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6 December 2018

Being told to squawk like a parrot is not the usual instruction to a group of 50 teenage school pupils on a wet Wednesday in December. However this was just one of the activities hosted by FBMH staff for our 4th annual 'Charlotte Beswick: Inspiring Futures Day'.

Charlotte Beswick, along with her husband Dr Bill Beswick, founded the University's Museum of Medicine and Health, now named the 'Beswick Collection', which tells some of the stories of Manchester's 200 year history of medical education and innovation. The family of the late Charlotte Beswick generously fund our annual 'Charlotte Beswick Day' to inspire futures in medical and health careers. The event is held in memory of Charlotte who was a strong advocate of showing young people the range of healthcare career opportunities available to them and so each year the event takes as a theme a different speciality of medicine.

Our focus for 2018 was Audiology, significant as Manchester was the first university to establish a department dedicated to this discipline. Pupils were invited from four different schools in the North West and were given the opportunity to take part in a range of activities with members from the Audiology department, British Sign Language (BSL) teachers, careers service, Museum of Medicine and Health, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHTSM), voluntary curators, WP fellows and Manchester Museum staff.

On arrival the students became acquainted with the British Sign Language alphabet and learnt how to spell out their names, before getting their hands on some of the objects from the Beswick collection with the help of current voluntary curators Peter and Julie Mohr.

In the afternoon, pupils delved into the inner chambers of a student ambassador's ear using an Otoscope, discovered how the eyes are crucial to balance and tested this out on 'balance boards'. Finally they were 'squawking like a parrot' - a competition to see who could make the loudest noise as measured by a sound-o-meter.

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Inspiring Futures: Charlotte Beswick Day

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6 December 2018 Being told to squawk like a parrot is not the usual instruction to a group of 50 teenage school pupils on a wet Wednesday in December. However this was just one of the activities hosted by FBMH staff for our 4th annual 'Charlotte Beswick: Inspiring Futures Day'.

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British Cardiovascular Society conference June 2022 Pop up exhibition, British Society for the History of Pharmacy meeting March 2022, Historical Medical Equipment Society.

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Heritage Officer Stephanie Seville, Museum of Medicine and Health Volunteers Julie Mohr and Dr Peter Mohr.

On Monday 6 June, the Museum of Medicine and Health (MMH) took a range of historical equipment and instruments to the British Cardiovascular Society (BCS) annual conference, which took place at Manchester Central Convention Complex, between 6 – 8 June 2022.

The event was attended by a national network of cardiovascular researchers and practicing clinicians in the UK, including University of Manchester academics, post-docs and PhD students in the Division of Cardiovascular Sciences.

Founded in 1922, the British Cardiovascular Society (BCS) has evolved into a complex organisation that plays a pivotal role in the delivery of cardiovascular health across the UK. The centenary event marked the launch of the BCS Women in Cardiology digital timeline A Historic Timeline Of Women In Cardiology and a keynote address by Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal, who visited the conference on its second day.

Stereoscopic viewing card and viewer used in medical education c.1900

The MMH pop-up exhibition explored the history of teaching, research and clinical work in cardiovascular sciences in the Manchester. Objects included a timeline of rare stethoscopes, sphygmographs, sphygmomanometers and other equipment as well as teaching models, lantern slides, photography, books and heart-sound recordings.

The Museum of Medicine and Health is part of the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health. Spanning more than 300 years, the collection is a significant educational and cultural asset. The museum contributes to exhibitions, research projects and run events to support outstanding learning and student experience and public engagement with the collection.

In the centenary year of the society, the conference offered an ideal opportunity to explore Manchester’s heritage in this area of medicine and research.

Further information:

Museum of Medicine and Health

Twitter @ManMedMuseum

Cardiovascular Sciences at Manchester

by | Jun 24, 2022 | FBMH News, School of Medical Sciences, Social Responsibility |

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Pop up Museum at the British Cardiovascular Society 100 year celebrations – FBMH News

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Dr Peter Mohr is active in publishing around the collection.

