Undisciplinary
Undisciplinary
Medical Museums and Colonial Hauntings: a conversation with Órla O'Donovan
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We talk with Órla O'Donovan about how medical museums and university heritage spaces can hide violence in the display cabinets while still shaping what we treat as knowledge, normality, and progress. We discuss with the limits of consent, erasing records, and why real repair demands ongoing reckoning with the past.
References to topics discussed:
- Órla O'Donovan, University ‘dude walls’ must fall, Community Development Journal, Volume 60, Issue 1, January 2025, Pages 13–17, https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bsae050
- O’Donovan, Órla. "“The Irish giant” and the questions haunting medical museums." bmj 381 (2023).
- Tasmania government apologises for display of autopsy body parts in museum without consent
- Vial episode over after precious blood comes home to Elcho Island
Undisciplinary - a podcast that talks across the boundaries of history, ethics, and the politics of health.
Follow us on Twitter @undisciplinary_ or email questions for "mailbag episodes" undisciplinarypod@gmail.com
Land Acknowledgment And Welcome
SPEAKER_01Undisciplinary is recorded on the unceded lands of the Wadarong peoples of the Kulin Nation in Geelong and the Gadigal peoples of the Aurora Nation in Sydney. We pay our respects to elders past and present.
SPEAKER_00Medical history has been made and in action. And COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic.
SPEAKER_01Welcome to Undisciplinary, a podcast where we're talking across the boundaries of history, ethics, and the politics of health, co-hosted by Chris Mays and Jane Williams. Okay, so welcome to another episode of Undisciplinary. Uh Jane, how are you?
SPEAKER_02Very well, thank you, Christopher. You?
SPEAKER_01I am well. Uh anything to report?
SPEAKER_02Oh, lovely long weekend. No, lovely long weekend, thanks to the king.
SPEAKER_01Uh yes.
SPEAKER_02And his birthday?
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_02Much appreciated. Well, you know what I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_01I was thinking about the topic that we're going to be discussing today, and again, not as a way to continually bring in talking about my new puppy, but my puppy, Pickles, is King Charles Cavalier.
SPEAKER_02I was joking.
SPEAKER_01Which is named after King Charles II. And in preparing for a lecture I was doing earlier in the year on John Locke and about the execution of King Charles the First, I didn't realise that King Charles II, once he once the restoration of the Stuarts happened, exhumed the body of Oliver Cromwell and tried him and had him hanged, and I think put his head somewhere. Which is pretty grisly, even thinking that it was 375 years ago, sort of pr pretty uh disturbing, I guess, to think about um how the remains of uh somebody is treated. And I guess, you know, not to have as a glib um transition, but that's sort of what we're wanting to think about uh today, and uh we fortunately have someone who's got more references than just the King Charles Cavalier, uh, to think about how we uh I guess memorialise, reflect on the past, and the ethical and political considerations that are um to uh that we need to reflect on, particularly those of us in colonial contexts like uh where we are in Australia uh and much of the much of the world where the British have ventured um often with atrocities in their wake. Uh but Jane, I was wondering if you would do the honours of introducing our guests considering I butchered it last time.
Meet Orla And Her Path
SPEAKER_02It's my job, mate. Um but I also just want to congratulate you on that extraordinarily smooth segue from pickles to Oliver Cromwell. I it it's full of skills.
SPEAKER_01I only found that out afterwards. So I don't know if I would have got a King Charles Cavalier if I knew that Grizzly Royal past.
SPEAKER_02Uh anyway, I'm really excited about the conversation that we are having today with Orla O'Donovan, who is an intradisciplinary feminist scholar working at the intersections of bioethics, social studies of science and medicine, death studies, and community and social movement studies. She's an associate professor in the School of Applied Social Sciences in University College Cork in Ireland, and a research associate with Collective Social Futureslash, I don't know how to read that, Institute for Social Science in the 21st Century. She's Vice Head for Research and Innovation and Director of the Bachelor of Social Science degree. She's also one of the founders and conveners of the Living Well with the Dead Research Collective, a UCC-based interdisciplinary and international medical humanities network, which I am dying to know more about. So thanks so much for joining us today, Orla. Oh, it's a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.
SPEAKER_01Yes, thank you very much. And so part of uh the purpose that we have with this podcast and reflecting on the title, Undisciplinary, before I guess getting into the sort of details of someone's work, we'd like to hear sort of a little bit about how they got to where they are. Um so, you know, not to sort of just say that you're limited to the kind of work that we're discussing about um museums and and memory and um the the bio that just Jane Joan just read out. But um, yeah, we'd like to hear, I guess, a little bit about the what is often an unplanned or undisciplinary journey to the research topics that we find ourselves uh immersed in.
