Turn, Italy Post #2

Ciao! Ruth here again for post #2 about my studies in Turin. I have gotten a bit behind in my posts, so this will post will be about the middle of my trip. Like I said in my first post, the goal of this trip is to understand how museums in Turin display and discuss ethically fraught topics, such as criminology and anatomical museums. My first stop was the Cesare Lombroso museum, also known as the Museum of Criminal Anthropology, and now I decided to go to a slightly different, equally ethnically contentious museum, Turin’s Museum of Human Anatomy home of the collection from the Craniological and Phrenological Museum of the Medicine Academy of Turin.

The entrance to the museum

I became interested in human anatomy museums after our Plenary when we had the curator of the Warren Anatomical Museum, Dominic Hall, join our discussion. To me, that was one of the most fascinating discussions we had in Plenary because of the many different viewpoints being shared and challenged. By the end, it still didn’t feel that opinions had aligned, which showed me that there was more that I needed to understand.

I had known before this discussion that human anatomy museums did exist. However, I had never been to an anatomy museum and assumed that most of the displays would be wax or clay models and if there were actual anatomical displays gathered from deceased individuals, I never questioned that it was a consensual donation. But, of course, I now know I was definitely wrong.

I was interested to see the way this museum chose to display the hundreds and hundreds of skeletons, skulls, and internal organs from their 18^th and 19^th century collections. How would the displays be organized? What would they choose to display from the collection? What would they choose to keep in the archives?

However, after reading Megan H. Bayles Dissertation on Human Body Objects in museums for plenary, I was most interested in seeing how they would choose to explain the objects on display? What would be the text surrounding these objects?

In her dissertation, she states, “For museums, whose visitor base is largely untrained at looking at these kinds of objects, the body-object is quite pliable, malleable to different interpretive strategies. The chaotic body-object opens itself up to the specialized languages of both the museum (if only labels would tell me what the object is saying!), and also of the narratives provided by medical discourse.”

Therefore, the museum has a lot of power in deciding what message to ultimately convey to the audience. They have the chance to completely control the interpretation.

But she also makes sure to mention that in this explanation, it is sometimes hard to discern who is talking “given the many voices surrounding objects in the museum: wall text and labels, guide brochures, the juxtaposition of other objects.” And so, I was also interested in the way that they would try to tone down the noise surrounding the objects.

As I was walking up the dimly lit staircase to get to the entrance of the museum, each floor came with a collage of anatomical images, making for an eerie walk up to the exhibit. The images were not associated with any text either. Nothing to describe what it is that I was looking at.

Staircase

This is the first indication that this museum is going to be very “object-driven.” I think the museum was, as Bayles state, relying on “the body as an object to tell its own story.”

As soon as I get to the floor that leads to the main entrance of the museum, the first thing I see is a large glass case filled with skeletons of all different sizes, originating from various animals. Examples include a skeleton of a bearded vulture, the skull of an Egyptian mummy, shark jaws, and the skull of a “monstrous calf.”

From this atrium, I enter into the main hall of the museum. This museum is much smaller than the last (the Lombroso museum) but the sheer number of anatomical items was startling. Hundreds and hundreds of human specimens lined the sides of the museum corridor in large glass cases. These cases were structured in a way that they made up a number of different “U- Shaped” corridors that were against both walls: around 8 of these corridors on both sides.

[Disclaimer: Once again, while in the museum I was not allowed to take pictures of the displays, so these images were found online.]

Each corridor was surrounded by three different glass cases. Each case had a specific theme and had a mixture of real, wax, and clay anatomical objects. All from the 18^th and 19^th century.

But one of the most memorable parts about this museum was that there was no large text on display. This is similar to the part of Lombroso’s museum that housed his collection of skulls. Instead, before each corridor, there were placards, about a bit larger than the size of a regular piece of paper, that had an in-depth anatomical depiction of the “body-object” that you were looking at.

It seems, in this way, the museum is handing the interpretation almost completely over to the audience member. If they so choose, they can simply walk around and view the objects on display. If not, they also had the choice of picking up a placard and learning a bit about the human anatomical part that they were looking at.

However, a statement Bayles made really rung true after seeing visitors walk through this exhibit with no text.

