month sea voyage, you're able to preserve soft tissue in a way that you couldn't before. And so he really uses that as the sort of starting point for innovating on this technique. He kind of builds from that initial technique of preservation to really tinker and try to find a more perfect or more complete preservation fluid. The thing that he becomes really, really well known for is wax injection, which is still something that people have not figured out how to replicate his quality of wax injection, which I find mind-blowing. The level of technique and precision and artistry involved in this wax preservation technique is just beyond description. And I always found the most compelling versions of this fetal specimens, um, and especially ones that are like still preserved within um the uterus, right? He's injecting vessels with colored wax and then dissecting them away because that changes the texture of the specimens. If all of the vessels are filled with wax, I mean, for lack of a less gross way of describing it, it's sort of like carving a block of cheese, right? And so if you have a fetus that's still within the womb, you don't just have to display the womb. You can actually carve it away to show the ways that like the vessels go throughout the uterus and the placenta and the ways that the fetus is connected into those systems, and you can use that colored wax to sort of emphasize different parts of what you're looking at. And so he really was first appreciated as an artist and a constant art. So the people that first really got into Raus were art historians that were just pretty mind-blown by the creative and artistic quality of these specimens. And other people at the time also really recognized that this is a guy that's like really intentionally creating something novel, useful, and frankly beautiful and kind of beyond anything that anyone has ever seen before. And he's very Baroque, right? And that's why, like, if you look at sort of depictions of his, you know, it's not just the kind of anatomical specimens that you would see at the Mooter Museum right now, which are pretty much just like here is a six-month fetus with cyclopia, there you go. He really was like mixing those things in with like shells and other pieces of naturalia and trying to really create these depictions of nature. So in that way, that's kind of why he's this middle period between Wunderkommers, which again are sort of like the eclectic, very artistic expressions of wonder from a single guy, and this more modern iteration of museum collection, which is a systematic depiction of nature that's supposed to be more free of the collector's interpretation. Rouse really sits in between both of those things and can equally be read as a Baroque artist and a sort of modern scientist.
Speaker 2I was very curious when I was reading some of your work to learn about how Rouse acquired his specimens, I guess for lack of a better word. And the relationship that Rouse and the people that worked with him had with the midwives and had with the parents of particularly the children that did not make it through birth and then were being preserved. I wonder if you could share some of that history with how they got the specimens, because it was something that I found really, really captivating and that it it sort of violated my initial assumptions or expectations about how it had probably gone down.
Speaker 1Yeah, and I mean we we get that still a lot in the museum that that I work in, is that a lot of people come into it, I think, probably with a similar expectation or presumption that you did, right? Which was that maybe not stolen, but that these were somehow acquired in a way that does not pass our modern ethical sniff test, or that, you know, they were taken from grieving parents that that did not want them to be taken by this guy. So there's sort of this history of maybe animosity or professional overstep that we tend to project into the past, and that really doesn't actually bear up to the source material. If Silk Rouse, again, in his collected works, he talks a lot about A being really gratified to be called out to cases of pregnancy loss because he sees his technique of preparation as being a gift that he can offer to grieving parents. And, you know, it's really hard to overstate how common pregnancy loss was during this period. Again, it's very common now still, but it was on a whole other level in maternal mortality, right? So infant and maternal mortality were just facts of life in a way that it is really, really hard to overstate. And there's also just not really the same mourning culture that that we have today, which is not to say that there was no mourning culture. It was to say that it looked really, really different. But that most families today are lucky if they they don't ever experience a pregnancy loss. Many families have experienced one. Families during this period were dealing with like three, four, or five, like people were just dealing with pregnancy loss so frequently. And again, not even to mention maternal loss, right? And so there was less of an emphasis on burial, right? Especially for pregnancy losses that hadn't made it to term. This calculus changes a little bit once you do have a live birth and then a child that dies, because then you're dealing with things like baptism, the soul of the child, which were a little less the case prior to birth. And so for cases of fetal collection, Rouse is getting called out to these cases. Um, you know, he was the chief anatomist of Amsterdam. So he's doing those dissections. He was like the forensic pathologist basically for Amsterdam. He oversaw the city midwives. And so all of those positions that I just described give him very direct access to being able to collect material, whether that's fetal material, whether that's just anatomical material in general. But he's directly offering up this method of preparation to parents as a way to sort of make something out of the loss. And I think part of the reason why people today read maybe exploitation into it is because we think of something like informed consent being so obviously necessary to that act of collecting. Where, like, you know, if I have a pregnancy loss and some doctor wants to take the fetal material and like display it in his home museum, like A, that's crazy. And B, it would at least involve like standardized paperwork. And none of that exists then, none of that exists until the mid-20th century, this notion that you would have standardized consent-based paperwork for any of these things. Instead, what you have is individual conversations between a collector and the person that they were trying to collect from. And so you do get glimpses of that in Rouse's work, but also other folks during this and later periods that are doing collecting, where you get glimpses into what that negotiation looked like. And what you find is that parents actually had a lot of autonomy and being able to set the terms of collection. So you have some parents that were just like, yeah, you know, like if it, if this fetal material is useful to you in some way, like take it. We're glad that some use could be made from it. Rouse has a very compelling example of parents of conjoined twins that were like, sure, you know, like you can take the bodies of these eight-month conjoined twins, but on the condition that we want to be able to come and see them in your museum whenever we want. And we sometimes want to bring friends as a as a part of our mourning process. We still want to have a connection to these children that we lost, but like, sure, that connection can happen in your museum. That would actually be really nice for us. Sometimes you find parents saying, you know, you can take the anomalous body part. So if there was something going on with the heart or the brain or some other bodily system, you can dissect that away and preserve it, but we want to bury the rest of the body. Or other times parents would say, you can make a drawing, but we want to be able to bury the body. But you know, we're we're fine with you sort of depicting or creating either a written description or or an illustration of what you find interesting. And other parents were just like, no. And there are very few, if any, instances that I've found where those wishes were not respected.
