Museum to exhibit severed arm

[garyjd]

At what point do you draw the line and choose a decent burial verses putting a body part on display? What if anything can this tell us about medical treatment during the Civil War? IMO it's has more shock value rather than educational value. ~Gary

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifest...y.html#weighIn

[Mark Choate]

Re: Museum to exhibit severed arm

Gary,

I am in complete agreement with you. This is nothing more than a spectacle at the expense of the poor soul who lost the arm.

Disgraceful.

regards,
mark

[Cumpston1862]

Re: Museum to exhibit severed arm

Not to mention they are not sure its a Civil War soldier's arm.

[The Chesterfield Rifleman]

Re: Museum to exhibit severed arm

It's just a crying shame how a persons suffering is displayed in a museum for amusement.

[David Fox]

Re: Museum to exhibit severed arm

When I first visited Gettysburg in 1955, what became the "National Museum" had one or more table cases with soldiers' skeletons on display. I was there with my grandfather. HIS father fought in that war. I was minded at the time that those shattered bones could have been some other living person's grandfather. Public pressure made them arrange burial for those abruptly slaughtered boys....

[markj]

Re: Museum to exhibit severed arm

One interesting possibility: there are now forensic tests available that could conceivably nail down the location where the original owner of this arm lived or, at least, was originally born. If these can be conducted, they might provide more details about whose arm it was, which side they were on, and perhaps even ID the possible unit in which they served. To wit:

http://www.smithsonianchannel.com/site/sn/show.do?series=674#episode-guide

[SamVan]

Re: Museum to exhibit severed arm

I beg to differ from the popular opinion. It has more value than the morbid. The display of a severed arm or of skeletal parts is not different that displaying a mummified body from Egypt or South America, some of which make world tours. There is an educational value from examining these.

For example, the Union Medical Corps saved injured limbs, some of which today are viewed with an example of the munition of what caused the injury. If you ever wondered how an injury from a minie ball would injure an arm or leg, there are examples of these in displays which often show a comminuted fracture. Surgeons have been studying these types of things for centuries. They continue to study them, today. Those things that are out of the current educational loop are often now on display in museums and help explain medical history as well as history of warfare and the wounds suffered. Because the display is one that is near and dear to our heart does not lessen the value of its display, even if it is from my own ancestry; I would hope the price paid by my grandfather would be no less valued or demeaned because it is on display in a museum. In example, if only what my grandfather died from would be in a display, perhaps the value of it would be awareness of others of an all too common malady.

[David Fox]

Re: Museum to exhibit severed arm

Everone to his own opinion. I saw enough death in Vietnam to subsequently wonder at the morbid curiousity people evidence for corpses. A number of television's most popular series revolve around voyeur fascination with bodies in various stages of decomposition, often represented on slabs while the stars swap quips over them. I've never been particularly keen on exhibitions of bog people, Egyptian or South American mummies, or the like. Decent regard for the dead should be a basic premise of self respect for ones fellow man. I believe it is still drilled into medical students before they undertake dissections.

Surely it would have been educational for Charleston tourists to have on display the remains of the crew of the "Hunley" submarine, arranged next to wax mock-ups of their faces. The reenacting community would have been first to rise up in protest. What's different about some strangled 15th Century Peruvian baby?

As a wise man on this site often says: "other's milage may differ".

[Curt Schmidt]

Re: Museum to exhibit severed arm

Hallo!

This whole topic is complex...

If the remains are of one's loved ones or family, it can be offensive, insensitive, intrusive, and shameless spectacle.

When the remains are "other" peoples' particiulary ancients and minorities like say American Indians the archeology becomes educational and scientific. And what would be sacrilage, theft, and grave robbing for "Whites" becomes legitimate and okay.

In my archeological internship, I viewed and examined the remains of over 12, 000 prehistoric peoples from here in the Ohio area. Students from local nursing and medical schools would come out to view the pathology of disease such as arthritis and bone breaks that did not heal properly. Or dental issues such as absesses eating away facial bone. Or the effects of spear and arrow head points lodged in bone where the person recovered and the bone fused the flint in place. Or did not recover.