SPEAKER_05Okay. Um well my formal academic training was highly interdisciplinary. Um I began with a a degree in the social sciences, and this was followed by a master's degree in rural development, um, where my research supervisor was an anthropologist, and then I did a PhD on democracy and women's health policy making, where my supervisors were an epidemiologist and a sociologist. Um, so I certainly haven't stayed within um you know a single um disciplinary uh stream. Um, but the the common thread running through these various formal studies and much of my subsequent work were questions about what gets to be constituted as progress or or development or desirable futures, um, how and by whom and um what and whose knowledges count in these. Um my interest in these questions, I think, was very much informed by being a child of 1960s Ireland, um post-colonial context, um, but also growing up in a place and time that was really saturated with hegemonic Anglo-American ideas about development and technological progress. Um, I was born in a hospital that was regarded as being advanced because many of the staff had been trained in obstetrics in the United States and used practices such as administering general anesthetics to birthing women. Um and I grew up in a town that in state discourses was central to the development of the West of Ireland. Um, the first house that my family lived in was owned by what was known as the Shannon Development Company that had been established by the Irish government to develop the region. Um, and these state discourses in which Ireland's post-development that was embraced involved really facilitating in whatever way was necessary global capitalism and its multinational corporations through foreign direct investment. Um so perhaps with that biography, it's not surprising that when I encountered the writings of post-development scholars in the in the 1990s, and particularly like one of the I think one of the key texts for me in terms of shaping my academic journey was the post-development dictionary, A Guide to Knowledge as Power, which was you know provided me with such delight and gave me a new critical language to think about the world in which I had I had grown up. Um I think also just thinking about my academic journey, um, that what has been significant are the many chants and extremely fortunate encounters I've had with people who have become my friends, my teachers, my co-learners and um and and collaborators, and where together we've taken what you're referring to as these unplanned and um disciplinary paths. Um and one of those paths has been into what I think we're going to be focusing on in this conversation, um, and that's my my collaborative research with um legacy medical collections.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, thank you for that um background. That was um yeah, really, really helpful and rich. Uh I think also yeah to understand the situations that were that shape us from you know birth and housing and uh government policy even. Um which is uh something I may say a little more about if we get down to some of these other questions uh that we've got out. But I I guess um just as a bit of slight background, I mean we haven't met uh f in person, but we came uh into contact through uh a proposal that uh is has been accepted for the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry to have a special issue. Um and before sort of talking about that, um it'd be interesting to hear a bit about the workshop that the special issue comes from.
Remaking Medical Museums Workshop
SPEAKER_01So in 2025, uh you co-hosted or hosted a workshop at um the University College Cork entitled Remaking Medical Museums as Sites of Ongoing Reckoning and Repair. Um for anybody who's interested, uh you can Google that title and you'll come up with a few pages describing some of the things and who spoke there. But um in preempting that, uh I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that workshop and then maybe uh a little bit about the the papers and themes that were discussed and where the special issue with the JBI is at.
SPEAKER_05Yes, well, first of all, Chris, just to say thank you so much for your immediate and very enthusiastic response to that proposal. Um I was very happy that you were so open to the idea. Um and the yes, the just to say the the special issue or the symposium, I think it's called, it's a I don't know, symposium, a mini special issue, um but although it's turned out to be not so mini. Um but yes, this is um in progress, and it um we expect that it will be available, um it will it will be included in the December issue of the the the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry. Um so and already some of the preprints um from some of the papers are coming available online already. So I know I was just in touch with Margaret Shildrick, the philosopher, the feminist philosopher Margaret Shildrick, and she has a wonderful paper called Um Disturbing Bioarchives, The Case for Hontological Ethics. And that's so that's available, I think, on Research Gate. So so the yeah, the papers are beginning to to come on stream. So just to um give you some of the background to that that workshop, um it's uh so both the workshop and the special issue have are part of work, um, ongoing work of this group that um that Jane mentioned in the in the introduction, the The Living Well with the Dead Research Collective. Um and this is a group that I've been involved with now for not quite a decade. I think it's um yeah, about yeah, 2018. Um but it's it's a it's a it's a a research collective that has been working on issues around the dead and our responsibilities to the dead, and particularly the disenfranchised dead. Um this is work that has been ongoing for quite some time. Um so where that uh the the impetus bar that we had a we had a small project in 2018 that was supported by Welcome called Living Well with the Dead in Contemporary Ireland. And that was um it it was about trying to nurture a um an interdisciplinary, even a transdisciplinary network of scholars who were interested in questions about um the the dead and living well with the with the dead. So part of that involved, well, we the the overall project was interested in looking at different social imaginaries of the dead, but we we found it necessary really to look at our own disciplinary imaginaries um and the kinds of questions that our various disciplines tend to pose or even how we approach the dead, including the dead, the dead body. So a lot of the work was about looking at these very different. We've really been using the term from Anna Singh, the idea of arts of noticing, and how in how different disciplines cultivate different arts of noticing. Um so there's been a lot of work around trying to develop some kind of shared language and um you know shared way of like really collaborating, you know, kind of deep collaboration on these issues.
