Observations and Lessons from the First Curating Medical Heritage Workshop or How I Spent My Swedish Vacation
In Sweden, the word for drugstore is apotek. I assume it comes from apothecary. I learned that word in September of 2024*, when I was lucky enough to be part of a contingent of academics from Kingston who travelled to Uppsala, Sweden for the first of a series of workshops on Curating Medical Heritage.
For three days, delegates from Canada, Sweden, the UK, and South Africa travelled to different medical heritage institutions and engaged in a series of education sessions and conversations themed around reconciliation and indigeneity. The big picture question for this particular set of the series was, “Can collections address colonial intergenerational trauma and create spaces for healing and reconciliation?”
Much of what we learned had to do with the Swedish Institute for Race Biology (SIRB) and how heritage professionals dealt with its legacy. I encourage you to do more research into the SIRB, but in brief, it was an institute founded in Uppsala in 1922 with a focus on documenting Sweden’s population in order to classify the different “races” and to understand and promote the “best” genetics.
In other words, eugenics. A lot of the work focused on the Sámi, the indigenous peoples of northern Scandinavia.
One of the things I found most interesting about the SIRB is that you can really see how it was allowed to exist. Not because of bigotry and not simply because people of the time were extra racist, but because of how it was sold to them. It was very much a reaction to the First World War. The SIRB was pitched as scientific research that would lead to permanent peace. The idea’s rotten down to the foundations, of course, but you can understand why people reeling after a major societal trauma might have latched onto anything that promised to make sure it never happened again.
Day One
We all turned up bright and early at the Carolina Rediviva, the Uppsala University’s gorgeous main library. Our first stop was a presentation by some of the librarians responsible for managing the archives from the SIRB. The SIRB researchers largely focused on statistics, but they also took many photographs of their subjects. In some ways, these photographs are a powerful record. They went into source communities, recorded traditional practices, and dress. Many of the people who use the collection now do so in order to obtain photographs of relatives who there were otherwise no images of.
We were able to see some of the photograph albums. They’re an interesting record and it was compelling to see them.
No photographs of this part of the workshop. While they only showed us the more innocuous albums, it was still in bad taste at best to take pictures.
But these photographs were for eugenics research. There were more natural portraits, but many were essentially mugshots and some were even more intrusive. The SIRB researchers wanted to document everything about their subjects’ physical traits. That meant taking photographs of their nude bodies.
Some of the subjects were children.
Part of the librarians’ talk was on how the collection has been mythologised. Many people think of the Carolina Rediviva’s archival holdings as the “naked children collection.” How do you manage a collection like that? How do you follow your legal and ethical mandate to make archives available while being respectful of the people portrayed, especially when some of those people are minors?
It was clearly something they still struggled with. I work at a medical history museum. I’m no stranger to mythologisation of the heritage you hold. I spend more than a little time reassuring visitors that we don’t have any wet collections (i.e. no body parts in jars). The librarians struggled with that, too. People thought they held human remains. People thought that all of the photographs featured nudity.
Neither of those things are true and part of being a responsible educator is trying to dispel these rumours while being honest about the difficult parts of your collection. There is anger at the existence of the photograph collection and it’s not hard to understand why. But the librarians didn’t create it. They only hold it. How do you hold a collection like that? How do you deal with that legacy in a way that acknowledges it? How do you give a voice to people whose personhood was torn away?
In the afternoon, we got a possible answer. We were able to speak with artist Katarina Pirak Sikku about her piece, Perpetually Wound in the Colors of the Ancestors (original title in Sámi, but that’s the translation), as well as to see the piece itself. Much of her work has focused on the legacy of the SIRB from her perspective as a Sámi woman. You can see some of her work on her website here, including this project.
(Here’s one of her earlier pieces in the Uppsala Castle modern art gallery; I wandered in almost solely because of the free admission – never let anyone tell you it doesn’t work! – so it was fun to then encounter her work again).
Perpetually Wound in the Colors of the Ancestors was created during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, so we were some of the very few people who got to see it in person. Katarina created a set of covers for some of the albums created by the SIRB. Each cover draws its identity from a person portrayed in one of the photographs – textiles from their family members, acknowledgment of their skill at sports. While the photos are largely anonymized, the covers still managed to speak to the identities of the people portrayed.
I don’t think any museum worker is a stranger to collections with complicated histories. History is messy and holding its remnants means engaging with those sometimes sad, sometimes infuriating, but always difficult histories. (And many museums have their own complicated legacies – collections that were created unethically, items and sometimes even human remains that were at best collected under false pretences, sometimes simply stolen).
It can be hard to decide how to handle these items that relate to difficult histories. To hide them is tantamount to hiding the history they speak to, but how do you store them respectfully? How do you speak of them, when their simple existence is an ugly thing? (To give an extreme example, you can’t simply knock Auschwitz down but everything about it is painful).
