Wunderkammer and Black Market Stiffs: The Harvard Cadaver Scandal
Turning corpses into commodities is no way to stock your cabinet of curiosity, son.
There is a wall of human skulls in Philadelphia. A memento mori scream. 139 faceless remains lined up in rows, their empty black eye-sockets staring out with hollow impassivity and their teeth arcing in vivid grins.
The display is a study of ossified human pointillism. Each skull is a sepia toned dot in the morbid tapestry. And yet each one is distinct and unique. Some show signs of trauma or sickness. Some seem carved from exotic stone by a master's hands.
This is the Josef Hyrtl collection in the Mutter Museum at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia – one of my favorite places in the world.
These naked craniums remind us of the singular consciousness that once emanated from the now empty braincase. When they wore flesh, these skeletons grinned and frowned and formed words both tender and unkind. And they still speak from their place behind glass, a ghostly voice asking we remember our own heads, perched above our shoulders, nodding and shaking and swiveling in wonderment.
The Mutter Museum could be considered one of America’s most notable wunderkammer, or “curiosity rooms,” (contemporary: curiosity cabinets). The German term signifies the originators of the phenomenon. The trend emerged in Deutschland sometime in the 15th century as a way to show status and curatorial panache, while also operating as a kind of proto-edutainment for the monied and learned.
More than simple collections of pretty objects, wunderkammer were meant to hold exotic artifacts that would shock, amaze and strain credulity. It’s important to note that these collections were not for scientific purposes per se. Even the Royal Society of London acknowledged that collections needed to inspire a sense of wonderment beyond natural history, intellectual edification and pedagogy.
A wunderkammer is a highly personal collection that reflects the collectors values, interests and aesthetics. However, there are some ground rules. In an attempt to get a job from Christian I of Saxony, the 16th century artist Gabriel Kaltemarckt penned a guide on how to assemble a curiosity room. He suggested the Saxon Elector build an assemblage of art from around the world, but also go hard on “curious items” and “antlers, horns, claws, feathers and other things belonging to strange and curious animals.”
Dead things have always been beloved by curiosity collectors. Those things might be bleached corals, fossils, scales and feathers. They might also be taxidermy of dubious origin, ceremonial totems from lost tribes, or human remains with notable deformities. A cast-away prosthetic eye or a dead man’s toe can make a collection.
It makes some amount of sense. Curiosity is sated in the face of life. You pay a nickel to see the dog-faced boy behind the curtain and you realize they are just a person, with struggles and hopes and dignity still. Curiosity fades.
But outside of scientific inquiry, and in the hands of collectors, what is dead remains open to conjecture and speculation. When placed in public view, the bleached white bones are vessels for the stories we project upon them because they can’t tell their own tales.
That palimpsest quality of human remains make them a powerful source of emotional provocation particularly alluring to artists. Consider Andrew Krasnow's work. His 2005 exhibition Of The Flesh: Works in Skin included objects like maps, boots, and even lampshades. It was not particularly subtle, but it worked in its own frightening way. The point? Man’s brutality to man, essentially. The material? Flesh donated for scientific research.
There’s a high barrier to entry when making works of art from human remains. The main problem is sourcing the medium. Krasnow somehow found a legal source for his skin. The photographer Francois Robert stumbled upon the articulated skeleton that he uses to build images of war in a bank of high school lockers he bought. British sculpture Marc Quinn uses his own frozen blood to create busts of his own head.
But these artists are legitimized by galleries who’ve championed their work. There are plenty of unknown artists swimming around the sea of trash culture, seeking the abhorrence that human remains might add to their work. And these artists are championed by home collectors of creepy craft who want to fill their own wunderkammers with bizarre artifacts. Somewhere in that relationship ethics are obscured in the fog of desire.
Recently, seven people received federal charges after a human remains trafficking ring was discovered operating from the Harvard Medical School morgue. The manager of the morgue, Cedric Lodge is alleged to have traded in human body parts, including skulls, limbs and organs during his long tenure as the institution’s main corpse guy.
Earlier this year, investigation of the body trade led to the indictment of Candace Chapman Scott, who sold body parts from the Little Rock, Arkansas, mortuary and crematorium where she worked. She is alleged to have sold body parts including those from stillborn babies that were meant to be cremated.
