Vol. 39, No. 1, April 2010
Printer friendly version of Newsletter
Disturbingly Historical: Reinventing a Museum
Poised between downtown Philadelphia with its Liberty Bell and Independence Hall and the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University, a century-old Beaux Arts building houses The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Flanking the entrance is a large banner advertising the Mütter Museum, a museum of medical history, as a "disturbingly informative" place. That a prestigious historical building — now a national landmark as "the Birthplace of American Medicine"— carries this edgy advertisement attests to an institutional reinvention of self. It also attests to the legacy of the late Gretchen Worden. During Worden’s tenure as museum curator and director, visitation increased from a few hundred to more than 50,000 annually. The Mütter Museum has become a cultural landmark for an audience that extends well beyond the medical cognoscenti.
Quick Links....
Notes from the Inside
-------------------------------------
News
-------------------------------------
Member News
-------------------------------------
Disturbingly Historical: Reinventing a Museum
-------------------------------------
Teaching Tricks
-------------------------------------
Program Profile, Georgia Institute of Technology
-------------------------------------
Feeding a War: Q & A with Daniel Ragussis
-------------------------------------
Honoring Scientists with Stamps
-------------------------------------
Searching Smartly in the HistSciTechMed Database
-------------------------------------
Jobs, Conferences, Grants
The oldest professional society in the United States (founded in 1787), the College has aimed to improve the practice of medicine through a fraternity of elected Fellows, physicians distinguished in their work. The College remains a fellowship-based organization today but is creating new constituencies. In addition to the museum, the College maintains a Historical Medical Library of 325,000 volumes, and was once the pre-eminent medical research library in the country. Unlike the museum with its ebullient daily buzz, the library reading room is a quiet place, minimally staffed, seven floors of stacks hidden from view. The Mütter Museum may wish to inform disturbingly while the College builds a reputation as a cultural organization, but the library poses more of a puzzle in finding its 21st century place. The history of science lurks within the collections and informs the dialogue of institutional strategic planning.
Last year, the museum hosted a record 105,000 people, an increase of nine percent over the previous year. Despite this number, the College faced closure in 2005 for financial reasons. Since 2006, however, under the leadership of a new director and CEO, George M. Wohlreich, MD, the College has been building its financial capital, obtaining grants, and announcing its presence in new domains. The College created Philly-HealthInfo, a Web-based outreach project to provide reliable health care information to the region. Dr. Wohlreich's decision to recognize library and museum collections as mutually-reinforcing cultural resources led to my appointment in 2008 as both museum and library director. This decision was grounded in hard economic realities as the College trustees, before Dr. Wohlreich was appointed, reduced both museum and library staff.
The College is a heady environment with a full docket of programs and events, many sponsored by fellow-based special interest sections (on the arts and history, for example). The popularity of the museum daily brings requests to use the collections (25,000 objects) for art projects or use the College building as a venue for a conference or meeting. To the extent possible, I am trying to conflate practices regarding the library and museum collections, create exhibits involving both, and promote events that introduce the College to new audiences. On any given day, I must be prepared to engage with visiting scholars, host a tour for a medical association, deal with a leaky roof over the book stacks, speak to high schoolers about Civil War medicine, or negotiate with a funding organization. All business is conducted on the premise that the College and its collections command prestige owing to historical pedigree and historical scientific authority.