Mother And Baby Homes Legacy
SPEAKER_05But the the impetus for that um work came from um, well, an aspect, a very troubling aspect of Ireland's past, um, which is by no means unique to Ireland, but it has played out in very particular ways here. Um and the the research group was the impetus for that came from official investigations um into the history of the use by universities and university medical schools of the dead from Ireland's notorious mother and baby institutions. Um in the like over the past few decades in Ireland, um, there have been well survivor movements and their and their supporters of women who were illegally incarcerated in these institutions have really been agitating for some sort of recognition and and redress. And their actions resulted in the establishment by the Irish government in 2015 of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation. And that part of the brief of that commission was investigation of the treatment of the dead from these institutions. Um now these were very much institutions of state-sponsored care as violence. I know in Australia you also have a tradition of these, you know, such institutions. Um, but the part of the brief of this commission was looking at the transfer of uh infants who died in these institutions to universities for um anatomization. Um but again, like these institutions were very much, I think what Ashil Mbembe refers to as death whirls. Um, you know, they were sites of social existence that were not only marked by heightened risk of physical death, but also social death for people who were stigmatized and institutionalized. Um and the commission reported, you know, it it provided all sorts of figures on the numbers of dead who were transferred between various institutions from say like the 1920s right up to the 1970s to various um schools. Um and you know, this is where there was no evidence of consent or even knowledge of the of the mothers of these um of these infants. And part of, and this is part of the bigger story about these institutions that one of the issues is that the dead for many of these institutions are missing. Um now there's issues around um the distortion of records to conceal illegal adoptions, um, but um yeah, so there are all sorts of archival erasures and missing records surrounding these issues. And also there has been through the work of a uh um you know someone who's described as a kind of amateur historian, but somebody who's very much, I think, is regarded as a kind of um rebel historian who has refused um the kind of silences around this issue. So there's a particular mother and baby home in County Galway and Toome, where through the actions of um this uh historian, a woman called Catherine Corless, um it has come to light that many baby, many infants who died were buried in what was a disused um uh sewage tank. Um so there this has really caused huge levels of public unrest and distress, and also it's where the dead are very much become central to public life in Ireland. Um so these were, and then in specifically in the Cork context, um there are many missing dead. Um but the official investigation was able to, you know, will will report it that there were no there was no evidence of the transfer of these remains to to University College Cork. But I know questions of what constitutes evidence is something we'll be discussing. But that is the that was the that was that's what was going on around, you know, in in our these are the kinds of debates and concerns um that um yeah led to the establishment of this living well with the dead research group.
SPEAKER_01Um thank you thank you for that uh sort of overview of the and the background of that that research group. Um it's also interesting to the way that you were talking about that uh the historian Catherine uh didn't catch the last name. Catherine Corless. Catherine Corless and the and some of the disciplinary norms in in in what you were reflecting on earlier about uh the way that disciplines for people who maybe then uh labelled activists or you know, the the sort of discounted and and again I guess that plays into the politics of evidence and objectivity and uh these sorts of um things. But um I was wondering, I mean, you've already given us um a a good sort of taste of some of these medical museums and and what kinds of things they were involved in.
