![]() Trump’s Best Legal Defense Has a Fatal Flaw I Noticed Something Strange at Donald Trump’s Arraignment in a D.C. Jack Smith’s Indictment of the Entire Legal Profession Trump Will Be the Most Important Case in Our Nation’s History He argues that Black and disabled people continue to be made into specimens and robbed of individual identities. Marion Sims’ gynecological experiments on enslaved women in the 19 th century to the harvesting of Henrietta Lacks’ cervical cells at Johns Hopkins University in 1951 and Penn professor Albert Kligman’s use of imprisoned men at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison for dermatological research from the 1950s to the 1970s. Ezelle Sanford III, a historian of medicine and postdoctoral fellow in the Penn Program on Race, Science and Society, which deals directly with the university’s legacy of scientific racism on campus, called Monge’s words just “the most recent example of an ongoing legacy of Black people’s bodies used for academic research and pedagogy.” Sanford studies centuries of scientific racism within elite institutions, from J. In the Princeton video, Monge says, when asked how she knows that the remains “are the bones of a recently deceased individual,” that “the bones are juicy” and that they “smell kind of greasy,” comments that have drawn particular disgust. Samuel Redman, a historian and author of Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums, told me in an interview that he was shocked by “the fact that so many individuals were inspired by earlier 19 th century collectors and continued to gather bodies well into the 20 th century.” Museums with reputations for holding remains became repositories for missionaries, army medical officers, and other amateur bone collectors, who sometimes gathered remains tilled up during farming or construction projects. While institutions are quick to dismiss such racist collecting practices as an unfortunate inherited legacy of 19 th century colonialism, human bodies were collected well into the 20 th century, often under dubious circumstances. At the very least, the physical anthropology departments like the ones that employ Mann and Monge exist today as uneasy reminders of many museums’ and universities’ racist and colonial foundations. While some anthropologists, including Princeton’s Carolyn Rouse, have argued that physical and forensic anthropology simply cannot be taught without the use of human remains, questions of where and how those remains have been obtained, and whether their use in research includes consent from families, have often been given little consideration-and have even provoked outright hostility and racism. ![]() Other universities seem to have little idea of the scope or scale of their human collections, often scattered across anthropology labs and in storage rooms of medical schools rather than in temperature-controlled museum cabinets. (Still, the university continues to fight some claims on its collection, including from descendants of enslaved people.) Yale’s Cushing Center holds more recent remains, including more than 2,000 human brains collected by neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing through the 1930s, many of them taken from his former patients, some of whose families actively denied consent for autopsies and dissection. Earlier this year, Harvard announced it would convene a committee to investigate the history of more than 22,000 human remains distributed across its museums to assess future ethical stewardship. ![]() ![]() Of the more than half-million recorded human remains held in collections across the United States, tens of thousands of them are at universities, and not all were collected in what some consider the “bad old days” of the 19 th century. ![]()
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