Feds have found nearly $150,000 exchanged, in total, among the alleged perpetrators, but little has been reported of a motive beyond money. To what end does one send human remains across state lines?
There are tantalizing clues in the news reports that suggest the body snatchers were connected to a thriving oddities market. One of the accused, Jeremy Pauley, is said to have purchased skin to make leather. Another of the accused, Salem, Massachusetts resident Katrina Maclean, owned a small storefront called Kat’s Creepy Creations, where she sold a variety of horror-themed dolls. So, it’s likely that the trafficked body parts were being used to create artifacts bound for curiosity cabinets around the United States.
I’m not particularly shocked. Humans are drawn inexorably to the macabre. Trash culture is full of people who collect serial killer memorabilia, or obsess over true crime. Collecting artifacts built from the dead is a natural extension of a dark subculture.
Obviously, trafficking in the non-consenting deceased is reprehensible. A person’s last wishes should be respected, whether it’s cremation, natural burial, organ or medical research donation or a Hunter S. Thompson ash-cannon blast. None of the body snatcher victims, or their families, consented to become leather so a tattooed ghoul could have a human-skin wallet.
Had the dead consented, in life of course, things would be different. If you want to allow an artist to taxidermy your buttocks into a throw pillow, I have no argument. Let those tattooed ghouls cuddle your badonkadonk for eternity for all I care. And while selling a person's remains may feel particularly bizarre, it’s not unprecedented. Consider the fact that the inventor of the Frisbee, “Steady” Ed Headricks, requested his ashes be incorporated into a memorial disc, which you can purchase for $200 a pop.
Of course, one could say that the cadaver thieves were following centuries of precedent. The ethics of sourcing artifacts for your wunderkammer have always been iffy. The most princely curiosity rooms were monuments to imperialism. The most wonder-inducing objects were those harvested from far away climes. Along with colorful stuffed lizards and birds, one might also have relics stripped from a people likely traded into slavery. But removing important artifacts, or even sacred animals, from a people and their environment is ultimately dehumanizing. Owning these spoils of progress allowed colonizers to render their victims as mere curiosities and backwards savages.
The irony of colonialism is that the savages are the colonizers. And judging by the behavior of our modern body snatchers, it would seem we remain savages.
There is clearly power, or even magic, in the remains of the dead. There always has been. Europe is filled with churches displaying the body parts of saints. Some feature incorruptible corpses. Others are decorated with bone. We once made jewelry with the hair of passed loved ones and we will live with their ashes on our fireplace mantles.
I do not begrudge a collector their momentos of death. But possession should be predicated on consent. We champion consent for the living and it should be the same for the dead. If consent cannot be given because of time passed, then I believe collectors have the moral responsibility to seek it from the relatives or ancestors of the deceased. And in their absence, collectors should make sure they place their cadaverous artifacts in a context that allows them to retain some sense of what made them human.
The Harvard corpse traders lost sight of the humanity of their victims. They rendered them into commodities. They removed the power and the magic of the remains.
The Mutter museum, and even artists like Francois Robert and Marc Quinn, are very careful to ensure that humanity comes before spectacle. Yes, the work is macabre and fascinating and even lurid. But it is also a reflection of our lived experiences as people. It puts us back in our bodies and forces us to understand our own flesh and bone as part of the human whole.
The best wunderkammers are a somber celebration. They remind us of our fragile and extinguishable lives. But they also celebrate the fact that what we do here, now, echoes forward even after all that’s left are hollow eye sockets and grinning teeth. In that celebration, we can affirm our life.
We should, as fans of trash-culture, champion humanity in all we do. What we make can be scary, and awful and abhorrent. It can be funny and strange. But we should make a point to enable those works that remind us to live compassionate and full lives.
To that end, I’ll make this proclamation: As long as the obligations of any organ donations and the wishes of my family have been fulfilled, you can take a part of what’s left and make it a totem. All I ask is that you remember me. Remember that I was human like you. Remember that you will be a corpse like me too and that your time on this earth is best spent loving and helping and celebrating.
Then cuddle my stuffed badonkadonk forever.