What Medical Museums Are For
SPEAKER_01I I guess maybe just a um, you know, what what were the purpose of some of these, particularly I guess the university-based medical museums? Um, you know, when did they come about? Um and obviously these are going to be different depending on different contexts, but I I guess a general sense of yeah, why do universities seemingly around the world are getting increasingly embraced with these reckonings of the past because they have been collecting uh various artifacts, remains. Um just interested in that sort of general um sense for perhaps people are unfamiliar with the that these uh pathology and medical museums even exist.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, there's a very wide array of um different kinds of medical museums um internationally. Like they they vary considerably in their scale, their age, origins, and purpose. Um some of them are open to the public and generate substantial incomes and um are often included in tourist guides of you know creepy things to do in different cities around the world. Um more restricted access, um, including, say, the the museums in in Cork where where I work. Um I think certainly many um many museums date from the 19th century as the the histories of medical museums, of many medical museums are bound up with the histories of Western medicine. Um and some of them are bound up with the histories of even you know the the development of particular um medical uh disciplines. Um but I think for the most part and certainly the virtually all of the museums and maybe with one or two exceptions most of the the medical museums I have visited they um they narrate a history of um of well first of all histories of the great men of science um and also celebrate histories of of of medical progress um but I think they are they are fascinating sites um they're they're they're very unsettling and um uh affecting and um and and compelling um places um um you like you mentioned or we were we were talking about the the special issue of the the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry and um a number of the contribu a number of the contributions to that talk about the well some of them do this kind of grand survey of um of medical museums internationally so we've we've uh uh we have an article by um Margaret Werry from the University of Minnesota somebody who approaches someone who's a a performance studies scholar and who who uh uh whose work focuses on the um the the the the stories that these museums are you know enlisted in um in in telling but she she has this art this article called a convocation of collections where she does this survey of the of the diverse forms um we have another piece that also looks at the just the the that begins by looking at the how you know how well just the sheer numbers of these um collections and so Thomas Champney from the United States who's involved in developing a set of guidelines from the American Anatomical Association and they you know so again he does the he talks about the the you know the range of um of of collections there's another by uh another article by Njabu Chipungura who is an anthropologist and also a museum uh practitioner and he talks about the the collection at the university in it's the the museum the Manchester Museum which is attached to the University Manchester which is a really really substantial collection um and then another focus is one by with a a a piece by the an article by Nina Licke the um she's the she's very much associated with queer death studies and um she's the author of the book uh vibrant death but in her the focus of her pieces on a very specific specimen um she's and she talks about the how we encounter our encounters not just with big collections but with even individual uh specimens um so but maybe going back to your question about you know what um uh about these these different collections and what they're called to do like many of them are regarded as teaching collections that are you know just for use with medical students others are regarded as heritage collections others are regarded as part of a public education so they're they're called upon to uh perform very differently um and one of the things that I've become really interested in uh are the how well even the um the display practices and how these vary really considerably internationally um so like I've I've visited some collections that I think would be impossible in the Irish context like in in Ireland we don't have any medical museums that are kind of public facing that have um you know traces of the the disenfranchised dead or remains of the disenfranchised dead whereas in in other contexts you do and I'm I'm really curious as to why why this is and um has it to do with different public bioethical sensibilities or histories of the medical profession or um but yeah so these are just some of the yeah just some ideas about the diversity of these collections.
Tourism Voyeurism And Atrocity Traces
SPEAKER_05I wonder Ola how much of it also might be driven by public demand hey so before we started recording um we we're having a brief chat about um how atrocities are commemorated and um depending on where you're talking about quite a few of those do have uh artifacts of dead people bodies or body parts and so on um and I think those are there because because there's demand there is terrorist demand for that kind of thing um which is something that I I struggle with a lot but um like thinking about the demand side of it it makes me wonder if there was a heyday if you like of the medical museum so um we'll we'll talk a little bit about the the paper that you uh wrote in the BMJ but I know there was the this this period where difference was um was displayed I suppose with with great fanfare um was that was that a like a a quite a discreet period and was that about trying to make sense of difference or um or was it more nefarious really more like the the old school sort of freak show type I I feel so bad saying that and I can't think of a better way of putting it but I mean you know yeah oh well I think unquestionably medical museums part of the history of medical museums are are is the freak show phenomenon and um um but I think it yeah there's I think there's been some really interesting work done though on the freak show and you know what is it about the freakish that is so compelling um and is it more than just voyeurism um so yeah there there there has been some yeah and Margaret Shildrick whose whose work I mentioned there she has she has written a lot about and Margaret Margaret Warry also about this um interest in the in the freakish and why is why is this this so so compelling um but yes I think the and also tourism um there yeah that many of these museums are are are tourist um destinations um but it is um and certainly uh they still I think one of the things that many of the the museums do is they produce this idea of the um the normal and the pathological um so many museums i and it's as neat as that where you know this is a normal specimen this is this is a this is a pathological um and I think you know this is something where certainly disability activists have been involved in um um challenging some of the the the ideas um communicated by um by the by by by museums but come back to the idea of atrocities um I think the um and maybe just to to give you an example one one exhibition that I visited um last year to have the I even dug out the the um the the leaflet march in advance of talking with you it's a it's an exhibition that's in the that was in the ingolstadt in in in Germany um in the the History of Medicine uh museum there um it's uh it's uh the the exhibition was called Heart of the the Matter Human Specimens in in the museum and it was uh it this um took place alongside um the the the this exhibition coincided with the the conference a conference of the International Association of Medical Museums and and collections um and they they now have a a biannual um conference but at this exhibition they um like even if I could just read you you know they say you know for centuries universities and hospitals have accumulated extensive anatomical and pathological teaching collections uh the status of these specimens has been increasingly questioned since the Body Worlds exhibition was shown in Europe in 1997 um and the discussion has taken on an additional dimension through the debate surrounding human remains from contexts of injustice and then they go on and talk um where they reassure visitors to the exhibition that the uh the exhibition doesn't include any um specimens that are originate from the context of injustice of colonialism and um or or national socialism but I think um so there has been around you know there has been for quite some time there's been some sensitivities around collections associated with um with Nazi medicine um and in more recent times um colonial collections again largely due to activism you know decolonial activism um but I think we there there are other atrocities too um so what even gets to be regarded as a museum with you know a museum of an atrocity and I think one of the issues that the I think the mother and baby homes controversy has helped us realise you know it that that there are in terms of these atrocities um some are you know this even Hannah Rent's idea of you know the the the um the banality of evil that there are that there are many of these regimes of medical violence and that many many medical collections um display or contain um traces of diverse atrocities and diverse regimes of violence.
