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Both the Hunterian Museum and the Wellcome Collection in London recently have been key loci for discussions on displaying the body and medicalized objects in museum collections. After a prolonged outcry, the Hunterian decided to remove the skeleton of Charles Byrne (known as the “Irish Giant”) from display ahead of its 2023 reopening. The long-running Medicine Man exhibition at the Wellcome also closed down, so that the institution could reconsider how medical collections should be shown to the public sensitively, ethically, and holistically. The origins of these problematic displays were rooted in imperialist projects that used museums and collecting to cement power. Alongside these more discrete moments of reckoning with the body and medical collections in museums in the British metropole, of course the British Museum’s treatment of the bodies and artifacts of non-British cultures remains a constant theme and debate in museum studies.

Expanding beyond the above British examples, this panel invites curators, art historians, and other museum professionals to reflect and engage with the imperial legacies of global collecting practices, the ethics of bodily autonomy and medical collecting, and possibilities for the future. While engaging with the breadth of recent work on decolonizing the museum and collecting practices, papers may reflect on the origin and status of a single object, on the strengths and shortcomings of the practices of certain museums or collections, on more conceptual ideas around ethics, or on wider trends within museum studies.