Bgh Assignment 4 Museum Report

Body, Gender & Health #4 Anatomy Museum Report Kartikeya Jain

INTRODUCTION

The Museum of Anatomy & Pathology (MAP) in Manipal houses an extensive collection of biological, i.e. human and animal specimens for display in a sprawling, swanky space. It seems to be a proud exhibition of the excellence in the medical sciences pursued at the Kasturba Medical College of Manipal University. This is apparent in the language of its description on the university website – “[…] the museum boasts of over 3,000 specimens and samples of things anatomical, including the skulls of an elephant and a whale, and the long skeleton of a King Cobra” (Anatomy Museum Overview n.d.).The larger idea behind the project is seemingly, to make accessible the vast bodies of knowledge related to anatomy, biology and pathology to the general public, outside of these highly specialized disciplines. There are two broad aspects that have come to light with my visit to this museum that I would like to talk about in this piece. First, is the aspect of display or representation itself of the various bodies (and body parts) in a museum setup, and the gamut of questions that raises regarding knowledge, and underlying narratives that come through within that space. Second, is that of the affective or aesthetic spirit that creeps into one’s experience of, what is on the surface, supposed to be a sterile educational experience for the visitor that is in part, induced by the manner of presentation of and within the space. The museum starts with a section on comparative anatomy with specimens on display of various animals, as mentioned before, these are skulls displayed in shelves along with cross sections of various birds, mammals and reptiles preserved in formaldehyde. Some of the skulls are newly painted in an odd colour scheme. For instance, the elephant tusk is innocuously painted white while, on the other hand, there is a display of an old man in typical Indian sadhu garb of orange robes, with skin painted dark brown and a fake beard. This display oddly, does not have any description - which makes one question its placement in the museum. There is a similar obsession apparent throughout the rest of the museum with representing specimens in a particular way, by further intervening on them via painting (among other things), it seems, to either make them ‘fit for presentation’ (whatever that may mean) or also, to indicate a certain status of ‘health’ or disease through various colour tropes associated with the many functions of the human body (‘red’ for arteries/clean blood and ‘blue’ for veins/dirty blood etc.). Some displays literally have buttons in the place of eyes with eyeballs painted on them, presumably to maintain some sort of propriety and normality. Although this provoked quite the opposite, rather unsettling reaction in my experience – exactly the sort of thing that the curators, perhaps wanted to avoid. I shall come back to the aesthetic aspect later in the piece.

SECTION I

The whole notion of displaying the multifarious internal organs of the human body, to be seen as objects of biological knowledge can be contextualized in the backdrop of the rise of the discipline of biology itself, shifting from the 18th century (and before) discipline of ‘natural history’ to the ‘science’ of biology in the 19 th century as described by Foucault (1970). He points to Cuvier as the pivot around which the epistemological transformation happens where the structure of knowledge of beings changes from a flat, two-dimensional grid based on visible and outward identities and differences to a centrifugal ordering and


classification based on identities and differences around an invisible and hidden notion of ‘life’. This basically means that where previously, each organ was represented in the grid of natural history on the basis of structure and function, that (in its presentation) belied a certain independence or autonomous existence of said organ within the larger body of the organism, and equal weightage to both parameters; Cuvier subordinates the form, structure etc. of the organ to the “sovereignty of function” whose aim becomes sustaining a notion of ‘life’ that is invisible to the naked eye (264).

“From Cuvier onward, function, defined according to its non-perceptible form as an effect to be attained, is to serve as a constant middle term and to make it possible to relate together totalities of elements without the slightest visible identity. What to Classical eyes were merely differences juxtaposed with identities must now be ordered and conceived on the basis of a functional homogeneity which is their hidden foundation” (265).

The ‘functional homogeneity’ is the larger functioning of the organism as a whole, that introduces an interdependence and reciprocity of organs along with an internal hierarchy according to their relative importance vis-à-vis functions of the whole body. Thus for instance, within the digestive system, the length, dilations and convolutions of the alimentary canal become dependent on the form of the teeth. Also, the morphology of limbs determines the type of food the organism will be able to tear and capture and, accordingly ingest (265). Similarly, while gills and lungs may not share any similarity with respect to form, magnitude or number, they both serve the function of respiration, in general. For Cuvier, the existence of the animal precedes the relationships between its constituent parts, and they only interact to serve the purpose of the former. There emerges a hierarchy of organs according to which the various orders, classes, families et al. of animals are arranged, according to a certain plan of nature. “As a hierarchical principle, this plan defines the most important functions, arranges the anatomical elements that enable it to operate, and places them in the appropriate parts of the body […]” (267). Thus, the vital functions place their organs towards the centre of the system and as we move outward toward the lesser organs, so to speak, they become susceptible to other forms of determination – fins are equated with arms and so forth -

“[…] the species can at the same time resemble one another (so as to form groups such as the genera, the classes, and what Cuvier calls the sub-kingdoms) and be distinct from one another. What draws them together is not a certain quantity of coincident elements; it is a sort of focus of identity which cannot be analysed into visible areas because it defines the reciprocal importance of the various functions; on the basis of this imperceptible centre of identities, the organs are arranged in the body, and the further they are from the centre, the more they gain in flexibility, in the possibilities of variation, and in distinctive characters. Animal species differ at their peripheries, and resemble each other at their centres; they are connected by the inaccessible, and separated by the apparent” (267).

