MUSEUMS AND PUBLIC HEATLH
"[A] powerful moral lesson of the deceitfulness of vice, which, amidst its most seductive allurements, leaves so fearful an impress indelibly marked on the human frame."
Drs. Henry Jordan and Samuel Beck, Catalogue of the New-York Museum of Anatomy, 1863
The most public-facing role of medical spectacles was the promotion of public health.
The Army Medical Museum in Washington DC was established in 1862 to document injuries and fatalities of the American Civil War in order to educate surgeons on how to treat these injuries.
After the war's end in 1865, Army Medical Museum curators began to reframe the institution. What was once a military and medical resource became an attraction for middle- to upper-class Americans to pass their leisure time.
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In the words of medical librarian John Shaw Billings,
Ford's Theater, where President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, was modified to accommodate the Army Medical Museum in 1866. Baltimore, W.M. Chase, 1870s. National Library of Medicine.
“Educated men and women should have some curiosity as to the structure of their own bodies,…the arrangement of parts in certain localities where they have felt pain or discomfort, or the changes in which have caused death in relatives or friends."
"Medical Museums: With Special Reference to the Army Medical Museum at Washington," 1888
Billings and museum curators believed that visitors would see a particular specimen and relate it back to themselves or their loved ones, and this would motivate them to seek medical attention.
Illustrations of ulcers caused by syphilis by Ambroise Tardieu, 1835. These types of shocking images were used to frighten the public into avoiding sexual promiscuity. College of Physicians of Philadelphia Digital Library.
Beyond educating people on their physical health, some medical museums concerned themselves with the moral health of the American public.
For nineteenth-century physicians, one’s physical body was inextricably linked to their morality.
They believed that impure thoughts or actions manifested as disease or defects on one's body, or the body of their children.
The New York Museum of Anatomy, run by Drs. Henry Jordan and Samuel Beck, compared the remains of the moral and the remains of the immoral.
They used these graphic demonstrations to warn the public that a lascivious lifestyle had dire consequences on the body.
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Following common beliefs about the practice at the time, Jordan and Beck touted in their 1863 catalogue that they displayed
"eruptions of the skin...which, in this case, arose from the debasing habit of masturbation."
To contrast this physical evidence of vice, Jordan and Beck showed visitors the consequences of a righteous lifestyle. Their museum contained a
"magnificent specimen of a healthy child, showing what may be expected from the good and moral life of the parents."
Another common display in medical museums was the preserved stomach of an alcoholic. These “drunkard’s stomachs” were often used to promote the growing anti-alcohol Temperance Movement by demonstrating the adverse effects of drink on the body.
While there is no doubt that excessive drinking is not healthy, the moral agenda lurking just below the surface of these displays is clear. Drunkard's stomachs represented the physical evidence of moral and social failure.
Magic lantern slide of a drunkard's stomach. Provided to the author by Dr. Matthew Warner Osborn.
These displays validated the popular idea that poor people, those experiencing addiction, and other "immoral" people were inherently and physiologically different from and inferior to the middle-class. Poverty and addiction were not problems that anyone could face; they could only afflict people deemed physically and constitutionally inferior.
The American medical establishment used these shocking visuals to further a very specific idea of what they thought the United States should be.
Much like the widely-circulated images of smoker’s lungs used to scare middle school children across the nation for decades, drunkard’s stomachs and specimens of sexual deviance in museums became very poignant deterrents against behaviors that were deemed immoral.