On March 19th, 2018, The Historical Medical Library hosted a symposium on site at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Fully captioned videos of all the presentations can be found along this path.  

We brought together leading scholars and professionals in the world of disability studies and the history of medicine to explore aspects of our most recent exhibition in the Mütter Museum, Imperfecta.

Presenters/presentations: 

• Sabah Servaes, M.D. Congenital Anomalies: Then and Now '
• Shane Miller, Ph.D. Ambiguity and Excess in Medicine: Gothic and Enlightenment Structure in Nathaniel Highmore’s Case of a Foetus found in the Abdomen of a Young Man 
• Izetta Autumn Mobley, Doctoral Candidate, University of Maryland Troublesome Properties: Millie and Christine McKoy, Race, Gender, and Disability 
• Seth Kane, CEO, Lead Designer, The New Flesh Co. Historical Views of Prosthetic Users: Figures, Myths and Socioeconomic Influences 
• Sarah Rose, Ph.D. “We Lost Sixteen Fingers a Month”: Workmen’s Compensation, Idiot Asylums, and the Invention of ‘Disabled Bodies’ 
• Katherine Ott, Ph.D. Retrieving Lost Community—Reflections on Teratology, Disability, and History 

Congenital Anomalies: Then and Now 

Sabah Servaes, M.D. Dr. Servaes opened the Symposium with an overview of congenital anomalies in order to provide us with an idea of their spectrum. Paleopathologic examples from the literature are described along with the medical tools used to elucidate them. Some of the implications that these ancient specimens have on life today are presented. Finally, some examples of specimens from the Mütter Museum that have been digitized are presented to delineate normal and abnormal development. 

Sabah Servaes, M.D. is a Pediatric Radiologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) who serves as the Director of Body CT as well as the Program Director for the Residency, Fellowship, and Observership programs. Dr. Servaes is also the Chair of the Child Abuse Imaging Committee and the Co-Chair of the Program Directors Committee of the Society for Pediatric Radiology.  Her research interests include musculoskeletal development, dose reduction, non-accidental trauma, and appendicitis. Dr. Servaes has performed both CT and MRI scanning of specimens from the Mütter Museum to help understand normal musculoskeletal development, and presented these findings at an international meeting.  She is committed to furthering our understanding of, and educating others in, the imaging of children safely. 

Ambiguity and Excess in Medicine 

Gothic and Enlightenment Structure in Nathaniel Highmore’s Case of a Foetus found in the Abdomen of a Young Man, Shane Miller, Ph.D. 

In 1815, a young surgeon named Nathaniel Highmore, a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, published a thirty-page pamphlet: Case of A Foetus found in the Abdomen of a Young Man at Sherborne, in Dorsetshire. The pamphlet comes at an interesting time in the history of medicine, where key discoveries about bacteriology, virology and basic sterility had yet to be discovered; yet as a field, medicine had formalized into a discipline and had adopted the language of empiricism and descriptive precision. Shane Miler argues that Highmore’s pamphlet was an effort to demonstrate the superior explanatory power of medical science, and, in turn the goals of the Enlightenment project. Yet Highmore's use of Gothic stylistic elements disrupted his intended message and inadvertently presented the alternative Gothic reading as a disturbing, but ultimately preferable way, to make sense of medical anomalies. 

Shane Miller, Ph.D. serves as the chair of the Communication Department at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University and is a former director of the Gender Studies program. His teaching and research is in the area of rhetorical criticism and public address, with special interests in sports, monstrosity, and gender. He received an Enduring Questions Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop an ethics course "What is a Monster?" and his current research examines the ways in which tropes of monstrosity are deployed and challenged in representations of the ambiguous human body. 

Troublesome Properties 

Millie and Christine McKoy, Race, Gender, and Disability, Izetta Autumn Mobley, Doctoral Candidate, University of Maryland  

Millie and Christine McKoy were born in Columbus County, North Carolina in 1851: enslaved, Black, female, and conjoined. Millie and Christine McKoy were not given a choice about whether they would be bought or sold, displayed, or examined. They were born into what scholar Saidiya Hartman calls a position of unfreedom. Like Chang and Eng Bunker, another pair of North Carolina twins, Millie and Christine McKoy disrupted concepts of bodily autonomy, disability, race, and gender. In her presentation, Ms. Mobley examines how race, gender, and disability interact to produce notions of the imperfect body: How do we talk about how bodies come into being? What kinds of rights are afforded to which kinds of bodies? How might we reconsider whose bodies are framed as imperfect? How do cultural understandings of race, gender, disability, and medicine influence which bodies are deemed abnormal or monstrous? Using archival research gathered from the National Medical Library at the National Institutes of Health, the Historic Medical Library at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, and the North Carolina State Archives, this paper explores the McKoy twins' challenge to the "normal" body. 