Speaker 2Thank you for giving us that history. I think it's just fascinating, and I really appreciate being able to understand how projecting our own sort of modern-day ethics leads us to read history incorrectly and in a way that isn't representative of the reality. Okay, so there's so many different directions I'd love to go, but ultimately Rouse builds up this huge collection and then decides to sell it to the Tsar of Russia, Peter the Great, which is also something that pops up in flights. We hear about the Tsar's tour of Europe, and we hear that he purchases Rouse's collection, which actually did happen. And so I'm wondering why did Peter the Great want to buy this entire collection, this entire museum? What was his vision for it, and what ended up happening with it?
Speaker 1Everyone was very mind-blown by this collection, probably no one more than Peter, and that has to do with the sort of uniqueness of Russia during this period compared to Western Europe. So by the time that Rouse is compiling this collection and other men of science from Europe are coming to it and being like, oh my god, this is crazy. None of those Western European guys were like particularly mind-blown by dissection itself. Dissection had been pretty normalized in Western Europe by this point. And so what they were mind blown by was like the technology of being able to preserve a human body and spirits, but like it was not news to any of them that dissection was a useful way for understanding the body. Not so with Peter, right? So Peter becomes Tsar of Russia in the late 17th century, and he really inherits a Russia that he considers to be like completely scientific or just completely backwards, right? They're very isolated from Western Europe, which is at this point over a century into the Renaissance. So from afar, he had been really witnessing this insane flourishing, both economically and intellectually, of Europe. And so when he comes to power, he's like, I want in. And that's why he initiates this grand embassy pretty soon after he comes into power, because he's like, we got to catch up. This backwards, Russia is not gonna cut it. We're we're just far behind. And also we have a mind-blowing amount of resources available to us that we're just sitting on a gold mine that we're not utilizing. We have an insane amount of territory that has an insane amount of geographic, mineral, flora, fauna, like all of the diversity in Russia is just wild. And so if Europe is at a point where those guys are having to go to South America to mine minerals and resources and find flora and fauna diversity, we don't have to do that because we have all of this territory right here at home, but we don't have any of the sort of intellectual or practical infrastructure for utilizing any of it. And so he initiates this grand embassy throughout Europe to really get up to speed with the institutions and technologies that people in Western Europe were utilizing to take advantage of all of these sort of natural resources that that are being utilized in a different way coming out of the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance. And he's particularly drawn to Amsterdam because they're a naval power. They're incredibly wealthy. This is like the golden age of the Dutch Republic. So they are out there exploring and colonizing on levels that nobody else is and just getting absurdly rich from it. And at this point, most of the really prominent men in science that all of the other Europeans were really looking to for intellectual advancement, they were all Dutch. That's how I found my way into this period of Dutch history, was that I just kept encountering Dutch people and being like, what's going on up there at this point? And so he goes to Amsterdam to A, study shipbuilding. And he's like trying to do this incognito, which is crazy because he's like six foot seven and Russians obviously not doing a great job of blending in. But he's like doing this under a fake name. But he's working on the dockyards by day. He's really going, helping to build ships so that he can learn himself what the technology of being a naval power is. But then he's also finding time to do lessons with all of these really prominent Dutch men of science, and no one captures him like Frederick Rouse, because he walks into this museum of Rouse's and is, oh my God, what is going on here? Like Russia does not dissect. And so when Peter walks into Rouse's museum and is like, oh my God, like you are intentionally doing the thing that in Russia would have just been considered just bad for all sorts of reasons. But in doing so, you are able to gain a level of natural knowledge that truly seems magical. And so he really discerns the power of this to answer naturalistic questions that were very difficult to understand otherwise. And so he studies with Rouse in 1697, is the is the first time that they meet. And they just, you know, get on like a barn on fire. At this point, Rouse's collection was very big by then. Peter goes back to Russia after that trip and issues the first of two royal orders. The first of which is basically like you are now forbidden from killing. Or burying the infants known as monsters. And this is to midwives, this is to parents, and this is to priests. If you encounter a monstrous child, do not kill it or bury it, send it to the royal apothecary in Moscow for preservation in my private museum. Later he issues a second UKs or a royal order that basically sets out a price list for what he's willing to pay for various, you know, dead or live animal monstrosities or dead or alive human monstrosities. So he really discerns the power of these materials to help understand cause. And he's really the first one to kind of put his finger on the fact that if we study these comparatively and collect them to study them comparatively and gather information about the context that they came from, we are able to reverse engineer the cause of abnormality in a way that was not possible before. And so that ends up totally being correct. But people at the time were just like, yeah, sure, I guess. Like this guy is just totally insane because he was totally insane. I mean, like he was just a nutso guy. So while we kind of look back at that project and we're like, oh yeah, like Peter nailed it, it has to be contextualized in the fact that he was collecting living people to be living exhibits in the museum. And so the fact that he got this project, you know, kind of right on accident gets a little bit like, I mean, there's a way in the scholarship where people are like, ah, yes, he just totally like, you know, anticipated developmental embryology 50 or 60 years before it came into being. And it's like, I don't know that I would give him that credit, but he did absolutely understand the value of what Rouse was doing as a new comparative methodology in a way that frankly even Rouse didn't really get. Rouse was collecting these things and demonstrating them, but he was not really using them in a comparative way to try and discern physiological or naturalistic causes. So yeah, that was that was Peter, and he sort of uses that collection as the basis to start the Russian Academy of Sciences, where this collection was housed and it still is housed within the museum that that institution is affiliated with. So he bought the collection for like just a crazy amount of money during that time. But really, what made the collection so valuable was not just the specimens, it was that Brauss included his technique and his recipes for creating these specimens with the actual collection materials themselves. No one was able to even remotely get close to the level of quality that Brauss was producing. They truly, truly thought that he was using dark arts to do it. No one was able to really reverse engineer it anywhere close to the quality that he was producing. And so when he said, Yeah, sure, I'm gonna sell you my whole collection and also the only existing copy of the way that I'm creating these materials, that is what made the collection so valuable, not just the materials themselves. And Peter was the only one that could really pay the sum that was being demanded for it. And while the collection is still on display in the Kunstkamera in St. Petersburg, to my knowledge, that that recipe has been lost. I don't know that it survived anywhere.