That’s why I really loved this piece as an intervention to try to address the legacy of the SIRB. The histories tend to focus on the researchers, the people in charge. The people affected get lost, their names forgotten. But this art installation came from a member of the source community and it was about the people in the albums. It was framed, as she created them, as an act of care. That’s empowering and it’s powerful. If it had been my own collection, I’d be asking Katarina if I could keep the covers. I’d want to find some way to make this, too, part of the SIRB’s legacy.
Day 2
There were no human remains at the Carolina Rediviva, but they do exist. On the second day, we travelled to the Hagströmer Library at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm to learn about their repatriation work.
It's also just a really pretty library.
Repatriation has been much discussed these days, especially in Canada. I’ve never done any repatriation work myself, but of course I’ve studied it and I’ve been lucky enough to work with people who were willing to share their experience of doing it. If I had to describe Canadian repatriation (as I was asked to at the workshop), I think I could do it in a single word: convoluted!
Repatriation is complicated everywhere, of course. It’s not just the complicated legacy, it’s the practicalities. Anatomical collections, especially the ones collected in less than ethical or legal circumstances, don’t always have the best records. And it can be hard to figure out who the remains “belong” to. No group is a monolith and cultures and boundaries shift over time. Check out the story of Naamiwan’s Drum for a Canadian example of repatriation going ugly.
The Karolinska’s human remains collection was part of an anatomical museum, common in medical schools at the time. It comprises largely crania, although there are other remains as well. Many of the records of the collection were destroyed in a fire in the 1890s.
Still, repatriation at the Karolinska seemed a bit more straightforward than anything I personally had ever seen before. Part of it is the size of the collection. It comprises only 800 individuals, a miniscule number compared to bigger institutions (they are, they told us, some of the only people in the world who may finish all their repatriation work within their lifetimes). Another factor is the clarity of the process. Sweden’s legislation, at least compared to Canada, is very clear about the process of repatriation, about how it works and who needs to approve. Finally, they have something the rest of us only dream of: funding.
Repatriation can be surprisingly expensive. In Canada, for example, the Haida have spent more than a million dollars on their repatriation efforts; that works out to about $2000 per ancestor returned. Travel is expensive. Research is expensive. And many of the museum workers who are sympathetic to repatriation efforts are badly overburdened and have neither the funds nor the time to give repatriation the effort it deserves.
At the Karolinska, they could pay for things like travel and they had staff dedicated to untangling the messy and sometimes missing records. They even had an osteologist on staff to work with the bones. I really enjoyed hearing their presentation on their work and it sparked some interesting conversations about the very nature of human remains. In the Western world, we correlate “human remains” with body parts, bones mostly. But there are other ways of perceiving the world and one of my colleagues raised the question: if we focus on bones, are we continuing to talk over the people most affected by repatriation?
Day Three
“Today is your day,” my colleague had said to me the night before. She wasn’t wrong, because day three was the day we visited the Uppsala Medical Museum.
I turned up early (by accident!) and the curator,Thérèse Toudert, very kindly let my companion and I wander around the museum so I managed to thoroughly explore. In many ways, the museum is almost the polar opposite of the MHC. The building is massive and much of it is open space. It looks like a jumble at first glance, but it’s actually very neatly and precisely organised by theme, which made it easy to navigate. There were also a few side rooms with a single focus. I was particularly delighted by their exhibit on syphilis (I don’t think there’s an exhibit on that particular topic in my immediate future, but look for something that borrows some of the layout).
The main area of the museum. It looks cluttered in my photos, but it's actually quite neatly and clearly laid out in person.
We weren’t, however, there just to look around or to seek inspiration for our own exhibits. We got the curator tour of their brand new exhibit on their local psychiatric institution. As someone who had recently done an exhibit on my own local institution (see Custodial to Curative Care: Rockwood and the Evolution of Mental Health Treatment), I was incredibly interested in seeing how they handled their topic.
One of the challenges of exhibiting medical and healthcare history is that there’s an inherent tendency to focus on the medical professionals and speak from their perspective. The patients don’t tend to write as many histories or keep as many artifacts. That challenge can increase ten-fold when you’re talking about incredibly delicate topics like psychiatric institutions. And while patient confidentiality is always important, it is extra fraught when dealing with vulnerable populations like those being treated for mental illness. You want to humanize the patients, but you don’t want to risk harming them.
The Uppsala Medical Museum had a wonderful solution. They were lucky enough to have in their collection a number of art pieces made by patients at the institution. The very first room of the exhibit was a display of some of these pieces. It was a lovely way to begin the story by centering the patients and their experiences, to allow them to speak of their lives without words. But there was risk there, too. Some of the work was signed; Therese and her colleagues got permission from the relatives to display some of the pieces but couldn’t for others. On one piece, they tried to compromise by covering the signature. But that brought up a question: who does anonymizing actually benefit? Patient confidentiality is important, but isn’t removing the artist from the art they chose to identify themselves with serving to dehumanize them once again?
(They did manage to find a relative and the signature is now proudly back on display).
