and I guess if it's disability pride month and I'm already feeling stroppy
every time someone comes at me with that stupid petition to save the mütter museum it's like
*leans forward into the microphone*
you're asking me, a disability rights writer and strong repatriation supporter, to try and save the collection of stolen bodies displayed in dehumanizing ways that made a fortune off of marketing disabled corpses as quirky and spooky and fun.
you're asking me to support the organization that fucking bribed gravediggers and lied about being a family member so they could steal the corpse of the (currently not concretely identified) saponified woman and put it next to the gift shop where they (at the time) sold soap lady on a rope.
you're asking me to support the organization that let donators "adopt" the skulls in the hyrtl collection without seeing an ounce of irony when they knew, they knew, that most of that collection housed the skulls of the disabled, criminalized, and impoverished. when we have josef hyrtl's notes where he talked about how it was better to steal the corpses of POC because they're cheaper. when they knew that not one of those people had the equivalent of $200 spent on them in their lifetimes, and that their lives often could have been saved if people had, but they also knew that these people were worth more to the museum-going public dead than they were alive.
when we fucking know that josef hyrtl's tomb was encased in concrete so no other grave robbers could return the fucking favor.
you're asking me! to support a museum! that I visited for a class on the history of medical ethics! and I had to go inside via a locked-to-the-public service elevator, unlike all my classmates! because a museum making money off of disabled bodies didn't have a dedicated entrance for living ones!
fuck you!
the saddest thing about the mütter museum is that I think some people working there really are dedicated to medical education. they gave me space to cry during that field trip after I heard a kid tell her dad that the body of a man who'd purposefully donated his body to the museum for education was going to give her nightmares. a real fucking person. one who'd willingly donated his body, the best-case scenario for that disaster of a museum. and her dad just laughed. because that's the vibe they go for there.
it's fucking dehumanizing.
I'm not against medical education; I actually think it's super important. but I've been to medical museums all over the world now, and the Hunterian model is not an effective way to teach. (though it does make lots of money, and has since Hunter first started having tea parties to show off stolen organs in bottles to his fellow rich friends in his fucking living room.) there are so many ways to teach about medicine and the history thereof without displaying, again, mostly stolen bodies in jars.
the depressing thing is that they know that there. I know that because their modern temporary exhibits tend to be really good. they're respectful and they're interesting and they're well-designed and they're deeply educational. I saw a few during various visits I had to make for classes. their exhibit on the way that medicine changed during the civil war? great! fascinating. important.
but the fact of the matter is that no matter how much their staff tried to get me in that building without missing too much of the tour the rest of my class got (but I very much did miss some of it) and no matter how much their staff acknowledged my concerns and no matter how respectful their modern exhibits are, the lion's share of their collection is still based on turning stolen othered bodies into a sideshow. that's their main draw and it's how they make their money. there is literally no way to thoroughly modernize a museum with a ghastly history while that's the case.
so uh no. I won't be signing your petition.