Speaker 2I mean, some of this obviously screams ethical considerations, which I think we'll get to in a second. You alluded to the fact that this collection actually led to a pretty big shift in how we understand human development. So I was curious if you could take us to that jump that happened because of this collection. Maybe not quite on purpose, but that's how it unfolded.
Speaker 1So this is like late 18th century. By the time that we get to that point, the collection has expanded. So, like I said, Peter goes back to Amsterdam, I think 1717 to purchase Rousse's collection. And like I mentioned in an earlier answer, Rousseau was trying to collect specimens that demonstrated God's perfect design. He saw this as a way for revering God's creative powers. And so while he did sort of end up with some anomalous specimens, by and large, the roughly 2,000 anatomical specimens in his collection demonstrated perfection. And just to sort of flag, perfection was different than the word normal and how we would use it now. Like our usage of the word normal is really a statistical category, whereas perfection was kind of a platonic ideal of a category. So there could be some deviation away from a perfect form, but there was this sort of idea that perfection existed. And that is what Rouse was looking to collect. So when Peter brings this collection back to St. Petersburg, like I said, basically like, send me your monsters, because he was interested in abnormality. So he basically had Rouse's collection to demonstrate anatomical perfection. But what he was interested in was anomalies away from perfection and trying to understand A, the range of those anomalies and B, what caused them. And this is again like kind of a point where it's worthwhile to mention that he was taller than like everyone in Europe. Like he was so interested in anomalies, and it has to be put into context with the fact that he himself was a monster. He was so interested in growth abnormalities, and it was not a passive random interest. It was one that was intensely connected to his own lived experience. And so you have to sort of wonder the degree to which that was informing his interest in this material, was just trying to understand himself and his own place in nature. Basically, by the time that he dies, this collection, which was in the care of the Russian Academy of Sciences, not only had a really comprehensive array of perfect bodies, but it also had a pretty comprehensive array of anomalous bodies. So then what happens is a German guy called Kaspar Friedrich Wolf, he gets a job as um, I can't remember what the job was. It was at the Russian Academy of Sciences, but basically uh Wolf's deal, and the reason why he ends up in St. Petersburg is that he had written his dissertation basically advocating for, I'm not going to use the word development yet, but a theory of epigenesis. And what epigenesis is, is the idea that the body forms from basically a blob of unorganized matter, like just a bunch of a blob of stuff, into a fully organized body in consistent successive stages. So again, I'm saying this, and all of your listeners are going to be like, obviously, what else would be going on? But again, that made no sense to science during this period because it required the sort of action of an immaterial, unobservable force within nature that somehow knew to create a perfect human body out of a blob of cells, for lack of a better word. And so, you know, if coming out of this sort of Newtonian period of experimental science, things had to be not just replicatable and observable, they also had to be kind of reduced to mathematical laws and based in material. This theory of epigenesis made no sense that you couldn't observe it. There was no material basis for why it would happen in the way that it did, and there was no mechanism for how a human body knows to develop into a human body instead of a chicken body, or a perfect human body versus an imperfect human body. Like it just required the existence of some type of force that didn't really make any sense to an experimental materialist science. But it's also an old, like this theory comes from Aristotle. So it had been around for a long time. It dies out kind of in the 1600s, again, when this sort of like the very materialistic experimental version of science takes takes hold. And so poor Wolf basically does his grad student dissertation, being like, hey, like I think Aristotle was kind of onto something. Because when I'm doing experimental observations of chicken eggs, it starts as a blob of nothing and it just for some reason turns into a chicken. And so all of the really prominent men of science during that period who are coming out of this like very experimental materialist school of science, just like blackballed him from being able to get a job in Europe. And the only place that he could get a job was at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg's. And he walks into the basement of the Russian Academy of Sciences and finds this collection of like 4,000 anatomical specimens of all different types and fetal specimens of all different varieties. These are fetal specimens of all gestational ages, all the way from like that blob of matter up to full gestational term of all sorts of anatomical types. And he basically goes, Oh my God. This is the literal exact material that I would need in order to visually and materially demonstrate this development. And he starts to call it developmental process. So I don't have to just advocate for this on the basis of describing my experiments on chicken eggs or by deductive logic. I can literally sit here and map, like physically arrange these objects into orders and into lineages that show, hey, blob of matter, over the course of nine months, it turns into a perfect human specimen and it happens over and over and over and over. And hey, this anomaly, it always happens at this gestational age and it always develops in the same way. So something like cyclopia, which is a real thing that had always sort of been treated as this one-off, like, oh yeah, like sometimes like you just get a little cyclops baby and who knows why. Oh no, when I get 25 fetuses with cyclopia, again, of all gestational ages, it might be anomalous, but the anomaly has its own regular rules of development. So it's just a poorly understood fact of nature. It's not a one-off monster. It is something that happens organically within the natural process. And I might not know why. I might not know what causes a fetus to start developing cyclopia versus not, but I can demystify it as something that just like happens because God's mad or happens because the mother, you know, had crazy thoughts that caused the fetus to deviate. And so he starts to go back to this theory of epigenesis and really starts to refer to these things in the language of development, which is new. This is the first time that development has ever been used as language to talk about a dynamic natural process. And he starts to be able to advocate it using the tools of materialist and mechanistic science. Even if people still did not feel like they had a direct explanation for what the cause was, Wolfe's methods of using anatomical specimens like this and using them in a comparative way completely upended the preformationist idea of how gestation worked, and it introduced this modern theory of developmental embryology as a scientific fact into Western science. And then it's off to the races from there.