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There are over 8000 objects in the collection. Below is just a small selection. Some have been used in engagement sessions, including teaching, public festivals and schools events. Others have not had much research or attention. What discussions or themes can be highlighted using the selection below? Are there other areas of the collection that hold significance and potential for you and your work?

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Changes in materials and technologies used in the teaching and practice of medicine.
A representation of the change from private health care to the NHS.
What stories does the collection struggle to tell through representation through objects?

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'What is Medicine?' 2022, Pharmacy joint stand

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Links with The John Rylands Research Institute and Library encourage research - e.g. Christine Slobogin, Rebecca Whiteley (Shreeve Fellowship) Caroline Henegan

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This blog post includes images of pregnancy and nudity, which some readers might find uncomfortable.

Dr Christine Slobogin, Visiting Early Career Research Fellow in 2021-22, writes:

My fellowship at the Rylands, from January 2022 to April 2022, allowed me to gather primary source material for my second major research project, titled “Anonymous Anatomies: A Critical History of Visual Anonymity in Britain and America, 1870-1955.” There has been no critical history written on anonymity in medical imagery, perhaps because it is in part a history of what is not visualized.

My PhD research also focused on the visual material of medicine, but in a very different capacity. My thesis was on drawings and photographs of facial injury and plastic surgery during the Second World War in Britain. It was through this research that I alighted upon the “Anonymous Anatomies” topic.

Fixating as I was on the face during my PhD, I often came across difficulties with when and how to show patient images. The rules of archives, journals, and publishers often contradicted one another. “Anonymous Anatomies” comes from my desire to get to the bottom of the historical precedents for how we think about patient anonymity in imagery, and how the ethics around the display of patients’ faces developed from the nineteenth century onwards.

Since I study the modern period, most of the material that I combed through during my fellowship is held at the Main Library. As expected, the scope of the medical publications at Manchester did not disappoint, and I now have an Excel spreadsheet containing details for almost four hundred images that will eventually be used to write the “Anonymous Anatomies” monograph.

When I first started this project, I thought that I would be looking at prints and drawings, as well as photographs. But the deeper that I went into the image sources, the more I realized that it is really photographs that pose the most complex ethical and aesthetic dilemmas.

Photographs serve as representative indices of the patient, rather than as interpretations (although there is theory that complicates and nuances this statement). And it is when photographs start to be used more often in medical publications that the question of patient recognizability is grappled with through anonymization tactics.

Anonymization Tactics

The question of patient display is dealt with in many different ways. Before starting this fellowship, I knew of black bars placed over faces, or eyes excised from photographs – these are among the most common ways in which publishers and practitioners anonymize their subjects. But the sources at the Rylands showed me that the visual conventions that were improvised to provide solutions to patient recognizability went far beyond these two tactics.

I found many strange and creative instances of anonymization in medical photography. In a 1901 book on the diseases of the thyroid gland, I found some approaches to anonymity that I had not found anywhere else. Thyroid diseases proved to be particularly rich pathologies for this project, as these illnesses are most obviously shown in the neck and eyes, so they offer difficulties to practitioners wanting to anonymize.

The diversity of the images in this book by James Berry show the ad hoc nature in which anonymity was dealt with in this period. Berry’s publication uses some more conventional tactics, such as cropping the image below the eyes. But several patients were given more fashionable, delicate anonymization treatments.

A woman with her eyes covered by a fan

One is covering her eyes (or is a doctor, out of frame, covering them for her?) with a round, decorative fan. Another has had a layer of lace cloth placed over her face – a softer tactic than the cutting or scratching or blurring of the eyes that often accompanied depictions of thyroid diseases. Another patient in this book – not shown here because the anonymization is not very effective – is “anonymized” by a diaphanous black veil, like one that a widow might wear.

