Finding that information required using historical archives and reading patient records in a way that researchers have not done before, said Erin McLeary, senior director of collections and research.
“Instead of reading it from the physician’s perspective, as it is written, you attempt to read against the grain to uncover the patient’s perspective of that encounter,” she said. “It’s a really powerful technique for imagining the lived experience of someone whose lived experience might be documented in a case report.”
Ray said this does justice to the patients because until now the collection reflected the points of view of the physicians who did the collecting.
“It’s just an acknowledgement that the historical record is not equal and that doing this type of storytelling offers us one pathway for equalizing who exists in the historical record,” she said.
She added that this answers a common question people often have about the collection: Why doesn’t the Mütter just give everything back? To which she said her response is always: To whom?
“We actually have to develop completely new techniques for even discovering that information before we can move on to a conversation about what should be done … in service of justice to Joseph Williams,” Ray said.
She said other museums in the U.S. and around the world have contacted the Mütter to learn about the work they are doing around ethics.
“It has been a really thorny problem for collections to navigate and it’s one that I think people, collections, rightfully or not, are sometimes really hesitant to do,” she said. “And I can understand why … it can get very heated, it’s connected to a lot of very tangled difficult problems.”
The Mütter Museum’s Erin McLeary, senior director of collections and research (left), and Sara Ray, senior director of interpretation and engagement (right) (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)
The Mütter Museum’s Postmortem project also came at a turbulent time for the museum, with a national controversy and high profile leadership changes.
Almost three years ago, museum leaders at the time took down all of its online exhibits. They argued the museum had to go through their entire collection and answer long overdue ethical questions about human remains, and how the museum came to have them. Long time fans worried that the museum would lose its identity and no longer serve the same educational purpose. The conflict led to national coverage.
The museum’s CEO, as well as the executive director who started the Postmortem project, Kate Quinn, have since left.
Stacey Mann, who was the lead interpretive planner for the Postmortem project and worked with Quinn, said in a statement that “I was very proud to be part of the project based on its original vision, and while the project changed under several changes in leadership, I hope that the museum and the college have learned something from the process that will inform their practice moving forward for the better.”
Ray said the project changed because they learned “the way that we were asking questions at the end of the grant process looked different than the way that we were asking [when] the grant was written, but that’s not a failure of the project. That means that we learned more.”
Ray and McLeary both stressed that they are grateful to Quinn for her work in starting the project, and “am gratified that we were able to land the plane of that conversation.”