Speaker 2That's fascinating. And how you're tracing the history again of this collection of objects, putting them side by side, and seeing the story they tell, that's very much fitting with this idea of the constellation novel that Tukharczyk is creating. Let's transition from this collection in Russia that is telling us something new about who we are and where we come from. And let's go all the way to the United States in Philadelphia, where maybe you could give us a little sense of the timing of the two, but the Moodle Museum is being founded in the US. I had a chance to visit when I lived in Philadelphia. It's one of the remaining places where you can see this type of medical science, anatomical science, on display. And so I'm curious, can you give us a little bit of the history of the Mooter Museum and fit it into the European history that we were just learning about and how it's different?
Speaker 1There's a way in which it feels like we're taking a great leap forward in time, and we're actually not really. So again, Peter the Great's kind of early, early 18th century, this theory of developmental embryology is really kind of catching fire in like the the 1780s, really until about 1810, is when I would say like is pretty well established as scientific fact. So the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, which is the parent organization of the Mooter Museum, were were founded in the late 18th century. So really not out of sync at all when Wolfe is doing his studies. So the College of Physicians is founded shortly after the American Revolution as a professional society for physicians, basically to come and share the research that they're doing around Philadelphia. And then kind of starting in the 1830s, what's now known as the Moodra Museum starts to be assembled as the teaching collection of the College of Physicians. So basically, again, this is really connected to this earlier history that we've been talking about, but it's basically physicians from around Philadelphia, they're like, I encountered a very anomalous case in the course of my practice. So that might be a case of megacolon, or that might be a fetal abnormality, or it might be a giant ovarian cyst. And those guys, um, because at this point it was all guys, right? Like would come and present that case history to their colleagues at the College of Physicians. But using these new techniques of anatomical preparation, they often brought the specimen itself, again, for the same reasons that we just discussed, literally physically demonstrate that the case history that they're discussing is based in fact and can be verified by other experts in the field. And so then oftentimes those specimens would be donated to the teaching collection of the college to be viewed and utilized by other people in the medical community. So again, it seems like we're we're taking a large leap forward, but really, really not. I mean, the anatomical materials in the museum really kind of date between about 1840, 1850, and like 1940, 1950. So it's about a hundred-year period, but the beginning of the collection and the rationale for starting that collection are really legibly coming from this European practice. And that's for a good reason, which is basically if you were a man of means during this time studying medicine in, again, the backwater colonies of the United States, if you could, you would go and take a year or two to study with the great men of science in Europe. Really, the kind of model of institutional medicine, like clinical medicine that we have in the United States right now, really comes directly from Paris. And this is the idea that the hospital and teaching medicine are integrated into a single institution. So I'm not just going to an academic facility and sort of learning about medicine from someone talking to me about it or showing me dissections, but I'm actually learning at the patient's bedside. That is something that comes directly from post-revolutionary Paris and that guys like Thomas Mooter were encountering during their sort of years abroad in Europe and then importing those models in that sort of framework back into the United States. But Mooter studies in Paris, I think in like 1832, 1833, he brings back this idea of really having a teaching collection, and that catches on in Philadelphia. By the time he dies, in the 1850s, he donates that teaching collection to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia to be basically a communal resource for other physicians in the area. And at that point is when you start to find other physicians really start to donate the teaching collections that they had built up during their time and practice to this institution once they died or once they left their practice. And so it really existed for most of its history as a professional resource for physicians and surgeons. So, you know, again, this is a time sort of in the early days of photography and where that in that alone was sort of the only visual technology for studying the body in some sort of way that did not require you to like be directly there and doing empirical work. So, you know, if I'm if I'm a medical student and I want to study a bunch of spines or a bunch of hearts, I can't go on to www.google.com and search it. I literally have to go over to this museum and utilize it in the same way that we would utilize a library today, like checking out the material, physically using the material in that space to study. So around 1940, 1950 is when that method of studying anatomy and physiology kind of falls by the wayside, A, because the study of these things has shifted largely from museums into the laboratory. And also disease and pathology really starts to be studied on the cellular level, sort of with microscopes and in laboratories rather than at the gross level, which is whole body parts or whole organs, but also visual technology has totally changed, right? Photography has improved a lot. You start to get things like x-rays. So you just don't really have the same need for these collections for medical study in the way that you did before. And so, you know, this collection really kind of fell into disrepair for probably about 50, 40, 40 years. You know, it was just sort of like something that existed in the city and that you could still go see, but it was not really a public museum in the way that it is now, and it also wasn't really used as a professional resource in the way that it was. And so it wasn't really until like the 1980s that the former curator who really was responsible for bringing this museum into its modern iteration, Gretchen Warden, starts to really reconceive of the power of this collection as a public collection and as a resource for the public to learn about themselves by encountering bodies from the past and really, I think, recognizing the resonance between people in the past and people today through the shared experience of living inside of a body that often kind of fails us in interesting ways. But yeah, I mean, it's a very different museum now than it was. And I think that that's why we we end up facing a lot of the questions that you've raised and that the general public raises about, you know, consent and the sort of like ethics behind display and whether or not, you know, the people in this collection wanted to be in a collection of this type. And it was like, well, you know, the