"Historical scientific authority" deserves an explanation. The Mütter's presentation of medical history benefits from and is a prisoner of its 19th century appearance. The 19th-century cases and a Victorianesque organization of specimens resonate with a young public that relish the atmosphere. This mode of presentation, however, does not permit fabricated displays, interactive devices, or the special effects associated with science centers, and it does not facilitate displays of current medical technology. Yet the specimens and instruments of earlier eras, though evocative of extinct medical ideologies, still carry authority. In the 18th century bloodletting was a sanctioned therapy and in the early 19th antisepsis was not practiced, as reflected in wood-handled instruments. Audiences readily suspend scientific belief in acknowledging early medical practices as distinct from those of today, while at the same time reacting emotionally to what they see. Early obstetrical forceps provoke gasps; a moulage of a smallpoxed arm evokes a shudder; a two-headed fetus preserved in a jar elicits disturbing thoughts. These responses, however, make it easy to engage visiting audiences with a modicum of science history, an opportunity to communicate obsolete medical philosophies with an implicit comparison with modern practices. For more sophisticated audiences, including classes of university students or informal sessions with visiting groups of librarians, historians, or others with special interests, the need for comparisons with modern medicine recede and artifacts and specimens are discussed within anthropological and sociological contexts. Recently, for Elderhostel programs, visitors were taught artifact curatorship as a form of material culture study. This approach emulates the object study approach described by David Pantalony (http://www.hssonline.org/publications/Newsletter2008/ NewsletterJuly2008photoessay.html).(1)
Opening in 1863, the museum began life as an endowed teaching collection for pathological anatomy by a local physician, Thomas Dent Mütter. Lately, the museum has moved vigorously to renovate its more superannuated displays and create a new Web presence to exercise science history. With major funding from external sources, the College is creating an on-line History of Vaccines, under construction on the Web with a multi-tiered, interactive timeline that examines the history of vaccines, with smallpox, diphtheria, and yellow fever as the diseases initially presented. The Web site represents the current best conflation of library and museum resources to tell a public health story, embedded within a history of vaccines. In response to a (funded) request from the City of Philadelphia to furnish a historical perspective on lead poisoning in Philadelphia, the museum created The Devouring Element: Lead's Impact on Health, which featured library and museum collections to explore our lovehate relationship with lead since antiquity. If outstanding funding proposals are successful, the central museum ambition is to create a permanent gallery on medicine during the Civil War, the sesquicentennial of which begins in 2011. "With Tenacity for Their Lives": The College of Physicians of Philadelphia and the Civil War, an exhibit resembling the look of the Army Medical Museum in 1865, will examine health, wounds, and disease through the experience of specific Fellows of the College during the war who distinguished themselves in war work. The museum's central contribution to science history will be its dialogue with the public through exhibits and complementary Web materials.
While the museum annually earns almost $1 million in admissions income from people who want to see skeletons, medical models, viscera, and instruments within the atmosphere of a 19th-century medical cabinet, the library receives about 30 visitors monthly, with up to 3,000 accessing the collections electronically. During much of the 20th century, the library served as the Regional Medical Library, Mid-Atlantic Region. It was designated a historical library in 1996 formalizing its specialized function as a repository for the history of medicine. The change in status and fortunes of the library are reflected in journal subscriptions: the library subscribed to approximately 3,500 serials at its peak decades ago, mostly of a technical medical or scientific character, and now maintains about 20, exclusively in the history of medicine or science. Although the museum ceased accessioning medical works from 1990 on (except for historical scholarship), the change of status forced on the library by circumstances meant a reduction of staff in recent years, although the library has remained open and available. Since 2009, the library has been subject to strategic planning which will define its core collection, deaccession materials not relevant to the core historical assets, and create, through a major institutional partnership with leading libraries containing medical historical collections, an electronic portal to selectively digitized materials. The dialogue is in progress to define the algorithm or search protocol that will lead researchers to digitized archives, generally on the topic of infection, that reside within partnering institutions.
The library's moniker, Historical Medical Library, reflects how the College wants to position the collection within academic librarianship. The core collection will undoubtedly speak to Philadelphia-area medical history. Planning, however, has unsettled some Fellows and created anxiety among some historians of medicine. They have not kept current with the huge challenges faced by all special collections libraries to retain "book collections" when the pressure has mounted to digitize materials. I and my colleagues have been criticized for referring to books as artifacts and cultural resources. Libraries are increasingly expensive; grants do not exist to save libraries from their electronic future; endowments are unlikely to support libraries according to a 1980 business model. Referring to books as artifacts does not diminish them but expands the discourse about their use. The College library collection, when defined through strategic planning with attendant de-accessioning of materials now abundantly accessible on-line, will be a different place. The library constituency, in fact, is already changing. Self-identified medical historians are relatively few. We are hosting an increasingly diverse constituency including teachers, artists, and even high school students. The vigorous use of social media to create new pathways to the library collection also generates new interest from unlikely constituents. The most urgent message that older library patrons must understand is the same understood by historians of science plying their trade. That message is that the future of an historical library collection is inseparable from its on-line presence and accessibility. Scholars interested in medical history have many ways to learn about assets at the College library. Many assets, without an electronic presence (including finding aids), remain underused or unknown.
