Cataloging and Reckoning With the Vanished Medical Museum at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania

Much scholarship on medicalized bodies in museums centers historical collections that still exist. Work on crania collected by Samuel Morton or remains displayed at the Mütter Museum probes provenance, ethics, and exhibition, but fails to grapple with the legacies of the many collections that are gone. In the 19th century, dozens of U.S. medical schools maintained museums where students consulted preserved human remains to study “normal” or pathological anatomy. A museum could house hundreds of specimens harvested from scores of bodies, typically without patients’ knowledge or consent. The collections were dismantled in the 20th century—often incinerated or thrown in the trash. This paper analyzes the 19th-century collection at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, among the country’s oldest and most prestigious training grounds for female physicians. Reading several decades of faculty meeting minutes documenting purchases and donations, I have created a partial catalog of the museum’s former holdings. None of the museum specimens are known to exist today, and I argue that we must study the museum in absentia. Turning to work by historians such as Stephanie Jones-Rogers, I insist that overlooking the presence of human remains in vanished collections elides patterns of historic harm: trafficking in these body parts, predominantly white students and alumni leveraged class and racial hierarchies for their own gain. I outline a future strategy for supporting descendent communities in deciding whether/how to memorialize and mourn the people whose bodies were never returned to their families and are now lost to us all.