Nov 1 Chris Willoughby (Huntington Library)

“Collected without Consent: Imperialism and Enslavement in Harvard’s Medical Museum.”

Co-sponsored with the Atlantic field

In 1847, upon his retirement, John Collins Warren gave his entire anatomical collection to Harvard’s medical school, including a  collection of racial skulls that would grow to include more than 150 objects. In this presentation, I will specifically analyze how skulls from the Black Atlantic were collected and dubbed “African,” attempting to erase their individual and cultural identities in favor of their  simple racialization. Specifically, I will examine the story of two skulls of African descendants, an unnamed leader from the 1835 Muslim Uprising in Bahia and another of Sturmann, a Khoe man from Little Namaqua Land who committed suicide in Boston in 1860 while a living exhibit. In telling their stories, I have two goals. First, I will posit a method for writing the history of racist museum exhibitions that does not continue the silencing of marginalized peoples displayed in those exhibits. Second, I argue that medical schools were intimately connected to the violence of slavery and empire. Through giving attention to the experiences of the skulls’ living antecedents though, I show that hidden in these records are histories of rebellion, politics, and survival in the age of empire.

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