Izetta Autumn Mobley, Doctoral Candidate, American Studies, is a native Washingtonian and graduate of Brown University. Ms. Mobley is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on art, public history, material and visual culture, gender, race, and disability. She is the author of the cultural landscape project 14th Street: A Love Letter, which chronicles the demographic and community changes along the 14th street corridor in Washington, D.C. Her dissertation project, Troublesome Properties examines the role of photography in establishing Black citizenship and the abled body in 19th century America. As a cultural worker, facilitator, and educator, Ms. Mobley has 15 years’ experience specializing in youth development, community capacity building, and equity education. 

Historical Views of Prosthetic Users 

Figures, Myths and Socioeconomic Influences, Seth Kane, CEO, Lead Designer, The New Flesh Co.  

Although specific perceptions of prosthetics users have varied wildly through time, the same underlying questions raised by their use have persisted: How do societies provide for those in need of a prosthetic device? Is the loss of a limb overcome by technology or willpower? What does it mean for our humanity when we can replace our bodies? 

This talk explores these questions and others through examples of historical figures, folk heroes, fictional archetypes and socioeconomic methodologies while examining our underlying fears and hopes surrounding limb loss and prosthetic use. 

Seth Kane, is a founding member of New Flesh Co. and currently serves as CEO and lead designer. Mr. Kane has over a decade of experience in industrial design, prototype development, manufacturing and biomedical engineering. He has also served as lecturer and a science and technology instructor for children and adults. 

New Flesh Co, is a biohacker collective and consultancy that develops biomedical devices, open-source prosthetics, and wearable technologies, backed by an interdisciplinary group of biotechnologists, designers, engineers, fine artists, and medical professionals. New Flesh Co. also provides Art, Technology and Manufacturing courses to children and adults. 

“We Lost Sixteen Fingers a Month” 

Workmen’s Compensation, Idiot Asylums, and the Invention of ‘Disabled Bodies’, Sarah Rose, Ph.D. 

People with disabilities cannot work, right? So have claimed politicians since the early 20th century. But how did people with disabilities become defined as “unproductive citizens,” as lazy dependents in dire need of retraining and rehabilitation? Such rhetoric does not reflect the reality that, historically speaking, disability is normal—in fact, being disabled is a standard part of the human experience and life course. Indeed, people with amputations, feeble-mindedness, tuberculosis, blindness, rheumatism, and many other disabilities had long worked. Certain injuries even served as a sign of experience and cool-headedness on the job. But by the 1920s, people with many different types and origins of disabilities, both acquired and congenital, found themselves pushed out of the paid labor market, thanks in part to shifting family structures and policies that sought to deter dependency, such as workmen’s compensation. Although disabled people continued to seek work, increasingly for minimal or no pay, employers and lawmakers now read their bodies in new ways: as abnormal and inherently unproductive. 

Sarah Rose, Ph.D. is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she directs the Minor in Disability Studies and is helping to build UTA Libraries’ Texas Disability History Collection. Her book, No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1840s-1930s, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2017 and was awarded the 2017 award for Excellence in Research Using the Holdings of the State Archives by the New York State Archives and Archives Partnership Trust. She has published on “Work” in Keywords for Disability Studies and on “‘Crippled’ Hands: Disability in Labor and Working-Class History” in LABOR: Studies in the Working-Class History of the Americas. Rose and Joshua A. T. Salzmann’s essay, “Bionic Ballplayers: Risk, Profit, and the Body as Commodity, 1964-2007,” received LABOR’s best article prize for 2014-2015. 

Retrieving Lost Community 

Reflections on Teratology, Disability, and History, Katherine Ott, Ph.D. 

In her presentation, Historian and curator Katherine Ott discusses the development of the field of teratology through a disability studies framework. The imagination has been significant in shaping analyses, descriptions, and aesthetics related to anomalous humans. Data for historical research primarily resides in medical archives and special collections, often the life's work of private collectors. While the gathering and preserving of this information for study benefits medical practitioners, the retrieved narratives are also an important family album for others as a means to locate themselves through community with those long past and on the margins. 

Katherine Ott, Ph.D. is a curator and historian in the Division of Medicine and Science at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. She works on the history of medicine and the body, disability and bodily difference, and LGBTQ history, among other topics. She has curated exhibitions on the history of disability, HIV and AIDS, polio, acupuncture, and medical devices for altering the human body. Her most recent web exhibition is "EveryBody: An Artifact History of Disability in America". The author of Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture Since 1870 (1996), she coedited Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics (2002) and The Scrapbook in American Life (2006), and is currently finishing a monograph about some of the major issues involved in interpreting historical objects. She also teaches graduate courses in material culture at George Washington University.