A sample of the art on display
From this introduction, we moved through a number of other rooms. It was a really fun, in-depth exhibition that worked hard throughout to provide the patient, employee, and systemicperspective. I loved that the case in the photo below combined something positive (the handicrafts) with proof that some patients attempted to escape the institution (the lockpicks). It was a beautiful encapsulation of what I’ve always argued about Rockwood: that it was neither all good nor all bad.
The exhibit ended with a reflection room, a quiet space with benches and artworks pinned to fabric covered-walls. It could be used as an educational space, but it was also simply a place to sit and think. There was even a question on the wall: how has the idea of being unwell changed over time? As the curator who introduced a response wall to her own galleries, of course I liked this idea. But the space itself seemed a perfect end to the exhibit and a perfect end to the workshops: a space to contemplate, to internalise and to think about how to think about the world.
I wanted to thank the organisers of the Swedish iteration of this series. See you all in March for the Kingston version. It’s going to be amazing!
Notes on Other Swedish Institutions from a Museum Nerd
The Gustavanium
The first thing I did (once I’d slept for about fourteen hours; jet lag is a nightmare) was head up to the Gustavanium, the Uppsala University Museum. Everyone interested in museums should see the lovely Augsburg Art Cabinet (cabinets of curiosities were the precursor to museums!) but I was there chiefly to see the anatomical theatre. Built in the 1660s, it’s the second oldest anatomical theatre in the world (although it’s been renovated and then refurbished since). Keep an eye on this blog for a later, more in-depth exploration of how they functioned and why they're called anatomical theatres.
Uppsala Cathedral
I bought a ticket to go up to the cathedral's museum of its treasures. It's a very neat set-up, a little elevator at the back of the gift shop that they have to unlock for you to go up. It's also well thought out. They give you a booklet explaining the whole exhibit so it's not too text heavy and in your own language. That might be a problem, since the galleries are kept fairly dark to preserve the textiles. But luckily, they thought about that, too, and you also get a little flashlight.
The Vasa Museum
I learned about the Vasa in my conservation class, so seeing it in person was kind of like meeting a celebrity. (Also, an icon. If you have to be bad at your job, be so bad you become a national treasure).
This building was made for the ship, and here’s an element of the design I thought was really neat: the entrance floor is the height that the ship would sit in the water and the ceiling is the height of the water over the ship when it sunk.
The Viking Museum
This is the only museum I’ve ever been in that had a dark ride! You ride a little cart through a tunnel, seeing different dioramas light up and with an audio narrative playing above. I’m mentioning it in my museum nerd section specifically because the timing on this ride was exquisite. Not only did the audio have to match what you were seeing, it came in multiple languages, which means multiple tracks were potentially playing in different places. I was so impressed with the timing and sound dampening; at no point was my story ever disrupted or my experience disturbed by the audio for the people behind me.
The ABBA Museum
The ABBA Museum, it turned out, was mostly not for me. I’ll admit I largely went for the costumes (and for the how-could-I-not of it all – ABBA is one of my favourite bands). It was much more immersive than I tend to care for – lots of interactives, like ABBA karaoke and ABBA dance party. I did like the game where you step into the role of an audio engineer and rebalance an ABBA song; it was a nice demonstration of how a somewhat obscure job contributes to the final sound. And credit where credit is due; anyone who knows me knows I’m not a big fan of tech in museums but these interactives were (mostly) neither broken nor unclear about how they worked.
Also, I do appreciate a thematic bathroom (even if I did have to wait a bit to be alone in it so I could snap a photo).
*I forgot my toothpaste
Works Consulted
(2022, March 30). Seminar on the human remains in Ki’s custody. News from Karolinska Institutet. https://news.ki.se/seminar-on-the-human-remains-in-kis-custody. Accessed January 31, 2025.
Cyca, M. (2024, January 8). It’s high time we brought home indigenous remains and belongings. The Walrus. https://thewalrus.ca/its-high-time-we-brought-home-indigenous-remains-and-belongings/
Josephson, M. (Ed.). (2024, April 18). FAQ on the human remains in Ki’s collections. About Karolinska Institutet - a medical university. https://ki.se/en/about-ki/history-and-cultural-heritage/faq-on-the-human-remains-in-kis-collections. Accessed January 31, 2025.
Hagfeldt, A. (2022, February 17). 100 years in the shadow of the Institute for Racial Biology. The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities. https://www.the-guild.eu/blog/100-years-in-the-shadow-of-the-institute-for-racia.html
Kjellman, U. (2013). A Whiter Shade of Pale: Visuality and race in the work of the Swedish State Institute for Race Biology. Scandinavian Journal of History, 38(2), 180–201. https://doi.org/10.1080/03468755.2013.769458
About the Author
Rowena McGowan started her curatorship at the Museum of Health Care in March of 2022. She holds Bachelor’s degrees in Biology and Archaeology, and graduated with a Master’s degree in Museum Studies from the University of Toronto in 2016. She has worked at Semaphore Lab, the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, the Manitoba Museum, and Lac La Biche Museum. In the little spare time her cat allows her, she enjoys writing fiction. Her first fiction novel will be published under a pseudonym this summer.