A woman anonymised through the use of a lace cloth

Hooding the Patient

Beyond these fascinating examples of aestheticized anonymization, there is one tactic that particularly interests me intellectually. I found many women who were anonymized with a sack placed over their head. The sack over the patient’s face offers perhaps one of the most compelling narratives of anonymity as it relates to the overlap of the histories of medicine and of photography – the two fields with which I am most concerned.

Pregnant woman anonymised by the use of a cloth sack (image from the Museum of Medicine and Health, Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health)

This stereoscopic image, found in the medical museum collection, shows a heavily pregnant woman diagnosed with a “pendulous belly” with a cloth sack placed over her head. This image inspired me to look for more of this type of anonymization, and I found several others examples in the Rylands collection.

I am working on an article about these images tentatively titled “Hooding the Patient: Early-Twentieth-Century Medical Anonymization and Visualizations of Torture.” Using these extraordinary pictures, I am couching this type of medical imagery within the context and theory of photographs of torture and execution, in particular the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse images of 2003.

In this research, inspired directly by my Rylands fellowship findings, I intend to build upon the work on affect and photography that I began in my PhD, interrogating what Judith Butler terms “the way in which suffering is presented to us, and how that presentation affects our responsiveness.”

In these medical photographs, women’s bodies (it is always women) are lined up for the “shooting” of the camera, as if prepared stoically and nakedly (they are always nude) for an execution. Some of them even hold out their arms like the most famous Abu Ghraib photograph of a hooded prisoner.

By asking “What are the visual similarities between images of torture and images of diagnosis?”, I will aim with this research – one facet of the larger “Anonymous Anatomies” project – to articulate the visual and ethical power dynamics of early-twentieth-century medicine and anonymity.

Questions for the Future

Even just in this blog post, I have had to grapple with which images I can show, and which to hold back. This is especially important when writing a piece like this that will be published online for all to see and to potentially reuse. Working with medical images, even when they are of patients from a hundred years ago, brings with it complicated ethical quagmires.

I do not want to reify the pain and exposure that these patients may have felt when their pictures were being taken, but I also think that it is important to chart who was deemed worthy of anonymization in medical journals and books, and why. Ethics of display and publication form the backbone of “Anonymous Anatomies”.

My time at the Rylands ended up raising more questions than it answered – but that is exactly what I was looking for with this fellowship. I am grateful to the Rylands for funding this period of research that completely shifted how I am thinking about this project. I will continue to develop this work as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Medicine and the Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, starting this summer.

Dr Christine Slobogin

Image references

James Berry, Diseases of the Thyroid Gland and Their Surgical Treatment (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1901), 281 and 340-341. Manchester Main Library Archives. K11.51 B26.

G. F. Barbour Simpson and Edward Burnet, eds., The Edinburgh Stereoscopic Atlas of Obstetrics, section IV (London: The Caxton Publishing House, 1909), no. 82. From the collection of the Museum of Medicine and Health, Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health (found with help from Stephanie Seville)

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Rylands BlogAnonymous Anatomies: A Critical History of Visual Anonymity in Britain and America, 1870 – 1955

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This blog post includes images of pregnancy and nudity, which some readers might find uncomfortable. Dr Christine Slobogin, Visiting Early Career Research Fellow in 2021-22, writes: My fellowship a…

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The museum holds the opportunity to raise discussion and debate around 'difficult' or controversial themes running through it's collections. This may be around perceptions of race, gender, disability. Objects here can be brought into contemporary conversations.

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MMH as part of University Collections, Special Collections University of Manchester Libraries.

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History of Medicine

/

The Museum of Medicine and Health

This sub-collection within History of Medicine contains 24 objects, carefully curated from the Museum of Medicine and Health. Part of the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health, the museum is home to over 8000 instruments and equipment, spanning 300 years. Renamed the Beswick Collection after its founders Dr F.B. Beswick (1925-2019) and Charlotte Beswick (1926-2013), the objects are based at the Medical School Stopford Building. In the foyer is a display of a selection of objects, in the Instruments of Change exhibition.