SPEAKER_01Yeah
Charles Byrne And Museum Haunting
SPEAKER_01I mean something that uh attracted me to um your proposal and to this topic um is I think the way that it also challenges a lot of um what is considered a bioethical issue and the way that that's framed. Like you were talking before about disciplinary imaginaries and I think bioethics um to some extent has been captured and defined by perhaps a similar imaginary to this sort of medical scientific imaginary. But I also think it's important that we emphasize that this is bioethics too these kinds of discussions and um you know queer and disability and postcolonial critiques are part of bioethics and that that narrative can't be dominated by that sort of Anglo-American applied ethics philosophy. Having said that a lot of this in terms of the context of injustice to sort of pick up on that phrase within that sort of bioethical imaginary often turns on this idea of consent. And so you know in Australia the Tasmanian government recently apologised uh for a pathology museum at the University of Tasmania because it was displaying specimens that again really quite recent like 1966 to 1991 these specimens were uh obtained and collected um and it was framed as you know the unethical or the injustice was that it was done so without consent and so you know with consent um something is unethical or ethical if we have consent whereas I think the sort of these broader um perspectives that you and your colleagues are drawing on sort of really reframes that. And and another one I guess and this comes from sort of teaching some undergraduate philosophy um this idea of can the dead be harmed again sort of reducing harm to this sort of physical sensation you know that going back to Epicurus you know we have no sort of physical or or conscious sensation after we die therefore we can't be harmed so you know the to go back to cr Cromwell you know he wasn't harmed when he was exhumed um because he couldn't feel it but it seems that except that with Cromwell if there wasn't harm then they wouldn't have done it.
SPEAKER_02Do you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_01Like maybe nah yeah I mean that yeah so there is a there there is a reframing in the purpose of doing it I guess to try to disgrace the body um exactly that's what I'm saying like that yeah like you know clearly he couldn't feel it but but it was about causing yeah causing punishment causing harm for past injustice. One case and this to to go to your BMJ article that I think sort of brings together a lot of these different threads um around sort of colonial um power about what counts and sort of you mentioned focusing on an individual specimen um is the case of Charles Byrne also known as the Irish Giant um and uh you wrote a piece in the BMJ called the Irish Giant and the question and the questions haunting medical museums so using that specimen to sort of draw on these sort of broader questions about uh medical museums um and just I guess in my own sort of a bit of personal biography during my PhD I came I can't I don't know whether maybe it's in blood and guts that book by Roy Porter somewhere along the line during my PhD I was I came across this and was outraged at you know this John Hunter and and what he had done. But then also I went to London shortly after and then sort of felt weirdly compelled to go to the Hunterian Museum and I can't recall whether Charles Byrne was on display at the time but yeah I think I I do and but feeling both there as as kind of witness to this atrocity but then also wondering whether I am I a tourist who's sort of complicit in all of this as well and as well as seeing all the other kinds of specimens that were in this um museum.