Thus, the dark, invisible space - the “great, mysterious, invisible focal unity” that one has to penetrate the surface of visibilities (only through dissection) indicates the conditions of possibility for biology (269). Concomitant with biology, comes the underlying teleological narrative that breaks the continuity of time implicit with the natural history grid. It presupposes a progression of life


towards a telos, to the top of the pyramid. A common example of this is the horshoe crab that is commonly known as the “living fossil” (Sadava et al; 2009). This betrays a line of thinking that would claim that despite its primitiveness, the horseshoe crab survived into the modern epoch wherein only creatures of a certain evolved state are able to adapt and ensure their survival. Whereas in the classical taxonomy system it would’ve just fit into the flat grid, placed in a box according to its features. Thus, fragmented by ‘life’, that “isolates forms that are bound in upon themselves”, the organs become representative of (and tending towards) a normative ideal of a healthy and good life (Foucault, 273). This underlying ideology informs the displays at the Anatomy Museum as well.

SECTION II

There are moreover, explicit visual markers such as mannequins of male torsos above some of the glass shelves that definitively indicate a notion of perfection in human health. The ‘specimens’ are flexing their well-built musculature and have networks of blue and red blood vessels, implying peak physical condition. Additionally, there is graphic visual imagery in the circulatory system section that shows, besides the blue-red schema that is common throughout, blood travelling like forces of electricity across the body (Figure 1 below).

Figure 1

While there are numerous displays of the ideal human body strategically positioned around the place, they were paradoxically swarmed by the innumerable other displays that illustrated how life can radically deviate from the norm. The first part of the answer to this phenomenon would be with reference to the vast collection of fetuses on display. From premature still births to aborted babies, there is an impressive spectrum on offer. Of special significance are some of the taxonomical specificities, such as the “hydrocephalic monster” - one among the many ‘monsters’ that showcases the still archaic residues of what was initially a discipline that arose from encounters of European expansion with the rest of the world.


Franklin contextualizes the trajectory of the practice of collecting, storing and displaying human and animal remains that, in the early modern period, occupied the European aristocrat, that was not only intended to educate but had the character of a frivolous pastime, intended to “amuse and titillate” (Anker & Franklin, 104, 2011). So there is element of an aestheticization of the exotic, horrific, the bizarre and monstrous in the history of this practice. This purportedly changes however, with the gradual emergence of natural history and then biology, when the practice is absorbed into the ‘serious’ pursuit of knowledge of the natural world (104).At the anatomy musuem however, the aesthetics of my encounter with the specimens formed a significant part of the experience. The bright lights, the sterile spick-and-span surroundings and the eerie interventions on the specimens in the glass cases as well as the other visual cues mentioned before, induce an inadvertent and unsettling reaction from the spectator in the event of the unabashed presentation of grotesquerie. Part of the motivation, evident especially in the pathology section that deals with ‘lifestyle diseases’ and their consequences on various organs of the body, seems to come from a didactic, moral voice that seems to warn, with its graphic accompaniments, against excesses of smoke, drink and harmful foods.

CONCLUSION

The larger epistemological point of note here is that the incremental mediation and intervention on the organic body in service of uncovering the inner invisibilities driving biological life managed to counter-intuitively widen the chasm between the representational modalities of knowledge and the actual, living beings that are the purported objects of study (Franklin, 104). Meaning that extracting and displaying, in a very specific manner, the many parts (organs) that make up a single, whole human body, and opening it up to unified human spectators results in a significant reconfiguration of the relationships of the objects (parts) between themselves and with the wholes. I sensed this myself, in the form of a curiously alienating feeling being amidst that cornucopia of glass jars filled with preserved dead organs, fetuses and cross-sectionals of animal remains. Concurrently, this ordering of objects betrays, as mentioned before, a conception of an ideal of (human) life guiding the particular science of biology. Consequently, this can become the grounds on which one could begin questioning the discourse of biology and destabilising its positivist claims to knowledge, by uncovering (in the Foucauldian sense) the underlying and ever-changing ideological impulses driving this particular discipline.

BibliographyAnatomy Museum Overview. http://manipal.edu/kmc-manipal/kmc-experience/putting-manipal-on-the-map.html (accessed September Sunday, 2015).

Anker, Suzanne, and Sarah Franklin. "Specimens as Spectacles Reframing Fetal Remains." Social Text 29, no. 1 106 (2011): 103-125.

Sadava, David E., David M. Hillis, H. Craig Heller, and May Berenbaum. Life: the science of biology. Vol. 2. Macmillan, 2009.


Foucault, Michel. The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. Vintage Books, 1994.

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Bgh Assignment 4 Museum Report