“Django's Phrenologist: Science, Slavery, and Material Culture, 1791-1861”

James Poskett (University of Cambridge)

Eustache Belin saw the violence of slavery and revolution first hand. Born a slave on the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1773, Eustache spent his youth toiling in the sugar mills. But amidst the Haitian Revolution of 1791, he escaped to Paris. Incredibly, in the 1830s, a French phrenologist took a cast of Eustache’s head. Over the next thirty years, Eustache became a focal point for discussion of African character. Phrenologists wanted to understand the relationship between the African mind, slavery and revolution. In this talk, I follow the bust of Eustache as it travelled back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean. In doing so, I show how a single phrenological bust was deployed by both supporters and opponents of abolition. More broadly, this talk suggests that the history of science and race needs to be understood as part of a history of material exchange.

“The First Geo-Chronology of Ancient Egypt and the Antiquity of Man, c. 1850-61”

Meira Gold (University of Cambridge)

British geologists of the early 1850s deliberately and cautiously avoided the topic of human antiquity. This tactic was a social exercise to distance themselves from a large body of popularisers—biblical literalists, antiquarians, and philologists—who were more than eager to address the question of recent historical time. Geologists had evaded the human question for decades, partly because there had never been a credible opportunity to correlate geological changes from past epochs with those that took place during historical periods of known dates, and again with observable changes in the present. Leonard Horner, twice president of the Geological Society of London and Vice-President of the Royal Society, sought to address this problem by investigating Nile silt deposits on monuments at the archaeological ruins of Heliopolis and Memphis in Egypt. His objective was to compile a geo-chronology of ancient Egypt to connect “the earliest historical with the latest geological time.” Jointly-funded by the Royal Society and Egyptian government, the excavations were directed by Horner from afar and carried out by engineer Joseph Hekekyan in Egypt. Horner’s sensational conclusion in 1858 that humans had existed in Egypt from at least 11,517 BC was shocking to many. This talk will consider the mixed reception of Horner’s “Egyptian research” among Egyptologists, biblical critics, geologists, and prehistorians to understand how it engaged with cross-disciplinary debates about the age of the earth, the age of the human species, and the authority of Scripture.

“Scale: A Material History of Medicine, Disease and Diagnosis”

Karin Tybjerg (Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen)

This is a history of medicine that takes its point of departure in the stuff of medicine. More specifically in the specimens of human bodies studied to produce medical knowledge. From 18th century onward medical doctors and researchers have preserved and investigated human material and the collections of specimens and samples provide a material trail that can be followed to produce new lines of sight through the history of medicine.

This paper takes its point of departure in the exhibition The Body Collected at Medical Museion in Copenhagen, which displayed human material from embryos in bottles to biobank samples. The ordering principle – scale – prompted a new, material way of thinking about medical history in the 18th-21st centuries. The principle of scale draws on the materiality of the objects, but at the same time mirrors a historical shift in medical interest towards smaller and smaller units.

In this way it becomes possible to see changes in medical science through the specimens collected and investigated. The paper provides a material reading and development Jewson’s famous paper “The disappearance of the Sick Man in Medical Cosmology 1770-1870” (1976), which pointed to changes in the units of body under investigation. The paper will show how the concept of scale can be used to elucidate continuities such as the importance of collecting in medicine, as well as changes such as where disease was thought to be located and when patients were diagnosed.

'Please Consult Your Dentist': Early Forensic Odontology and the St. Francis Dam Collapse of 1928

Vicki Daniel (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Shortly before midnight on March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam collapsed, spilling twelve billion gallons of water into Southern California’s San Francisquito Canyon and killing 471 people. Anticipating a series of death claims against the city of Los Angeles, which owned and operated the dam, officials in neighboring Ventura County initiated an unprecedented identification effort, combining the traditional method of sight recognition with a nascent form of forensic odontology.

Using coroner’s records and photographs, inquest transcripts, claims files, and medical literature, this paper argues that the St. Francis disaster has been overlooked as a turning point in disaster identification history; by looking at Ventura County Coroner Oliver Reardon’s pursuit of dental identifications, we gain insight into how forensics first entered the disaster morgue before World War II. The St. Francis identifications reveal the critical importance of political and legal frameworks in adopting new identification methods, as well as the improvisational way dental identifications evolved in the American context. This paper will show that dental identifications earned a place in disaster because of their alignment with, rather than their distinction from, the traditional practice of sight recognition. At the same time, dental identification also elevated the coroner to the role of primary identifier and foreshadowed significant changes to come in disaster identifications, especially the reconceptualization of identification as a data-driven practice in which experts, not families, possessed primary authority.