SPEAKER_05And so yeah I I I really resonated with this idea that that you talk about in the article about um the haunting of these cases um and so I guess yeah why do you think this and other cases are haunting and and could you expand a little bit more on you know what you mean by this term okay that's a lot quite a long question take it in whatever direction you like okay um um yeah I think you also mentioned that you you wrote a song about um I skipped over that bit because that was a cringe bit as well yeah no no I would love I would love I would love to I would love to hear the song and well maybe I'll put it at the end of this episode if I can um do because I think Charles Byrne has inspired a lot of um creative work um the like the author Hilary Mantel has a a fabulous book called the giant O'Brien as well so it it is um yeah it it is um a story that is ongoing and is being retold in in in also in in various ways um so my my use of the term haunting um is in informed by an understanding of time that rejects the the binary of past and present you know this idea that there's a very neat division between the past and the present and that Charles Byrne was part of you know the the retention of his body um you know the the very questionable ways in which um Hunter obtained his body you know so this idea that they're practices from the past and that wouldn't happen today that it um so that idea that clear binary between past and present is something that um the the the notion of haunting rejects but also it's um I and the the group I'm part of we we use it as a a recognition of the decolonial ideas that emphasize that being haunted by injustices of the past is one of the costs of the horrors and and and subjugations of of colonization. So these are pasts that cannot be undone um you know that they they they um they they refuse to to go away um and it's also it's it's where we see and encounter medical collections not just as material traces of of histories of harm or violence but that they're caught up in ways of thinking and relating and being that that endure and that haunt the you know the our contemporary social worlds in in in including um universities. A scholar called Alana Warner Smith and she's been working with an early 20th century anatomical collection of skeletal remains of many Irish people who emigrated to um to to New York and like our collective she writes about you know the how the the ghosts that haunt our disciplinary practices and you know that we live with haunted methods data sets records um she talks about even the storage drawers even those that have been emptied through return or or or repatriation so not only have we inherited um you know our our our our institutions not only have we inherited these material traces but we've we've inherited these these um yeah these ways of thinking and being and um the you know so that's the sense in which um we use the idea of being um being being haunted um but maybe i maybe I can go back to your your question Chris about consent um because I think certainly this is um uh maybe the prevailing preoccupation within um within bioethics and um I think certainly you know it the the intention is not in any ways to to minimize the importance of of consent um um but I think it's what what our work what we have found in and we're you know we're it's not as though we have um a fully developed alternative bioethical framework it we're our our work is very much about searching for um um ethical ways of relating to and living with these medical collections um but it's where we find the individual level consent a bioethics that is you know concentrated on individual consent just um inadequate um like certainly individual consent itself is rendered meaningless in in you know these contexts of injustice and violence where many collections were were were crafted um but also I think our work shows that we need to go beyond thinking about these level these in terms of individual individual patience um so some of the people who've been inspiring our work are like one bioethicist whose work uh has been particularly helpful is Ruha Benjamin's work um and she has provided like she she has used the the the term of biodefection and also informed refusal as a corollary to informed consent and she uses that to think about forms of refusal or Conscientious objection to biomedical interventions in context shaped by histories of structural uh violence. So we're we're drawing on those kinds of ideas to really expand the parameters of bioethics and the kinds of questions it it provokes. Um so maybe just to give you one example, one of the um one of the forms of uh violence, I would say is a form of social violence associated with many medical collections. Um, and this is something that's very much being um you know played out in the Irish context in relation to um the the dead from from mother and baby institutions, are the you know, the ethics of uh record keeping or uh who and what is recorded and who and what has access to these records. Um so these are uh you know, so institutional responsibilities around records. Um but also looking at questions around, and I think the like the the the Charles Byrne, the the controversy around Charles Byrne that you you you mentioned, that because people because his remains became so controversial, um they and this has happened in many museums where um certain entities that have been displayed have been withdrawn from view. But even though there are you know anecdotal evidence of um what's referred to as anecdotal evidence of his wishes to be buried at sea, the the the Hunterian Museum is retaining uh, you know, has uh it's it has opted to retain um his skeleton for because of its possible future scientific usefulness. But I think we need to think about the ethics of these various kinds of logics as well around does scientific usefulness you know outdo all other kinds of um ethical concerns. So I think it is it is about the necessity to expand these issues um and certainly this issue around um who is specimen and you know how many medical collections are traces of you know various social structures of disenfranchisement and where some people are you know become bioavailable um to become specimens. Um so these are just some of the you know the the kind of expanded bioethics that I think these collections are uh provoking us to uh to consider.
Beyond Consent Toward Informed Refusal
SPEAKER_02Um it actually excuse me, it made me laugh um in your BMJ piece Ola when you when you um noted that the museum said that there was no record in writing of his wishes. So anecdotally he did not consent, however, he didn't write it down, yeah. Which is another um, you know, which goes to the slipperiness of consent as well, hey. So what constitutes consent? Um and who can meaningfully consent, I suppose. So obviously, uh I've just forgotten his name. I want to say Charles Byrne. Charles Byrne. Yeah, Charles Byrne, sorry. I know somebody could Charles Byrne, so I was like, I must have that wrong. Anyway, the um the idea, you know, that that's a very obvious um case of uh non-consent. But so many people whose bodies are used um for other people's whatever, either for scientific futures or for tourism or for whatever. There was never any I mean, the the idea of consent is just irrelevant, frankly, because their lives were such that it wasn't about consent. You know, they weren't consenting to be in the positions that they were in in the first place. Um it just seems particularly artificial to to make this discussion one of consent to me.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01And it works in the favour of um, you know, the powerful dominant medical men, because you know, in in the context of Australia uh and and what you were talking about earlier, um all uh with the idea of refusal. You know, there was a collection was recently returned um to the people in Elko Island, and it was and these were blood vials that were taken um again without consent, and the director of the institute um, you know, in in the ceremony of returning the bug vials was like, you know, these scientists didn't know, you know, they didn't they we didn't have procedures of consent back then, which was is just not true because the these blood vials were taken in 1969, and the Helsinki Declaration preceded that, and there was an active conversation in the medical community. But you know, on that on that situation we can just sort of awash that past. But um, you know, again, these traces of different voices within bioethics, uh, Indigenous scholar Barbara Flick um wrote an article and gave a paper at the Australian Bioethics Association in 1991 talking about um the right of refusal uh or veto rights for indigenous communities to have over medical science. And again, you know, that's a trace that hasn't really been picked up within the bioethics community and talking about consent. Um, but you know, these indigenous voices, indigenous scholars, indigenous activists have been wanting to reframe it from these practices of individual consent to more, okay, how as a community can we control our futures and our well-being as we negotiate with medical science or or whatever. Um we don't have much time left, and uh I don't want to rush these conversations either, but I do want to, and I guess maybe it, you know, these themes come together in the the final paper that we were going to talk about that is delightfully titled Um Uh University Dude Walls Must Fall.