answers to all those kind of things are like no, because that was not the sort of circumstances that these materials were collected under. But it doesn't mean that we can't answer and engage with those questions in a very meaningful way. It just means that we have to kind of find different ways of doing so than looking into the historical record and saying, oh, you know, did this person sign a piece of paper saying, yes, I would love for field trips to come and look at my body, even though we know that a lot of people were very aware and involved with professional interest in their bodies and collecting their body parts. And we can really read into the historical record the ways that those conversations were negotiated in the same way that we can with Rouse's patients. Public display was never a part of that because it was just never really thought of as like the way that an institution like this would function. So that's a big project that we're engaged with now, is sort of how to square that circle a little bit. And it's not a circle that's unsquarable, it just really requires a different way of engaging with historical ethics, museological ethics, bioethics, and what it means to really give voice and respect to the people of the past rather than privileging the medical gaze, which is really the circumstances in which most of these materials were collected in the first place.
Speaker 2Something you bring up that I find really fascinating is the relationship that different people have over the course of this preservation, this learning. So you've got potentially the parents, you've got the midwife, you've got the person collecting it, or the doctor collecting it, who all have a relationship with the body, the human, the organ, the specimen, whatever it might be. And then over time you've got relationships with the students who have a sort of relationship now with this thing as they're learning from it, and you've now got the relationship of the general public with this. And so I'm curious, how do you see when people like me go to the Moodle Museum? What is the initial relationship that people have when they step into the museum? Like again, someone opening flights and in the first few pages encountering a Wunderkammer. And then when they leave, what perspective do you hope they leave with, or what relationship do you hope they leave in relation to these objects, materials, people?
Speaker 1Yeah, I mean, I think this is one where like I hope that this interview causes just hordes of people to flood the the doors of the museum to come and check it out, in which I would sort of warn people like it takes a really long time to massage the perspective that I'm about to give you into the core collection itself. And so we've been trying to find like we're really starting to engage with a process of reinterpretation, which does not mean taking human remains off display. It means contextualizing them in a new way and reinterpreting things through a new perspective. So we're starting that process, but it takes a really long time to do that in a comprehensive way. So we've tried to find kind of intermediary ways to introduce this perspective to folks through public programming, through new digital resources and in gallery resources, and through conversations like these, right? Where we're able to really kind of dive deep. We take it as a starting point that when you walk into the museum and when a 15-year-old field trip student walks into the museum, or just when a curious tourist walks into the museum, very few of them are walking into it from the perspective of a doctor. Almost all of us are walking into it from the perspective of a patient, right? Like my experience with the medical system is not as someone that knows anything at all about like medical science, but you know, I know a lot about what it means to be a patient and what it's like to interface with systems that have a lot of power over the way that I gain access to health and gain care when my body doesn't feel good, that has a lot of power over me in terms of what knowledge I learn and that has a lot of power in society about how we gain access to healthcare and how we gain access to knowledge and what treatment options are considered valid or invalid or accessible to us economically or shut out from us economically. And so if that is who is walking into the museum, and that's the perspective or the lived. Experience that they are walking into the museum with, our perspective is like, well, that's also how the people whose bodies are currently in the museum also interacted with medicine. They're people that were often profoundly ill or profoundly debilitated and that were seeking out medical care because of that debility or that disability or that, you know, disease. And their agency, right, within those systems was profoundly constrained by their economic class, by their race, by their gender, by their ethnicity, their immigration status, by their language. Those are all things that are still profoundly relevant today. There is no part of the sentence that I just said that is not equally applicable to people in 2026 as it was to people in 1826 or, you know, 1900. And so even if the materials that you see in the museum seem oftentimes very fantastical, right? And they're not fantastical because they're not things that exist anymore. Ovarian cysts still exist. Any of the fetal abnormalities that you would see in the museum still happen all the time. I know people that have had pregnancy losses that are very related to those exact same abnormalities. The difference is that medical technology has changed and that oftentimes those things can be intervened upon at a point where they are less debilitating or they have advanced to a lower degree of severity because we have things like sanitation technology that don't make surgery something that is literally a life or death option. Or, you know, we have fetal imaging technology that says you can identify really quickly if your pregnancy has a genetic condition that causes it to be non-viable and it allows different reproductive choices than were available to people that didn't have those visual technologies. And so that's really where I think the power of the museum kicks in is to say none of these people are different from you in nature or in kind, and none of the things that affected their body are different from the things that affect you and your peers' bodies in nature or in kind. The only thing that separates us, or the only thing that makes us different, is the historical circumstances that we live in and the options that are available to us because of technological advancements in medicine. But if we can really center the patient as the primary storyteller in the museum and really foreground the experience of the patient and the ways that their existence in their bodies and society informed their experience of health and debility, we give you a really good tool for thinking critically about how those same systems affect you today. And the great news is, and historians love to say, like, you know, historical thinking is a superpower. Because what it shows you is that if you can look 100 years into the past and say, oh my God, thank God stuff like this doesn't happen anymore, or thank God we advanced our way out of this and we don't have to deal with this. What that shows you is that all of