Last Thursday I re-entered my European researcher mode and attended the opening of the Deadly Medicine exhibit at the University of Michigan's medical library. This is a traveling version of the larger exhibit from 2006. I missed it when it toured to the SMM, and I've regretted it because I had hoped to contrast it with the Disease Detectives exhibit from the dissertation. The exhibit was accompanied by a presentation by Lombardo, who discussed the notorious US Supreme Court Case Buck v. Bell. It was an enlightening presentation, and he enriched the history of this story in really fascinating ways. For all the exhibit's concern with Nazi use of eugenics, Americans were really the origin and source for many of their ideas. And many states still have sterilization laws on the books.
I don't want to spend a heap of time on this, but here are some quick, rather unformed thoughts about my response to this exhibit.
The Valence of Evil This is a very sad, very emotionally powerful exhibit. This story is not one we really know about, and getting the sense that children and families were murdered, not just by Nazi soldiers, but by nurses, doctors, and others who should be doing good, is particularly striking. This exhibit is one reason why Sarah Palin's utterly false claim that Obama's plan was going to create "Death Panels" is so frightening.
Pathos As a result, this exhibit is nearly all pathos, the effect of which is that both the Nazi regime and the eugenics moment acquire a much stronger valence of "evil." To this end, it's vey powerful.
Quotation Marks This exhibit uses quotation marks throughout. I dug this, because one of my criticisms of the Race exhibit was that even as it defined “race” as a social construction, it continued to reify "race" by leaving the quotation marks off. Oddly, Deadly Medicine uses quotes for nearly everything but the relaxed use of "race" itself, a move I need to think more about.
An Amazing Exhibit? While this might be just a common overstatement, when the library team that brought the exhibit to Michigan introduced the speaker, they referred to the exhibit in terms that surprised me. They implied it was really amazing. While the story itself is super powerful, I didn't get a sense that the exhibit experience was amazing. And what struck me was that the little fold out pamphlet that accompanied the exhibit actually does an "amazing" job of capturing exactly the argument, history, and narrative of the exhibit. So, my question is, again, how impressive can the experience of an exhibit be when it can easily be distilled down into a takeaway brochure? The only difference is size, scope, and the presence of videos. Is that enough?
Where Are They Now? The exhibit's final panel is titled "Aftermath," and in the organization of the space at the health library, you see this title before seeing the panel itself. This led me to expect something different than what I got. The Aftermath panel follows a documentary approach by describing what happened to each of the seven or eight doctors profiled throughout the exhibit. One was tried for war crimes and hung. One escaped to Brazil. Another got some prison time. But the majority continued to practice medicine in Germany, a fact that offends our sense of justice.
This end panel annoyed me for a couple of reasons. First, my experience of the exhibit hadn't given any priority to these men and women. I hadn't seen them as the exhibit's main characters. To me, all the men and women and children who were murdered were the main characters, but unfortunately a "where are they now?" segment wasn't necessary for them.
The second problem, for me, was that this approach consolidated the evil of eugenics into these few scientists. This consolidation was offset to a degree by the diffusion of the evil to all the unnamed doctors and nurses that helped out, but there's an odd cathartic sense at the end when the exhibit essentially says: these doctors and scientists were the core of the problem.
What did I want? To preview my next point, I wanted us to see aftermath of the real character of the exhibit: Eugenics itself. To me, the point isn’t simply historical, it’s philosophical, it’s scientific, it’s more broadly educational. It’s here that I wanted a real meaningful discussion of eugenics and the politics of the science of health.
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