The museum has close links with the University’s Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine with research and teaching activity aligning with Social Responsibility priorities at The University of Manchester. Objects are accessed for research, teaching and learning and public engagement with our communities, particularly schools.

Content Warning
The Museum of Medicine and Health contains historical instruments and equipment. Aspects of the development and past use of some objects reflect prejudices of the era, which may cause offense, or upset. This is not condoned by The University of Manchester, but we are committed to providing access to this material as evidence of attitudes of the time period.

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The Museum of Medicine and Health collection.

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Case Study SALC Art Gallery and Museum Studies

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Case Study SALC Art Gallery and Museum Studies

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21 January 2020

The Museum of Medicine and Health in the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health has now marked five years of working collaboratively with the MA Art Gallery and Museum Studies, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures. This article gives us chance to have a look back at the previous years' successes and see what the impact has been.

2015: The Medicine Cabinet at Chetham's Library

2016: Healing Histories: An exhibition of medical marvels and curative curiosities at Manchester Central Library

2017: Stories of Change at Chetham's Library

2018: Enhanced Humans at Manchester Central Library

2019: Instrumental Change at Manchester Central Library

The programme of joint working, consists of objects from the Beswick Collection at the Museum of Medicine and Health being lent to the students for a period of eight weeks. Over the last five years 202 students have gained practical, hands-on experience of having custody of genuine museum objects, and have used them to mount one-day, pop-up exhibitions at major Manchester cultural venues. This is one of the key events that increase public access to the collections each year. Every year more than 200 people visit these exhibitions, engaging with the interpretation the students have created, including innovative display techniques, quizzes, and activities.

The pop up exhibitions are entirely student-led, and forms the backbone of the Managing Collections and Exhibitions module. As part of this, students are split into working groups, and use the objects to learn basic collection management principles such as how to correctly handle and pack the objects, how museums acquire and dispose of objects, and object conservation; as well as gaining skills such as writing object condition reports, logging objects on the KE Emu cataloguing software, budgeting, and writing professional museum labels.

Every year, they also gain experience promoting themselves on social media, with each year having a presence on Twitter, and some students also choosing to run, for example, a WordPress blog or dedicated Facebook page on that year's exhibition. This gives the students vital experience with the ways that museum collections can use the digital realm to connect with audiences and advertise themselves.

The feedback from the public and other organisations around Manchester is greatly positive:

"@HHistoriesPopup thanks for great, engaging exhibition! Hope #Manchester gets funding to permanently display all these exhibits someday!" - Emma Dixon, @TheAngleOfView on Twitter, 2016

"Interesting pop-up exhibition at Manchester Central Library - Enhanced Humans? @enhanced_humans #enhancedhumansmcr" - Jesszad NHS, @jesszsalford on Twitter, 2018

"Thanks for organising this - it's great to be able to see what healthcare was and how it has developed through #research" -NCA Research NHS, @NCAresearchNHS on Twitter, 2016

"Must see 'fascinating' exhibition on Manchester's medical history #MCRMEDICINECABINET http://bit.ly/1Tu4tFB" -Ancoats Dispensary, @twitdispensary on Twitter, 2015

"Are those markings indicative of different pill "sizes"? If so, deeply cool! I've never seen that before!" -Linnea Kuglitsch, @Archaesmallogy on Twitter, responding to the pill roller, 2018

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Museum of Medicine and Health collaborates with MA in Art Gallery and Museum Studies

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21 January 2020 The Museum of Medicine and Health in the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health has now marked five years of working collaboratively with the MA Art Gallery and Museum Studies, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures. This article gives us chance to have a look back at the previous years' successes and see what the impact has been.

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Instruments of Change

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Loans - Science Museum Cancer Revolution

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Loans - Science Museum Cancer Revolution

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20 October 2021

To mark the current loan of instruments from the Museum of Medicine and Health to the Science Museum Group exhibition ' Cancer Revolution: Science, Innovation and Hope ', honorary curator and volunteers, Dr Peter Mohr and Julie Mohr, reveal how the selected objects came into the care of the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health.