these systems that we feel so trapped within are changeable. They are changeable because systems can change, because systems are human. And none of us have the ability to change these systems on our own, especially if we're patients that have sort of no choice except for to live within them. But we all have the ability to intervene on them in really specific individual ways. And so I think certainly now in the period that we're in, we're in this period where people just feel so caught within and powerless against these systems, especially medical systems and economic systems and labor systems that feel absolutely crushing and beyond our ability to change. But when you look into the past and how alien the problems of the past seem and really are able to see that actually in kind and in nature, those people were not existing in systems, the details of them were different, but the nature of them is not different. It should really equip you with an empowering feeling that these moments that we're in right now and these systems that feel so oppressive can also change, but they require collective action. They require a belief that they can change, and they require a willingness to sort of act in whatever sphere of influence that any of us have. The responsibility is not on anyone to change it wholesale. The responsibility is for all of us to see change as something that's possible and worth working towards. And that's what will make 2026 feel like a crazy time, you know, to our kids and grandkids when they look back on it is not because medicine in a vacuum changed, but because regular everyday patients helped change it to something that is suitable to them. The sort of framework that I often use with my students in kind of teaching them this perspective of his critical historical thinking is be a generous time traveler, by which I mean, you know, it's really instinctive for all of us to be like, oh my God, I can't believe they simply didn't know about germs. And like, I don't know, like why didn't they simply just use sanitation technology? It's so easy to be like kind of an asshole and think about the things that people didn't know in the past rather than allow them a lot of like when I read, I'm like, I can't believe anyone survived. Are you kidding me? Like people survived without access to sanitary, people survived childbirth, and that's not by luck. It is because people did know things, and it's because people worked really effectively with the knowledge that they had, even if that knowledge seems completely alien to us. And so I want us to extend that same historical empathy to people in the past, to not say, well, why didn't you just simply do this? Or I can't believe that you believed all this stuff that I think is totally stupid, but to get out of that time machine through a book like Flights or through a history book or through a conversation like this, with a lot of curiosity for what people knew and the way that them working within these kind of fantastical seeming worlds that seem unfamiliar to us created the type of knowledge that we could stand on the shoulders of to create the world that we live in today. And that really is a superpower because it will make you better. You are never gonna advocate for change or change these systems if all you can do is be judgmental about the things that people in the past didn't know. You are only going to gain the capacity to change those systems if you can come through that time machine with curiosity and empathy, because that's the only way that the future is gonna give you that same thing.
Speaker 2So can you tell us about an item or two in the museum's collection that you think exemplifies some of the knowledge and the storytelling that we're talking about today?
Speaker 1So I got my start with this museum, I guess, back in 2014 as a volunteer docent during the first year of my PhD studies, because I always really wanted to do my doctoral work really from a the perspective of what does the general public ask when they walk into this space? Like I can sit here and study the scholarly conversation and contextualize the museum from a scholarly perspective. But if what I'm interested in is being a public historian and talking about the ways that these collections can be relevant to everyday people, I'm not gonna get that from scholarship. I'm gonna get that by just literally being on the museum floor and touring people through the space. And so there's a couple different parts of the museum that I always kind of go to from that perspective. And one of them is probably one of our most well-known specimens, which is the megacolon. So this is exactly what it sounds like, a megacolon. So it's it's hard to describe. I mean, it is I mean, A, because like people don't really have like a good idea of what a regular colon looks like, I guess. But um, the the megacolon basically was from a man that when he died had about 40 or 50 pounds of solid waste in his colon. So I mean, it is huge. Okay, I can't remember the exact dimensions, but it is just so large as to really be kind of mind-blowing. And it was in a guy. I mean, that was one of the questions that people always start out with was like, was that in a guy? And it's like, yeah, it was in a guy for his whole life, you know, ever since this condition started when he was a kid, until the point that he died at 29, at which point the colon was removed at autopsy. Basically, now what what exists is the lining of the colon and it's stuffed with kind of a combination of newspaper and straw in its original dimensions. And we have also his medical photograph, which I have a lot of objections to medical photographs being used in the collection for reasons which are a whole other separate conversation. But you know, what you see in this medical photograph is that he's malnourished. And so I think there's a way that people tend to look at this specimen and imagine that, you know, this man who we knew initially by the the initials JW, and we kind of found out more about him, which I'll say more on in a second, we seem to sort of like imagine that this was from someone that was very obese, but he was not. I mean, he was really malnourished and skinny because, of course, you know, he couldn't poop. Like there's a whole point. I mean, the reason why he had 40 or 50 pounds of solid waste in him was because he could not pass waste. And of course, just imagine that like the sort of anxieties that that would give you around eating. And so, A, like he wasn't absorbing nutrients well, but B, just had a lot of like fear around like eating because of the sort of issues on the other end. Um, but of course, like, you know, you can't talk about this specimen without talking about poop, which, you know, a bunch of high schoolers are gonna immediately just be like, oh my god, 40 or 50 pounds of poop, blah, blah, blah, blah you know, like they just like get so amped up about it. And what I find so powerful about this specimen is that my my approach is always like, let people have whatever reaction they're gonna have. Like, great, you know what? 40 or 50 pounds of poop is very funny. Like, I'm gonna laugh at, like, maybe not within a guy, but like that's a I don't know, like, sure, laugh at that. Um, it's not something that you would ever encounter. I'm 17 years old. I'm absolutely gonna think that that's hysterical. So let people have