Dude Walls And University Heritage
SPEAKER_01Um great title, uh and uh a great um little article uh talking about you reflecting on the dude walls at uh the University of Cork, I believe. Um do you want to talk us through what a a dude wall is?
SPEAKER_05Sure. Um well I think anyone who's seen one will will know what the the term refers to. Um but in in Cork, um in the the university's good room, the the the aula maxima that's used um for the big public events, up to recently the walls were decorated with these uh portraits of the former presidents of the of the university. Um so like University College Cork was originally a colonial um institution. Um but uh yeah, for as long as I've worked in UCC, this this dude wall really um annoyed me because you know it well it it it was like a celebration, it it it communicates this is these are the people this institution was intended for, and also it's intended to inspire awe, etc. etc. So um yeah, so I I wrote this piece um saying that we really need to, well, and the the must-fall, so it was related to the the roads must-fall, you know, taking inspiration from the the roads must fall uh movement around you know celebrating these individuals. Um there's a number of objections, you know, I've you know, in terms of colonial figures, but also I think it's the the cult of the individual and uh the idea of the individual genius or even the idea that academic knowledge production is you know the you know it's a singular activity, so for me it obscures how all knowledge production is collective and how this you know other forms of labor come to be hidden, etc. etc. But since I wrote that piece, the um the university has um um engaged well with sponsorship of the a corporation called Accenture, um they've now introduced some women on walls, um, but um for me this isn't the the solution.
SPEAKER_01Um because just to interrupt, sorry, because you kind of anticipated that as a solution in because Yale or some another university had decided that the solution would be just to throw in a few portraits of women and yes, then it will even go.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, in a number of institutions this has been the response. Um, but for me it literally retains the frame um you know of the of the of the of the individual. Um but what I what um in that piece, what I thought was what I think is really interesting are universities' um kind of heritage making practices and how this is, you know, it is held up as an important part of the heritage of the institution. And now I think there's a colonial demand, you know, this is about saying, oh, you know, we're a little bit like Oxford, which of course we're not in any way, but you know, but it's trying to mimic the the the great colonial um great and um you know prestigious universities of of of um of colonialism. But but I think it's interesting, and this is the connection with the medical collections, is where so some some objects from the past are retained and displayed, um, but others are disappeared um or in storage or hidden away. And I think it is really interesting, and I think there's huge pedagogical potential for us, you know, with the with our students as ourselves, you know, as people working within universities to reflect on these processes of of heritage making and what are our inheritances. And um so in that piece, I'm I'm not really in favor of so I say the dude walls must fall, but I I think we should retain them. But we it it is about learning to look at them differently. Going back to this idea of these arts of noticing, Anna Singh's wonderful phrase that can we notice them, you know, apart from these, you know, prestigious great men who made these wonderful contributions, can we think about these portraits in different ways about um what they represent and what these um individuals, you know, the um how they came to be, the you know, the processes behind these, but also to see them alongside of the collections.
Wax Moulages As Pain Archives
SPEAKER_05So we didn't really get a chance to talk about the the collections that we're working with at Cork, but one is a collection of these medical wax moulages that um were their 19th-century collection of wax moulages, and this is something in terms of unanticipated paths, you know, these these were something um when we were looking at how um what research had been done, what records were surveyed to reach this conclusion that there was no evidence of uh the transfer of infants from mother and baby institutions to our university. It was we were looking like we were retracing those searches, and it was in that process we became aware of this very substantial collection of moulages. Um that's what is that what is a moulage?
SPEAKER_01A wax mulage?