The University of Manchester's Museum of Medicine and Health (MMH) holds more than a hundred objects from The Christie Hospital related to the history of the treatment of cancer. They were collected by Dr Brian Fox PhD (1929-1999), a Professor of Oncology and donated to the museum in 2002. Most of the objects date from the 1950s-70s; many of the instruments were for 'brachytherapy', designed to safely locate radium near to a tumour. Other objects were used for diagnosis, X-ray therapy and measuring the radiation dose.

Professor Fox was an expert on the use of drugs to treat cancer, studying chemistry at Durham University and researching alkaloids extracted from plants, such as the lupin, in the 1950's. He joined the Christie Hospital and subsequently became Head of Experimental Chemotherapy, followed by being made a Professor in 1980 and Deputy Director of the Paterson Institute for Cancer Research in 1984.

Fox was interested in drugs derived from plants and how their geometric shape affected their biological action, and along with colleagues, he introduced and tested several anticancer drugs. He was indefatigable in his role of organising clinical trials; becoming Secretary of the Cancer Research Campaign Clinical Trials Committee fast-tracking potential chemotherapeutic drugs into clinical trials. Gaining an international reputation for his work on cancer chemotherapy, he was named Chairman of the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer and then retired in 1993.

Professor Fox was a methodical record keeper and acted as unofficial archivist for The Christie Hospital; his vast collection of committee meeting minutes along with other documents, papers and photographs and his collection of the medical objects are now in the University Library Special Collections ( Library Search (The University of Manchester) - Brian Fox).

By nature, Fox was a 'collector' as well as his research material, archives and objects he was also known for his expertise on the classification of lichens and the effects of air pollution on their distribution, becoming President of the British Lichen Society, a member of the Committee for British Lichen Flora and a Fellow of the Linnean Society. A man of many talents: pianist, artist, botanist, medical historian, scientist and rightly remembered for his ground-breaking work on cancer chemotherapy and his work at the Christie Hospital.

Cancer Revolution; Science, Innovation and Hope is on display at Manchester's Science and Industry Museum between 22 October 2021 and March 2022. Following this it will then tour to the Science Museum in London. Book your free tickets here Events | Science and Industry Museum

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Museum of Medicine and Health's objects featured in national cancer research exhibition

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20 October 2021 To mark the current loan of instruments from the Museum of Medicine and Health to the Science Museum Group exhibition ' Cancer Revolution: Science, Innovation and Hope ', honorary curator and volunteers, Dr Peter Mohr and Julie Mohr, reveal how the selected objects came into the care of the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health.

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The MMH act as custodians to the history of medicine and health in the faculty.

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The MMH act as custodians to the history of medicine and health in the faculty.

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The collection provides a tangible link and asset to the study of the history of science, technology and medicine in the faculty. It represents a material culture of medical education and clinical practice from the past.
The collection forms part of University Collections (cultural assets falling outside of the University Cultural Institutions) but is still run and maintained by this faculty.

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Academic Lead Professor Carsten Timmermann, who is the head of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine in FBMH.
Part time Heritage Officer Stephanie Seville
Volunteers Dr Peter Mohr, Julie Mohr and David Sigee

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
a leucotome is a neurosurgical instrument used for cutting nerve connections in the frontal lobes of the brain. frontal leucotomy operations were relatively common during the 1940s and 1950s to treat various psychiatric illnesses. this instrument was designed by dr james mcgregor

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a psychiatrist at warlingham park hospital

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surrey in the 1940s. neurosurgeon dr john crumbie used it to perform 20 leucotomies. it has a rotating

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which was inserted into the frontal lobe of the brain. unfortunately

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the blade tended to catch small blood vessels causing cerebral haemorrhage and the deaths of two patients.

the operation was increasingly controversial

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and following the introduction of chlorpromazine in 1954

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the number of leucotomies rapidly declined.</p>

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The Museum of Medicine and Health : Leucotome

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A leucotome is a neurosurgical instrument used for cutting nerve connections in the frontal lobes of the brain. Frontal leucotomy operations were relatively common during the 1940s and 1950s to treat various psychiatric illnesses. This instrument was designed by Dr James McGregor, a psychiatrist at Warlingham Park Hospital, Surrey in the 1940s.