“Body-objects are almost by definition chaotic and excessive, defying simple explanation or complete comprehension. For many people, most notably those who are not trained to look at them, looking at body-objects is akin to hearing gibberish,” Bayles said.

“While there are, of course, discernible and familiar aspects to them, often the visuals are overwhelming and disorienting,” she continues.

I think this is a really important point because, as Bayles says, “the ability to read the body-objects that are the focal point of this project relies to a great extent on the viewer’s prior knowledge.” And while the museum did try to add to the viewer’s knowledge with the anatomical explanations on the placards, most who came, did not engage with the optional text.

Rather, it seemed that most were there because this museum addresses an age-old curiosity: to know more about ourselves and what makes us human. “In linking seeing with knowing, the body’s interior becomes a kind of final frontier of invisibility,” Bayles states. I think this statement aligned with those who I saw visit the museum. Very few engaged with the placards beside the cases and most did not stay for long.

However, in talking with an employee at the front of the museum, I learned that during the school year, most of the visitors they have are student tours. In that case, I think the scene at the museum would look quite different, because I would assume these students have some background knowledge and interest in learning about the intricacies of human anatomy if they are choosing to be on a tour of this museum.

I think there are several reasons why they may have chosen to forgo having text surrounding the displays. First, to preserve the historical aspect of the museum. As was customary in the 18^th and 19^th century, there would not have been text to accompany the objects and because one of the goals stated in their brochure is to “recreate the 19^th century atmosphere,” adding text may have retracted from this goal.

Furthermore, they may have been trying to avoid sensationalizing the objects in the museum by adding new technological elements to the exhibit, such as touch screen displays or large posters with text. This way, they are simply putting the objects on display and avoiding the risk of misinterpreting or making the display theatrical, which would have been insensitive to the subject matter.

On their brochure the museum states that they understand that this choice “has penalized communication,” but they argue that the museum still has much to tell about “this history of the collections, about scientific discoveries and about the activities of Turin’s School of Anatomy in the last 300 years.”

I wonder how much of this can be conveyed without explanatory texts, but still, to me, the goal of this museum was much more clearly conveyed through their displays than that of the Lombroso museum. Although the Lombroso museum outlined their explicit goal at the beginning, I left feeling that the exhibit itself did not convey their intended effect of urging caution — because it did not deal with his mistakes explicitly enough.

Okay now back to the actual exhibit!

Like I said, this museum was much smaller than Lombroso’s. The structure of the room was in the shape of a T. You entered in one long hallway which then eventually led you into a smaller, horizontal section at the end of it. The room was absolutely gorgeous, with high ceilings and intricate details throughout the building.

In making conversation with one of the security guards at the museum, I was told that they think this used to be a science cathedral, with the ‘saints of science,’ up along the top of the wall.

All along the highest points of the wall in the room there were paintings of people like Darwin (who is significant to history of anatomy in Turin because they used evolution to justify a lot of their work — so significant in fact that he is the first painting you see, at the very center/top of the hallway), Bizzozero (who discovered platelets and their role in blood coagulation), and Vesalio (who “marked the beginning of modern anatomical research”).   

The first corridor to the right has a lot to do with pregnancy. Near this corridor, there is an 18th century statue of a woman in which her stomach is opened to reveal her intestines and her uterus. The explanation says that there used to be a model of a 7-month old fetus inside her stomach, but it was lost. On this same placard there are in-depth descriptions of fetus development, which aligns with their mission to educate their visitors.

However, this same section had some of the most horrifying parts of the collection in the museum. This was where skeletal models of fetuses at different weeks, placed in order of increasing size at different stages of development, were displayed. The smallest skeleton was no larger than my pinky.

On the next shelf, instead of full skeletons, there were at least 20 more skulls of fully formed infants all lined up next to each other. On the other side of this same glass case were skeletons of fully formed infants. Again, in the theme of education, there were detailed descriptions of the differences between bones of fetuses, infants, and fully formed adults, next to this display.

It was definitely really interesting to see this to be one of their very first displays because of how startling it was to look at.

Moving over to my left, this first section greets you with another large anatomical wax statue made by Ercole Lilli in 1734. It looks like it was meant to show the different muscles and I read that it used to be next to the desk of the professor in an ancient anatomical theater.