Thomas Söderqvist, who directs the University of Copenhagen's Medical Museion, has outlined the challenge to the future of medical history museums. The older specimens and tools may have immediate emotional resonance with audiences, but 21st-century medical techniques and technology, hugely relevant to people's lives, are very difficult to display. He asks whether traditional museum displays will even be possible when museums tell the story of biomedicine.(2) He has also provoked a conversation on wider participation in museum curatorship through a distributive model which uses "crowdsourcing."(3) That the College collections continue to promote a 19th-century ambiance suits one huge constituency knocking at the door: the visual arts. In 2010, the museum opened a guest-curated exhibit, Corporeal Manifestations, featuring newly-commissioned ceramic figurative work which explores the psychology of our biological existence. Further, a College Fellow has promised recently to fund the renovation of another large space adjacent the museum to permit the installation of exhibits of photographs or works on paper, thus creating an exhibition gallery. Laura Lindgren, publisher of Blast Books, produced two briskly-selling books about the museum and its photographic collections, and the popular annual calendars. Her work in courting major photographic artists has given us international authority within the visual arts (see: http://www.blastbooks.com/). At this writing, with Ms. Lindgren's help, we are seeking support to commission a film by the Quay Brothers, an artists' meditation on our collections. We are also participating in an exhibit, Anatomy/Academy, conceived by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts that will "focus on how Philadelphia's dynamic art and science communities fostered knowledge of the human body," to quote the prospectus. This engagement with the arts permits an exploration of how the histories of medicine and the visual arts intertwine and allows the College to exhibit and interpret its stunning collection of anatomical atlases.
Surrounding all of these projects are social media. Happenings at the Mütter Museum are followed at Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. We have enjoyed particular success with our YouTube program, No Bones about It. This program, which I host, includes interviews with authors, artists, and others who give lectures or hold events at the College, and has become a popular adjunct to museum programs. A relatively low-cost way to promote the collections, No Bones has already, in a half year, attracted more viewers than any other comparable program run by Philadelphia museums. The fact that our most popular episode has me feeding my pet medicinal leeches on my blood may have something to do with it. Increasingly, the College's presence via social media will become more vigorous and extensive and will connect substantially with the study of library and museum collections.
The College's claim on the history of science is multifaceted and evolving. This claim invites scholars who wish to use library materials for traditional research, but it also elicits interest in multidisciplinary uses of all College collections for projects that may challenge or provoke public perceptions of the human body, disease, or mortality. The history of science can be found in our photography collection, exhibits, or Web material involving imagery of the body, medical discourse, or the social history of disease. It can even be disturbingly historical.
Robert D. Hicks is director of the Mütter Museum/Historical Medical Library and William Maul Measey Chair for the History of Medicine. Contact him at: rhicks@collegeofphysicians.org
Web Links
The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, http://www.collegeofphysicians.org
Travel Grants
http://www.collphyphil.org/ERICS/Resfels.htm
Footnotes
- "What is it? Twentieth-century Artifacts out of Context," History of Science Society Newsletter 37.3 (July 2008).
- Thomas Söderqvist, Adam Bencard and Camilla Mordhorst,"Between Meaning Culture and Presence Effects: Contemporary Biomedical Objects as a Challenge to Museums," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 40 (2009): 431-38.
- Thomas Söderqvist, "The Participatory Museum and Distributed Curatorial Expertise," Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Technik und Medizin (2010, forthcoming).