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No Contents List Available

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this hearing aid is fashioned to appear to look like a hair slide

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concealing the hearing loss of the wearer. this model is called the duchess and was made by ardente acoustic laboratories ltd

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in 1961. it consists of a transistor and is made of plastic that imitates tortoise shell. there is a wheel on one side used to control the volume. a twisted cord comes from one end and connects the transistor to a receiver which would have an ear mould attached

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The Museum of Medicine and Health : Hearing Aid

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This hearing aid is fashioned to appear to look like a hair slide, concealing the hearing loss of the wearer. This model is called the Duchess and was made by Ardente Acoustic Laboratories Ltd, in 1961. It consists of a transistor and is made of plastic that imitates tortoise shell.

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Stereoscopic Viewing Card Atlas of Obstetrics - image within this blog

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Stereoscopic Viewing Card Atlas of Obstetrics - image within this blog

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This blog post includes images of pregnancy and nudity, which some readers might find uncomfortable.

Dr Christine Slobogin, Visiting Early Career Research Fellow in 2021-22, writes:

My fellowship at the Rylands, from January 2022 to April 2022, allowed me to gather primary source material for my second major research project, titled “Anonymous Anatomies: A Critical History of Visual Anonymity in Britain and America, 1870-1955.” There has been no critical history written on anonymity in medical imagery, perhaps because it is in part a history of what is not visualized.

My PhD research also focused on the visual material of medicine, but in a very different capacity. My thesis was on drawings and photographs of facial injury and plastic surgery during the Second World War in Britain. It was through this research that I alighted upon the “Anonymous Anatomies” topic.

Fixating as I was on the face during my PhD, I often came across difficulties with when and how to show patient images. The rules of archives, journals, and publishers often contradicted one another. “Anonymous Anatomies” comes from my desire to get to the bottom of the historical precedents for how we think about patient anonymity in imagery, and how the ethics around the display of patients’ faces developed from the nineteenth century onwards.

Since I study the modern period, most of the material that I combed through during my fellowship is held at the Main Library. As expected, the scope of the medical publications at Manchester did not disappoint, and I now have an Excel spreadsheet containing details for almost four hundred images that will eventually be used to write the “Anonymous Anatomies” monograph.

When I first started this project, I thought that I would be looking at prints and drawings, as well as photographs. But the deeper that I went into the image sources, the more I realized that it is really photographs that pose the most complex ethical and aesthetic dilemmas.

Photographs serve as representative indices of the patient, rather than as interpretations (although there is theory that complicates and nuances this statement). And it is when photographs start to be used more often in medical publications that the question of patient recognizability is grappled with through anonymization tactics.

Anonymization Tactics

The question of patient display is dealt with in many different ways. Before starting this fellowship, I knew of black bars placed over faces, or eyes excised from photographs – these are among the most common ways in which publishers and practitioners anonymize their subjects. But the sources at the Rylands showed me that the visual conventions that were improvised to provide solutions to patient recognizability went far beyond these two tactics.

I found many strange and creative instances of anonymization in medical photography. In a 1901 book on the diseases of the thyroid gland, I found some approaches to anonymity that I had not found anywhere else. Thyroid diseases proved to be particularly rich pathologies for this project, as these illnesses are most obviously shown in the neck and eyes, so they offer difficulties to practitioners wanting to anonymize.

The diversity of the images in this book by James Berry show the ad hoc nature in which anonymity was dealt with in this period. Berry’s publication uses some more conventional tactics, such as cropping the image below the eyes. But several patients were given more fashionable, delicate anonymization treatments.

