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WELLCOME LMKAKV CTAE: ^~3 . i 22502828740 Remains Narrative Karen Ingham Ourl«tJyrpf th«IfijhCunt Emotion and Identity in Museum John Hunter’s Emotion and Identity in Museum John Hunter’s Simon Chaplin To untrained eyes a pathological medicine. In the hospitals of post- specimen is a barren, lifeless thing. revolutionary Paris, he locates an Detached and disembodied, it is an epistemic shift that changed the way object made by hands skilled in the doctors saw their patients, through the craft of unpicking the fabric of the emergence of a penetrating ‘clinical human body. It is presented for the gaze’ which turned individual patients appreciation of discerning medical eyes, into medical objects. Not surprisingly, trained to delineate diseases which the pathological specimen - by penetrate organs or traverse planes of definition dissected and abstracted, tissue. The specimen speaks, too, with stripped of context - has become an a medical voice; in terms that are emblem of this cultural change. Others anatomical, pathological or histological, have looked back further in time, and the lingua franca of the clinician or across the Channel, to see evidence for biomedical scientist. Most of all it is the birth of the clinical gaze in the anonymous. Its accompanying case charitable hospitals and private history may lay bare the most intimate anatomy schools of Georgian London. details - reveal age and gender, health The emergence of the anatomist as and habits, dissect a life with the same exemplary figure and the demise of the dispassion that has been brought to patient as individual have been seen as bear on the body - but the narrative is inextricably linked. In John Hunter - the always impersonal, the patient is not archetype of the surgeon-scientist - named, and their voice has no place. some have seen the origin of an exclusive medical authority that still, Have emotion and identity ever been today, denies the patient a say - a part of the museum of pathology? ‘fearful symmetry’ between Hunter and For Michel Foucault, it is precisely the his successors, as Ruth Richardson so removal of these uncontrollable qualities eloquently describes it. that characterises modern clinical Narrative Remains I 8 Emotion and Identity inJohn Hunter's Museum Simon Chaplin Revealing the patient’s voice in John stripped the bones of an old woman Hunter’s collection, invoking identity to that died in St George’s Hospital’, engender emotion, can therefore be begins one such record, knew nothing ‘I seen as a political act. It is a way of of her history’. Yet his notes also highlighting the origins of the clinical include many details of patients with gaze in order to deflect or refocus it, whom Hunter was more familiar: people and to bring the modern patient back of rank, of wealth, and of power, whose into the picture. But the fact that these stories are preserved, and whose own identities are there to be recovered voices can be heard in the records of should make us pause. Why do we their final illnesses. Hunter’s knife cut know their names - Richard Bulstrode, through the social and economic Mrs Adams, Marianne Harland and divides of Georgian society, bringing more? Was Thomas Thurlow - a Bishop! together clerics and criminals, - subjected to the same indignity as the politicians and paupers, merchants and author Laurence Sterne: disinterred, tradesmen. In an essay on post- ‘resurrected’, and spirited away, only to mortems in Britain in the 17th-century, be revealed in the cold light of day on David Harley has argued, pace the dissector’s table? We know that Foucault, that such histories are John Hunter was, like his many evidence of a more multivalent political contemporaries, dependent on an illicit economy, in which patients, rather than trade in cadavers conducted by practitioners, often held sway. If, as London’s ‘resurrectionists’ or grave- Norman Jewson has suggested, the robbers. His case-books contain plenty 18th-century witnessed the of dispassionate accounts of disappearance of the ‘sick man’ from dissections performed upon anonymous medical practice, then Hunter’s case- bodies, some secured through books suggest that this was a gradual hospitals, others from work-houses or process, and one that was the result of the gallows at Tyburn. ‘In 1759 a careful process of negotiation, rather I Narrative Remains 9 Emotion and Identity inJohn Hunter's Museum Simon Chaplin I simply than the imposition of a new A calculated appeal to the sensibilities model of medical authority. and sympathy of readers, these narratives invited readers to put Written case histories formed part of themselves in the place of the sufferer, this process. Published in learned to appreciate their travails and their journals, and often re-circulated in stoicism in the face of adversity. literary magazines or reported in the Employing the patient’s voice lent these press, they were accessible to and read narratives a rhetorical urgency. By by a much wider audience than we emphasising the role of the patient or might imagine. For the historian Thomas their family as the instigators of Laqueur, they form part of a broader dissection, they also portrayed as a it literary genre, the ‘humanitarian duty that served both private interest narrative’, which used the plight of the and the public good. patient to create a ‘moral imperative’ for actions that appeared beyond the pale - It was not only in print, however, that harsh physic, radical surgery, and post- patients spoke from beyond the grave mortem dissection among them. to sanction the act of dissection. As the Narrative Remains I 10 Emotion and Identity inJohn Hunter's Museum Simon Chaplin