0.1.4: Object Analysis

In framing the specimen as a media technology (0.1.3), I am placing it into a broader hierarchy regarding researchers and the things they study. A researcher and their interlocutor; a researcher and their patient; a researcher and their research subject; a researcher and their research object; all of these phrases imply a different set of relations between those with epistemic, cultural power¹ and those who are included in research (0.1.5; 0.2.2; 2.4.2; 2.4.3). I use the terms patient, subject, and object as a means to signal the relationship between the person or thing captured in biomedical research and how they are being framed in a specific study.

Figure 1. Jeremy Bentham’s remains were preserved and put on display at University College London. Image courtesy of University College London.

Patients, most simply, are the humans who see the doctors for some medical malady. Subjects are those patients who have been coerced, forced, or otherwise brought into a scientific experiment or other research activity. I use subject in relation to the framework Michel Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish: the subject for the French philosopher is a pun on a monarchal subject, and it is power that makes the subject fit within the discursive, scientific system (2.2.3). Foucault explicitly describes this relationship between the overt capacity to inflict harm upon the subject, spectacularizing the violence in such a way as to present its overt power. This monarchal subject—a prerevolutionary subject in the French context—was different than the disciplinary subject—one which was made docile through the operations of knowledge producers, who discipline subjects into specific categories to understand and control those deemed unlawful, or otherwise deemed as other.² To be a subject in either model is to lose some aspects of agency, and in the context of this study to be subjectified is to be brought within medicine’s disciplinary systems. Objects are not humans.³ They can be parts of humans, which have been extracted and isolated from their source bodies. In medicine, they have been severed from their source in specific ways so as to be anonymous.⁴ A research object, in relation to a specimen, could be easily described in the possessive way remains are discussed following an individual’s death.

For example, Jeremy Bentham, noted ethicist and subject of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, bequeathed his remains to University College London, with the request that he be publicly dissected and displayed on campus. Southwood Smith, friend and colleague of the philosopher, processed Bentham’s remains: his Auto-Icon is made from Bentham’s articulated skeleton, the philosopher’s own clothes, including his favorite hat, and a wax recreation of his head (fig. 1).⁵. Rather than saying that the articulated skeleton, stuffed with straw, is Jeremy Bentham, one would say that it is Jeremy’s skeleton. For human remains, they are objects precisely because they are no longer seen as part of a living living human being. An object implies a severance of the thing from the from which it was originally taken. Making a specimen is a process which cuts away the personhood from the subject as a means to make a research object.⁶

The term research object, in this sense, also conveys in biomedical epistemics a kind of objectivity: that is in splitting the organ from the subject, it is something that can be conceptually explicated outwards. Bentham’s ribcage can just be conceived as just a human ribcage: something that is universal in human anatomy. For biomedical epistemics and pedagogy those bones would be more useful as an anatomical representation—as a model of normality—not as a historical object tied to a person’s life and death. The object too is split from the researcher, as objectivity in the sciences does away with the political, personal, or skillful decisions of the scientist.⁷ As Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison write,

Objectivity preserves the artifact or variation that would have been erased in the name of truth; it scruples to filter out the noise that undermines certainty. To be objective is to aspire to knowledge that bares no trace of the knower—knowledge unmarked by prejudice or skill, fantasy or judgement, wishing or striving. Objectivity is blind sight, seeing without interference, interpretation or intelligence.⁸

These separations enable the object and the scientist to be objective, but they also necessarily destroy the epistemic ties between sick subject and biomedical claim (2.1.4; 2.2.3).

Specimens are not just representative objects: they are interlinked with other cultural and economic systems. Specimens are valuable. I use value, here, as a shorthand to describe how they produce economic, cultural, and professional benefits for those who take specimens from human subjects. This thinking comes directly out of how Ruth Richardson describes the human corpse as a commodity. The human cadaver became a valuable asset for medical education, as part of the mid-eighteenth century adoption of the Parisian method of anatomy—one which required all doctors to individually dissect a corpse to learn anatomy. Before their use in anatomy classrooms, human remains were considered to have no value, nor could they be owned; the adoption of the Parisian method in England and Scotland brought with it a shadow market for remains made possible by the work of restrictionists—body snatchers. As Richardson writes, “[n]o longer an object worthy of respect the body of [those stolen from their graves] became a token of exchange, subject to commercial dealing, and then to the final objectification of the dissection room.”⁹ The legal apparatus that addressed the widespread practices of body snatchers never questioned the pedagogical/epistemic value which begat the corpse’s commodification: it only served to produce more legally obtainable bodies through the passage of the Poor Act.

The specimen has multiple valences of value, because in this relationship between epistemics, pedagogy, and commodity, there is also a direct link between the production of specimens and the ranking of medical schools. As J. M. M. Alberti argues, in the early nineteenth century in England and Scotland medical schools used their medical museums—often stocked with famous collections, like with John Hunter’s materials at the Royal College of Surgeons—to prove the value of the education they offered.¹⁰ What many scholars have argued, too, is that these supposedly valuable materials were often mined from communities who were deemed other or lesser in the broader culture. In the United States, Indigenous bodies and Black bodies were regularly stolen from their gravesites, with the Smithsonian being one of the main benefactors of these practices.¹¹ The scale of posthumous theft practiced by medical researchers and anthropologists led to the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, and following a number of scandals regarding the theft and use of the remains of Black children, there are activists pushing for the passage of a similar act protecting and repatriating the remains of Black Americans.¹²

In thinking about specimens as objects, there is a conceptual severing of the representational object—the organ, blood sample, x-ray—from the original subject. While I describe these research materials as objects, this articulation is fraught: I want to be legible to my readers but I am doing harm to the people whose afterlives have been stolen. I am obligated to attend to this problem, and much of this dissertation wades into the morass of medicine’s atrocious collecting histories (0.1.5; 2.4.2; 2.4.3).