A woman with her eyes covered by a fan

One is covering her eyes (or is a doctor, out of frame, covering them for her?) with a round, decorative fan. Another has had a layer of lace cloth placed over her face – a softer tactic than the cutting or scratching or blurring of the eyes that often accompanied depictions of thyroid diseases. Another patient in this book – not shown here because the anonymization is not very effective – is “anonymized” by a diaphanous black veil, like one that a widow might wear.

A woman anonymised through the use of a lace cloth

Hooding the Patient

Beyond these fascinating examples of aestheticized anonymization, there is one tactic that particularly interests me intellectually. I found many women who were anonymized with a sack placed over their head. The sack over the patient’s face offers perhaps one of the most compelling narratives of anonymity as it relates to the overlap of the histories of medicine and of photography – the two fields with which I am most concerned.

Pregnant woman anonymised by the use of a cloth sack (image from the Museum of Medicine and Health, Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health)

This stereoscopic image, found in the medical museum collection, shows a heavily pregnant woman diagnosed with a “pendulous belly” with a cloth sack placed over her head. This image inspired me to look for more of this type of anonymization, and I found several others examples in the Rylands collection.

I am working on an article about these images tentatively titled “Hooding the Patient: Early-Twentieth-Century Medical Anonymization and Visualizations of Torture.” Using these extraordinary pictures, I am couching this type of medical imagery within the context and theory of photographs of torture and execution, in particular the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse images of 2003.

In this research, inspired directly by my Rylands fellowship findings, I intend to build upon the work on affect and photography that I began in my PhD, interrogating what Judith Butler terms “the way in which suffering is presented to us, and how that presentation affects our responsiveness.”

In these medical photographs, women’s bodies (it is always women) are lined up for the “shooting” of the camera, as if prepared stoically and nakedly (they are always nude) for an execution. Some of them even hold out their arms like the most famous Abu Ghraib photograph of a hooded prisoner.

By asking “What are the visual similarities between images of torture and images of diagnosis?”, I will aim with this research – one facet of the larger “Anonymous Anatomies” project – to articulate the visual and ethical power dynamics of early-twentieth-century medicine and anonymity.

Questions for the Future

Even just in this blog post, I have had to grapple with which images I can show, and which to hold back. This is especially important when writing a piece like this that will be published online for all to see and to potentially reuse. Working with medical images, even when they are of patients from a hundred years ago, brings with it complicated ethical quagmires.

I do not want to reify the pain and exposure that these patients may have felt when their pictures were being taken, but I also think that it is important to chart who was deemed worthy of anonymization in medical journals and books, and why. Ethics of display and publication form the backbone of “Anonymous Anatomies”.

My time at the Rylands ended up raising more questions than it answered – but that is exactly what I was looking for with this fellowship. I am grateful to the Rylands for funding this period of research that completely shifted how I am thinking about this project. I will continue to develop this work as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Medicine and the Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, starting this summer.

Dr Christine Slobogin

Image references

James Berry, Diseases of the Thyroid Gland and Their Surgical Treatment (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1901), 281 and 340-341. Manchester Main Library Archives. K11.51 B26.

G. F. Barbour Simpson and Edward Burnet, eds., The Edinburgh Stereoscopic Atlas of Obstetrics, section IV (London: The Caxton Publishing House, 1909), no. 82. From the collection of the Museum of Medicine and Health, Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health (found with help from Stephanie Seville)

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Rylands BlogAnonymous Anatomies: A Critical History of Visual Anonymity in Britain and America, 1870 – 1955

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This blog post includes images of pregnancy and nudity, which some readers might find uncomfortable. Dr Christine Slobogin, Visiting Early Career Research Fellow in 2021-22, writes: My fellowship a…

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Opportunities to influence or support promotion of special collections in the area of medicine and health. Audiology collections, Humanitarian archive,

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AGMS student pop up exhibitions at Central Library

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AGMS student pop up exhibitions at Central Library

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The Museum of Medicine and Health is one of the most extensive collections of medical artefacts in England.