There continued to be a wide variety of wax anatomical statues and models in each corridor, some male and others female, but all highlighting different aspects of human atomy, from different angles, and even one that highlighted what our organs would look like after death (the stomach and intestines were swollen by gas, the muscles were wilted, the skin was a yellowish color, and the model’s eyes were closed.)

Most were fairly accurate, except for one (which they point out in the brochure). This was a wax model representing a mother carrying a child. Inside her uterus is a fetus and while the size looks like it should be about 3 months old, it has the body proportions of a newborn baby.

Other than that, these models were astonishingly accurate and detailed. It truly was an art form of its own. These wax models wouldn’t just have very intricate anatomy, down to the different textures of their organs, but also would have very intricate hair styles, and be in very theatrical positions.

All the full body wax models stood in a very distinct pose. Either with their hips hitting outwards or their hands splayed very dramatically.

Each glass case in the museum covered a different part of the body: from the thorax, to the heart, to various circulatory systems, to the spinal cord, to embryo development, to so much more.

Items included a skeleton of a giant which they chose to juxtapose with the skeleton of a dwarf by putting them right next to each other, an arm that had been sectioned into 15 pieces in which each piece resided in its own jar of alcohol, all lined next to each other (there was also one full arm in its own case), and dry preparations of trachea and bronchi.

The middle of the long hallway was broken up by a large wooden case with hundreds of drawers that “contain the largest collection of brain sections,” that were once used by Carlo Giacomini. The top of the cabinet says “the head is of slight dimensions and yet it holds immense mysteries. Every molecule is of divine power.”

However, truly the most horrifying thing I saw was two “natural mummies” that the museum had brought over from South America that were further down on the left side of the museum. By natural they meant that "these mummies were not eviscerated not treated with special substances." They were both curled up in a fetal position and when I first saw them I was confused as to what I was looking at, and when I realized it became very hard to look at the display for long. One of the mummies is of a female carrying a child. This same mummy also doesn’t have a head attached to her body (her head is instead beside her) because she had an artificial deformation (which was common among individuals of “certain social classes” of the time and provoked by skull compression during childhood development.)

The long hallway then led into another room and I honestly couldn’t stay in this room for too long because the smell was overpowering. To my right, there were hundreds and hundreds of brains, of all different sizes, from fetal sized to adult sized. All were a really dark brown/black color but they were not in alcohol cases, like the other preserved specimens had been throughout the museum. They had been preserved in a way that didn’t require that. But the smell was horrible.

The recipe to preserve these brains was published by Carlo Giacomini in 1878. He did it to make the brain “firm and easy to handle.” The treatment consists of two phases. “Phase one: the gardening of the nervous substance by immersion in zinc chloride. Phase two: the immersion of the hardened brain in glycerine, in order to maintain the preparation’s characteristics unaltered in time.”

And then to my left were hundreds of skulls and stone/marble busts, meant to be a part of their section on phrenology.

The most interesting part of this room was in the center back, called however was named the “ghost of the brain.” It’s a large brain constructed with iron wire and colored cork spheres by the Swiss artisan F.R. Büchu in 1883. The "model testified the increasing importance of the functional trend of neuroanatomical research in the last decades of the 19th century." It was so beautiful and so large and added some much needed color to a rather depressing and haunted like room.

So far from what I can tell, this seems to be a much more educational museum than the last. The people here come with their children and point out and explain things to them. I think this museum would definitely be really fascinating with a guide.

I personally would have been interested to see a section on ethics of displaying body objects, but they do state at the beginning that this will solely be a historical museum.

Overall, I think this museum is fascinating. It is a very interesting way to learn about how past scientists thought and dealt with human anatomy and an interesting place to teach students about anatomy. But I still feel uneasy every time that I think about how these were once real, live human beings.

I think the distinction between this museum and other more typical art or historical museums, lies in that these are human beings who throughout their lives are a subject, but then at death, treated as an object — to the extent that they don't even have a name or any sort of identifier of who they were before this. It is this blurry line between subject and object that I think continues to make me feel uneasy about these displays

My time so far in Italy has definitely been very informative and eye-opening. I am excited for my next stop because I will be headed back to the Lombroso museum, but this time for a private, guided tour. I am interested to see how the tour guide will choose to frame Lombroso and his findings and if it will change my perspective on how the museum frames Lombroso.

Ciao for now!