SPEAKER_05So a wax moulage, wax moulages were used very widely in medical education in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Um, and they were they were used um, some people say they were used prior to the availability of color photography, but often they worked alongside um uh photography. But they were they were used to um well to to train medical well to train medical professionals in in diagnosing various um conditions, particularly skin diseases. Um so moulages were made using made using plaster casts on the bodies of diseased people. Um many moulage collections are focused on um uh syphilis. Um so um, and many moulage collections were made using the bodies of women who were incarcerated because they had syphilis. So they're um in in some ways they're archives of pain, um, even the process of producing them, and maybe we could say even the ongoing display of them. But but I think it's really I think it'd be really interesting to uh display the dude walls with moulage collections and um because many moulages were used, were made, crafted using the bodies of people who were uh you know reduced to being scientific objects or resources for medicine. Um and to think about that those various histories together.
SPEAKER_01Um I mean this is uh uh sort of one of these ongoing disputes around different kinds of histories. Yeah, do we just yeah, the dude walls fall, we bury, forget, never happened, let's, you know, put up some kind of other more progressive picture or framing that accords to us now. Um but that this harder practice of I guess what you're sort of talking about of of bringing the two together, both retaining and um uh and putting it alongside some of those contexts of injustices and to see them both differently in the context.
Reckoning Without Closure
SPEAKER_01I mean, this is something that we've ebbs and flows at at our university, at at Deacon University, so we're in more our dude wall is actually not in a public area. Uh I mean it probably serves a different purpose, but it's in like one of the bigger, more sort of corporate meeting places. So I guess when the special guests come, and maybe if you're part of a special meeting, you see the dude walls, but it's not a public display, unlike Sydney University, which in the Great Hall has the Dude Walls, and the Sydney University explicitly its motto is under different stars, same knowledge, in reference to Oxford and Cambridge. So it's got that very colonial. But I think for our heritage making at Deakin University was around Alfred Deacon, who there was this sort of foundational figure in Australian politics, you know, and and founder of the White Australia policy, which you know was basically trying to create an ethno-nationalist um state and was in place in Australia for 75 years. And so whenever we have conversations about this and it spills out into the media or different places, people say, Oh, so you're saying that we should just rename the university and rename everything and forget the past, and you know, a number of us are saying, No, we need to sort of follow your lead, what you're talking about, Orla, and um sort of bring that past into a different framing, a different light.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah, I think well, I think denaming um can be important, um, and um but it's but never it's it's never sufficient. Um we've we've had that in in Ireland recently where a library in Trinity College Dublin that was named after George Berkeley was denamed and has now been renamed after an Irish poet. Um but I think the uh and maybe maybe this might be yeah, just uh uh maybe a point to finish on is around this idea of living well with the dead, that one of the um what we're trying to convey in this idea of living well with the dead is the that these path that there's we can never achieve closure on these pasts. So there is no um, you know, there's no solution. It's not as though, you know, repatriation or denaming or you know withdrawing from display. That um the the the challenge to us seems to be um uh uh this this necessity for an ongoing reckoning, but without any expectation of resolution. And um and um yeah, so that's that's the the ways of living well with these pasts, but where there is no closure.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, thank you so much uh for joining us for this conversation, Orla. It's uh fascinating to hear of the work and um yeah, look forward to reading some more uh of uh your work and the the group from the um Living Well with the Dead collective. Is it what's is it a Living Well with the Dead?
SPEAKER_05Well we're yeah, it's the Living World with the Dead Research Collective. I think we yeah, on our website it's the Research Cluster.
SPEAKER_01Um thank you so much.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, fascinating. Thank you.
A Song Inspired By Byrne
SPEAKER_01Sixteen years ago, uh in twenty uh in twenty ten. If you really love it, I guess uh I'd be doing a disservice to my former self if I didn't say that you can find this, I believe, through streaming services. Um it's up there, uh, but it's from an album called Until the Day Breathes um by the Wild Frontier. And actually, this track is not available on the streaming services because it's a bonus track. So if you're really desperate for it, uh you will need to go to Band Camp. And if you free, um it will come as a bonus track with the rest of the album. I guess enjoy it.
SPEAKER_00Fearing the doctors and grave robbers, he asked to be buried at sea.
SPEAKER_03Charlie, my boy, the sea is calling, she's calling out your name. Charlie, my son, hear her voice is the comfort of the grave.
SPEAKER_00On news of his death, the surgeons gathered, surrounding his corpse like crows. Ignoring his request, they pecked at his flesh, his friends turning to foes. With five hundred pounds, he bought Charlie's body, amazed at his giant size.
SPEAKER_03Dr. John Hunter, Charlie's blood flows and comes over your hands. Don't you find some how do you cut and screw away the flesh of the man?
SPEAKER_00Drained the blood and boiling in water, Charlie's flesh began to shed.
SPEAKER_03Charlie, my boy, a great chamber to cut upon your body. Charlie, my son, your pleas ignore your skeleton.