IMHO, yes... on the one side of the coin is the 19th century notion of freak show and carnival both in shows as well as museums. On the other side of the coin is what remains can tell us about life in the Past. The difference is whose remains they are.
One would perhaps not want their father or mother turned over to a med school for human anatomy dissection class. But an unwanted unknown homeless person, may be so.

Remembering the right arm of my wife's great-great uncle, shattered by a Minie at Resaca, and tossed in an amputated limb pile outside of a field hospital.

Others mileage will vary...

Curt

[Milliron]

Re: Museum to exhibit severed arm

Interesting topic. I understand those who object to this as needlessly macabre or disrespectful. For this record, it seems to me that a severed arm discovered in your field after the battle of Antietam is easily identified as a war wound.

I see it as a means to make the public at large understand the human cost of the war in terms they can easily understand. The Civil War is far too remote for many members of the public. Anything that leads them to identify and see the connection between the War and their own lives is a good and useful thing to me. These were not men in lithographs, but real people with loves, hates, desires, bad habits, faults, qualities and well, arms, just like you do. I'll even indulge in the conceit of thinking that the bearer of that arm would agree.

Just my .02. Worth what you paid for it.

[CSchneider]

Re: Museum to exhibit severed arm

Don't forget that the U.S. Army began collecting just this type of thing during the Civil War. In early 1862 Surgeon General William Hammond's Circular #2 ordered, "As it is proposed to establish in Washington, an Army Medical Museum, Medical officers are directed diligently to collect, and to forward to the office of the Surgeon General, all specimens of morbid anatomy, surgical or medical, which may be regarded as valuable; together with projectiles and foreign bodies removed, and such other matters as may prove of interest in the study of military medicine or surgery. These objects should be accompanied by short explanatory notes. Each specimen in the collection will have appended the name of the medical officer by whom it was prepared." Many thousands of severed limbs and other bits of Union and Confederate soldiers, and later soldiers from other wars, were collected, preserved, and (still to this day) displayed by the military for the public to see.

-Craig Schneider

[Garryowen]

Re: Museum to exhibit severed arm

Although morbid, this is not a very new thing. In 2000, I went to the Scouting jamboree in Vienna, Austria. Our host family took us to every site humanly possible, including an old WW2 era flak tower turned into an aquarium, and the “Museum of Human Abnormalities”. Or at least that’s what we were told the name translated to in English. It was a medical Museum started back when Austria – Hungry was still an Empire and major player on the world stage. They had a “lung room” with cancer victim’s lungs, coal miners lungs, smoker’s lungs and so on, all preserved in jars for medical study. Not a tourist trap (like some museums), but rather a place to learn and study.

There is a museum like this in Philadelphia (I don’t know the name, I’ve never been).

Isn’t there also an old story of Dan Sickles visiting his leg at the Smithsonian?

As a vet myself, I can understand the both sides of the coin, both the folks who want to study and learn, and those that want to leave the dead buried.

[Garryowen]

Re: Museum to exhibit severed arm

Allow me to clarify my last,
Veteran, not an animal vet….. I don’t want anyone getting the wrong idea

[jessejames70]

Re: Museum to exhibit severed arm

Just curious as how this arm is different than Sickles' leg bones being on display (I think they are still on display)? I know that he donated the leg and all that but I don't see folks saying anything about that being morbid. Is it just because there is tissue attached to the arm or is it just an aversion to wanting to see the arm displayed? Now if there could be a positive ID placed I could see a push to bury the arm as it deserves, but without an ID I don't have a problem with letting people see the damage that could come from battle. I guess this is a long way to say I'm OK with either option, but just curious as why it's fine to display one body part for so long and nobody has said anything about it.

Just my $.02

[jessejames70]

Re: Museum to exhibit severed arm

Alex and I must have been typing at the same time with similar thoughts. You are thinking of the Mutter Museum in Philly I believe. I know there are a couple more out there. In my search for the Titanic exhibit I came across a package deal in Atlanta for that and another exhibit called "The Body" or some such, I didn't read everything about it but it came across as "teaching" displays to the public of the human body, here is where I assume they will probably have some actual "items" on display.