4.4.1: Conclusion

The Opaque Online Publishing Platform (OOPP) was developed with the intent of providing a different kind of rhetorical method to the history of medicine (4.2.5). It is indebted to the critiques of Indigenous and postcolonial thinkers (4.1.3; 4.2.3), and it speculatively reframes historical patients within contemporary understandings of consent (4.2.4).

As I developed the OOPP and as I wrote the dissertation in earnest, I knew that, for the most part, the erasures that the OOPP enabled were not going to disrupt my argument too much. This is partially a result of my mid-scale analytical frame: looking wide enough at the scientific literature to point to specific things happening in the discourse, but not close enough to point to specific patients in the process. It is also a result of a broader understanding of the kind of labor which is done by researchers working in the past. We do a lot of summarizing, and we do a lot of precise framing: picking specific material and omitting swaths of others that best enable our arguments. I do not need images of patients to understand that doctors might have unethically tested on them, because the ways the doctors viewed their patients was evident in their writing. The specific examples help me emphasize a point, but they are not epistemically necessary to make it.

I say this because what I am arguing against is less the digital materials with which I work,¹ but to think of them as a stand-in for the materials which I did not have access: wet tissue specimens preserved in research institutes and museums (0.1.4; 4.2.4). One of the implicit arguments that I make in this dissertation is the social construction of value around research materials (0.1.4). They do not have inherent value, so much as the value that scientists, historians, archivists, and institutions imbed in them; scholars reify that value even when they look at these materials in a critical light. This latter point is something I am constantly writing about, and which I mention whenever I present.

My challenge, using the OOPP and this dissertation as my main example, is that the divestment of human material from collections will not mean a reduction of potential historical research, but it does mean a reduction of potential value within the institutions which house them. One of the main problems of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) is that it gives the final say in the repatriation process to the same facilities who ascribe and maintain the value of those stolen objects.² I want to make that value system obvious, and to reduce that same system through a practice of ethical elision—opacity (4.1.3; 4.2.3).

The OOPP is a way to share that practice and invite other scholars to develop their own interventions in many fields. While I cannot erase the extractive methods which historical patients were subjected to, and I cannot actively remove materials from any collection. I can provide tools to others who also wish to unsettle the epistemic and institutional demands for further extraction. I hope these tools can work to further reject and refuse (4.2.3) these implicit ideologies which guide western academic practices, with the specific interest in the divestment, repatriation or destruction of any and all unethically procured materials, no matter their discursive or epistemic value.