that reaction. And then all it takes is for like once the laughter quiets down to be like, yeah, imagine how uncomfortable that was. And people change on a dime. I mean, that's literally all it takes for people to be like, oh my God, yeah, that does like I cannot imagine. And then you're able to have this conversation with students about disability and talk to them about the fact that, like, this was just a guy. I mean, this had been part of him since his childhood. He was a very active patient throughout his entire life, trying to figure out what was wrong with him. His doctors were also very involved in trying to find solutions, and they never were. He worked in factories until his disability pushed him out of that work. And then at that point, he started performing in dime shows, basically letting people, you know, drum on his belly so that he could be financially independent. And eventually he died and his mother and brother claimed his body. There's just this really human history behind how this person experienced this condition. And again, because the experience of like pooping is like something that everyone relates to, it's just so easy to get people to go from raucous laughter to just like thousand-yard stare horror at what the disability history of this person was. And so, what's been really powerful for us is what's called de-anonymization, which is trying to figure out the degree to which we can reattach the anatomical specimens in the museum to specific human identities. And so for most things, this is just like a random kidney. Like, can we figure out whose kidney that was? And by kind of finding out who it was, like renarrate that experience. And so, again, like this guy had always been in our records as JW, 29 years old, died of basically a rupture of his colon. And so Aaron's team was able to take those little details and say, well, let's take it back into the death records and find if we can find anyone by those initials that died during this period of something that seems similar. And sure enough, they were able to find that JW is Joseph Williams. And once you find his name, you are able to search the demographic, the newspaper records in Philadelphia and really create this whole life story of him. Like he's all over the newspapers. He's talking about his own experience in his own terms. His family is talking about him and giving details about his upbringing. And that means that we can talk about something more than just his disease and his debility. We can talk about the way that he experienced that disease and debility in a profoundly humanizing way that foregrounds his experience rather than just the experience of the doctor, who, again, was like very involved and empathetic towards him, but you know, ultimately the doctor that was just like, I don't know what's going on with this weird colon. And so that's the type of storytelling that we want to do. And we've been able to sort of do that through various materials that are both on display and not on display. And so, you know, again, over the next couple of years, as we move forward into reinterpretation, that's really the big thing that we're thinking about is how can we think really intentionally about how to integrate that biographical patient-forward method of storytelling into the core gallery itself rather than privileging the pathology or pi privileging the view of the doctor.
Speaker 2Thank you for sharing that. And it's great to hear about the reinterpretation and how the museum is evolving. Something that does come up in flights. Tokarczyk does mention the sort of initials on the jar or the design, or you know, seeing an arm but not knowing whose arm it ever was because the initials have sort of faded. So this idea that it was a human and there's sort of an ongoing continuous relationship with them and part of them, I I find fascinating and something that there's never sort of an answer. There's sort of a story and a sense making that that happens collectively about it. So is there anything that we didn't get a chance to cover that you'd like to talk about?
Speaker 1The only other thing that I would insert into this conversation is to kind of again go back to this perception of whether or not exploitation or some somehow un unfairness that often gets kind of projected into the past. I think one thing that I always find it really important to say, and I mean, this is not to say that like there was no power dynamic or exploitation or inequity that was sort of involved in the creation of these collections or in medical care, but I think there's often a tendency for people to look back on these earlier periods of history and say, oh my God, it was so barbaric. I can't believe that physicians were, you know, doing XY, you know, they were doing surgery without anesthesia. They were using all of these incredible like torture technologies on their patient. And that must be because like these mean old doctors just loved torturing their patients, you know. I think what's important to realize is that physicians cared a lot about their patients and helping them survive. And even within systems that were unequal, there was absolutely power differentials between physician and patient, and certainly exponentially so whenever you get categories of marginalization. But a lot of the things that seem incredibly barbaric to us were methods of last resort. They were methods of physicians and surgeons that were desperately trying to save the life of their patients, having to use methods that were horrific and very traumatizing to all involved, but that there was no other option for. And this is especially the case with obstetrics. I think there's a tendency to be like, man, physicians just loved torturing women. They just loved, you know, using all of these cruel, horrible instruments on women. And I can't believe that they were doing that, how barbaric, and it's just sort of because men hated women. And again, there's plenty of inequity between men and women, but a lot of those techniques were used because there was no other option and they were last-ditch resorts. And so again, I really want us to sort of extend more empathy into the past. And things are things are complicated. Like people were not all good and not all bad. People were working in unequal systems, people were working in imperfect systems, just like we are, and the care that people received was affected by those. But at the end of the day, there has always been a profound respect for the patient that came from physicians and surgeons that were involved in care. And I want us to extend a little generosity towards the fact that sometimes those methods of intervention look barbaric to us, but we are lucky that they look barbaric to us because the things that were done in the past gave us the knowledge, the data, and the tools that were fundamentally necessary to creating the more humane ways that we experience those same problems today.
Speaker 2Thank you, Sarah. Okay, so Tokartrik writes about the three travel questions, and so we're asking each guest these questions, and you can interpret them literally, you can interpret them metaphorically. The three questions are and you can almost imagine meeting somebody on an airplane or in a hostel or a hotel waiting room with these three questions. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from, and where are you going?