Spanning more than 300 years, the collection is a significant educational and cultural asset. We contribute to exhibitions, research projects and run events to support outstanding learning and student experience and public engagement with the collection.

For more information on the Museum, please email stephanie.seville@manchester.ac.uk.

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Museum of Medicine and Health | University of Manchester

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The Museum of Medicine and Health, based at the University of Manchester, is one of the most extensive collections of medical artefacts in England.

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History of Medicine

The Museum of Medicine and Health is part of The University of Manchester. It contains over 8000 objects and is one of the most extensive collections of medical artefacts in England.

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Discover more with this digital learning resource f or Key Stage 4, as well as anyone curious about Manchester's healthcare past.

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Look at the object and read the descriptions.

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Use the questions and activity suggestions to help spark discussion and debate around the three themes:

Understanding the Body

Surgery

Medicine in Conflict

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The History of Medicine Museum would love to hear your feedback and if you like you can take part in a quick questionnaire.

Sights, Sounds and Stories: Manchester's Medical Histories

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History of Medicine The Museum of Medicine and Health is part of The University of Manchester. It contains over 8000 objects and is one of the most extensive collections of medical artefacts in England. ​ Discover more with this digital learning resource f or Key Stage 4, as well as anyone curious about Manchester's healthcare past.

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FWIW I hadn't heard of this museum until last year and didn't know I could use the collection so simple advocacy 

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FWIW I hadn't heard of this museum until last year and didn't know I could use the collection so simple advocacy 

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Again I didn't know about this aspect so some advocacy, communication might be useful 

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Again I didn't know about this aspect so some advocacy, communication might be useful 

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Would give AHRC/ ESRC grant applications profile if they were involved

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Would give AHRC/ ESRC grant applications profile if they were involved

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I think some of the *difficult* material ie. the ethnographic materials would be really interesting within SALC particularly to scholars of race

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I think some of the *difficult* material ie. the ethnographic materials would be really interesting within SALC particularly to scholars of race

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Lots of outreach opportunity here, doing work outside the U with objects really important. Could link with Family History at the Library? There is a phenomenon called a 'history harvest' where people compare objects. I think some kind of roadshow would be excellent with some key objects, I like the idea of taking these out of the university 

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Lots of outreach opportunity here, doing work outside the U with objects really important. Could link with Family History at the Library? There is a phenomenon called a 'history harvest' where people compare objects. I think some kind of roadshow would be excellent with some key objects, I like the idea of taking these out of the university 

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Engage with standard festivals in the city - Science, Literature, Libraries - and run events. 

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Engage with standard festivals in the city - Science, Literature, Libraries - and run events. 

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I would ask your SR team for dedicated funding stream to fund work developing engagement with the objects - this would be a key way to drive usage

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I would ask your SR team for dedicated funding stream to fund work developing engagement with the objects - this would be a key way to drive usage

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As Carsten suggested - using the objects to highlight how instruments were developed on / designed for people who were different - whether that was race, ethnicity, SES, gender, or mental health

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I think opening up the space as a place to be used will lead to this. This is again all about higher profile. I think you could do a day workshop or something on the museum with key people 

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I think opening up the space as a place to be used will lead to this. This is again all about higher profile. I think you could do a day workshop or something on the museum with key people 

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Providing a session for the New Academics Programme so new staff are aware of this resource and this can also provide guidance on how to present these materials in a sensitive manner

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The museum has key resource for investigating the history of issues that are *very* interesting to students > neurodiversity, race, mental health, diversity

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The museum has key resource for investigating the history of issues that are *very* interesting to students > neurodiversity, race, mental health, diversity

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Using these objects to help create discussion with members of the community - both to help raise awareness and provide pathways to knowledge development for various different audiences

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Community research would be very useful, partnering with AIU Race Centre for instance

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Community research would be very useful, partnering with AIU Race Centre for instance

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Like the NHS at 70, going into hospital space seems obvious 

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Like the NHS at 70, going into hospital space seems obvious 