Speaker 1I think I'm from um high school in very Romane where I felt like a total anomaly myself for many reasons, and I was fascinated by philosophy and ethics. I was the weird high school kid that was checking out like Plato's The Republic from the library and really reading it. And I say that that's where I'm from, kind of in this context, because I I can't believe that I found a career where I get to do that. I think I just always thought that that was gonna be something that I was interested in, but maybe at most would discuss at a party with some other nerd that was in the same boat. But I think to to find myself in a position where I'm really able to use those interests and that knowledge base to think about this stuff that feels so like urgent and relevant. It feels like such a gift. So, you know, when I think about where I'm from now, I very much trace that origin point to like a little 15-year-old nerd reading Plato's Republic in high school and having everyone be like, What's the deal with that kid? Um where I'm coming in from is this job whenever I travel anywhere or go anywhere, even if it's just going out to to a party or going out to dinner with people, and people say, What do you do? I always feel like I'm, you know, coming from a plane from a different planet to be like, Well, you know, like let me tell you what I it's not normal. And I always I always joke that like studying this is like the worst first date conversation in the world because it's just not simple, it's not clear, and it seems so bizarre, but it's such a like fruitful place for connecting with people. So coming, coming into this airport lounge, and I found myself in many airport lounges having that discussion with people that say, What do you do in a very well-intentioned way? And I think where I'm going is this real synthesis in this new era, I think, of public understanding about the power of these collections to help us think about civic responsibility. And that's really where we see the power of these collections, isn't just teaching people about their bodies and health, but really saying the history of medicine is one of the most powerful vehicles for teaching you about who you are and who you can be in society and in relationship to your fellow citizen. And so I see us in the enthusiasm that we've gotten and the buy-in that we've gotten from the general public and from scholars in this field about the work that we're doing as such a profound gift for really being able to look a couple years in the future and see these conversations and the way that we think with these collections in such a generative and productive new way. So it feels wild to sort of connect the dots between the 15-year-old ethics nerd who never really saw a future in those things, aside from the personal curiosity, to a grad student and a professional that gets to like do that stuff in ways that are often difficult and challenging and illegible to people, to I think a future where it's incredibly legible to people and not just legible and interesting, but useful. So, yeah, that's how I would answer those.
Speaker 2Sarah, thank you for being on Behavioral Scientist Reads.
Speaker 3Evan, that was such a fascinating conversation with Sarah Ray. I learned so much about the history of science and thought way more about dead bodies than I have in a very long time. It's funny because I think we as a society in the US and UK tend to avoid the subject of death altogether. Never mind what we do with our bodies after death. But of course, it's something that's so universal and happens to everyone. And I love Sarah's challenge for us to be generous time travelers. That feels like such a big part of what the study of history gives us.
Speaker 2Yeah, I feel like I've learned so much too, but I also have so many questions. Questions I didn't even know I had. And you know, something that the book and this conversation got me thinking about is the possibilities for our bodies after we die. I never really considered plastination. But maybe it'd be fun to travel the world post mortem as a figure in something like the Body Worlds exhibit.
Speaker 3Uh, I don't know.
Speaker 2Well, okay. Okay. It'd definitely be strange. I mean, would your relatives or maybe your great-grandkids come visit you when you're in town 50 years from now?
Speaker 3You know, this conversation raised a lot of ideas and questions for me too. But I have to say, that was not one of them.
Speaker 2Well, in any case, I appreciate how Tokarchuk and Sarah have opened our eyes in new ways to something that you would think we'd already be so familiar with, our own bodies. And some food for thought. I want to play part of an interview with Tokarchuk where she gives a glimpse into how the focus on our bodies fits into the novel. Here she is speaking at a GBH Forum network event in Boston in 2018.
SpeakerSo for me, there were there are two main plots in this book. One is the traveling, and the other one is uh the vehicle, which is the like a uh carriage, not carrium the chariots which are you know taking us to with the tra to the travel, trav to the traveling. So the the human body is such a vehicle, very fragile, mortal, uh weak in fact, and the desperation in human uh behaving to preserv to preserve those human bodies uh from cosmetic medicine till the preservation of mummies somewhere in the ancient Egypt. So this uh miracle of preservation of something which is so fragile is the the the other plot uh in this book. So they are weaving each other all the time.
Speaker 3That's really interesting. It reminds me of the mind-body dualism debates and Platonic ideas around the body and soul. It's cool that Tukarczyk is tapping into these ancient and classical traditions of thinking.
Speaker 2Why don't we use this as a leaping off point for our discussion question? Sounds great. So we want to know how have you been making sense of the travel and anatomy themes as you read flights? For instance, are there any quotes or passages that stand out to you? Did the conversation with Sarah create any new connections in your mind? And what do you make of Tokarczyk's idea of the body as a vehicle? Let us know in the Behavioral Scientist Reads WhatsApp group. We look forward to hearing from you.
Speaker 3This episode was produced and edited by Evan Nesterak.
Speaker 2And it was mixed by Stephanie Tam. Our theme music was composed by Nina Humphreys. Thank you to the Kahneman Treesman Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy at Princeton University for sponsoring Behavioral Scientist Reads and helping to make the podcast possible. You can subscribe to Behavioral Scientist Reads on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. You can also find us at behavioralscientist.org and our dedicated book club website, bookclub.behavioral scientists.org, to discover all our episodes, extra material, and leave feedback. Don't forget to rate and review the show. It will help other people discover the podcast. See you next time.
