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243 Bull. Hist. Med., 2015, 89 : 243–266

Two Australian Fetuses: Frederic Wood Jones and the Work of an Anatomical Specimen1

lisa o’sullivan and ross l. jones

Summary: A close analysis of two fetal specimens is used to explore of role of material specimens in anatomical practice of the late nineteenth and early twen-tieth centuries, the significance of Indigenous bodies in that era’s quest for an understanding of human difference, and the postcolonial legacies of the global project of creating collections of human specimens.

Keywords: anatomy, human remains, museums, collecting, Frederic Wood Jones, Lamarckism

The Specimens

A photograph of a fetus, legs curled in front of the body, large head cra-dled by one arm above, the other appearing to prop up its chin, appears in the 1933 issue of Journal of Anatomy, the premier journal for anatomists in the British Empire. Its features, or rather her features, are powerful; “unmistakably that of an Australian aborigine” according to the accom-

The authors would like to thank the editors of the Bulletin and the anonymous reviewers for their incisive and helpful suggestions. In addition we thank the special edition editors, Eva Ahren and Carin Berkowitz, for their advice and support. Also the participants in the “Artifacts, Aesthetics, and Authority” workshop, Philadelphia Area Centre for History of Science, Philadelphia, September 6–7, 2012, provided insights and engagement that did much to help us formulate our ideas. Versions of this article were presented at the Ameri-can Association for the History of Medicine 2011 and Society for Social Studies of Science 2010 meetings. We received support from the Australian Research Council—Discovery Project 2009-12, DP0985845. We also thank Warwick Anderson for his ongoing support of our intellectual endeavors.

1. Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this article contains information about deceased Indigenous individuals.

forum

244 lisa o’sullivan and ross l. jones

panying description.2 It is one of only two descriptions of Indigenous Aus-tralian fetuses found in the Journal of Anatomy since its founding in 1867 (as the Journal of Anatomy and Physiology). Indigenous bodies, however, are an enduring presence in the pages of the journal, from its first volume’s description of the “dissection of a Bushwoman” on, reflecting the ongo-ing centrality of material sourced from Indigenous bodies in medical and biological research.3 Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the multiple forms in which such biological material is collected, retained, and reused, whether bones, organs, hair, tissues, blood, or DNA, and to the postcolonial scientific and cultural context in which the retention and use of such material is now being negotiated.4

Both fetuses were described in the journal by the British anatomist and anthropologist Frederic Wood Jones (1879–1954), a leading early twentieth-century anatomist and anthropologist and an important figure in the international exchange of biological specimens. This article uses the collection, description, and analysis of the two Australian fetuses to explore the place of material specimens in anatomical practice of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the significance of Indigenous bodies in that era’s quest for an understanding of human difference, and the postcolonial legacies of the global project of creating collections of human specimens. In doing so, we also examine the rhetorical as well as empirical roles played by material specimens in generating knowledge, building institutions, and developing and maintaining relationships in scientific communities and the relationship between a material specimen and the knowledge, images, text, and data generated from its analysis. Frederic Wood Jones was simultaneously a leading figure in the British Empire networks of comparative anatomy and somewhat isolated in his commitment to a Lamarckian worldview, which shaped his interpretation of the fetal specimens, even as he produced data from this analysis that could be used by the broader anatomical community no matter their Darwinian or Lamarckian affiliations.

2. Frederic Wood-Jones, “The External Characters of an Australian Foetus,” J. Anat. 67 (1933): 549–54, quotation on 553. The other fetus discussed in this article is described in Frederic Wood-Jones, “The External Characters of a Second Australian Foetus,” J. Anat. 72 (1938): 301–4.

3. W. H. Flower James Murie, “Account of the Dissection of a Bushwoman,” J. Anat. Physiol. 1867 (1): 189–208.

4. Emma Kowal, Joanna Radin, and Jenny Reardon, “Indigenous Body Parts, Mutating Temporalities, and the Half-Lives of Postcolonial Technoscience,” Soc. Stud. Sci. 43 (2013): 465–83.

Two Australian Fetuses 245

The image of the fetus is poignant, and far more evocative than the subsequent textual descriptions and data that follow, however we have chosen not to reproduce it here. This decision may initially appear at odds with the focus of this volume on the importance of representation and aesthetics in the practice of anatomical science. Yet it is in keeping with our desire to question the intellectual and ethical distinctions between material specimens and the knowledge generated from them (and in line with current Australian museological protocols around the representation and display of Indigenous human remains).5 Indeed it is precisely the implications that flow from the identification of the fetuses as specimens rather than human remains or relics that underpin our analysis. Our examination of the fate of the fetuses as specimens is informed by the growing literature around object biographies, and their close examination of the multiple, and often changing, meanings acquired by specimens and artifacts in scientific and museum collections.6 However, while recent “biographies” emphasize the anthropomorphism of animal specimens being ascribed with new identities and meanings, our attention is more focused on the stripping of individual identity involved in the creation of human specimens, a process that not only requires intellectual and physical work, but also privileges the scientific meanings subsequently produced by such specimens in their new roles, whether as the origins of new data, currency in networks of exchange, or the basis for authoritative analysis. Lack of documentary evidence means that this article cannot hope to fill in all the gaps in the story of the fetuses, whether the context of their original acquisition and removal from the control of their fami-lies or communities before their transformation into specimens or their final fate.7 Instead we aim to set out the uses to which the fetuses were put in different physical and intellectual spaces as specimens, whether as the subjects of analysis in academic journals, objects of value in networks of material and intellectual exchange, or additions to the large museum

5. Museums Australia, “Continuous Cultures, Ongoing Responsibilities: Principles and Guidelines for Australian Museums Working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Heritage” (2005), http://www.museumsaustralia.org.au/userfiles/file/Policies/ccor_final_feb_05.pdf (accessed March 18, 2015).

6. See, for example, Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, ed., The Afterlives of Animals: A Museum Menagerie (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011); Lorraine Daston, ed., Biogra-phies of Scientific Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

7. While both specimens were described as being held at the University of Melbourne’s Department of Anatomy, neither can now be located there, nor can these particular speci-mens be found among records of University of Melbourne collections handed back to Indigenous control in the 1990s and early 2000s. Ross Jones, personal communication, September 5, 2012.


collections on which comparative anatomy and anthropology relied, and finally the challenges posed to these identities by the calls for repatriation of remains by source communities.

The Fetuses in Intellectual Context

Frederic Wood Jones’s career illustrates the highly mobile and networked nature that could be considered typical of the anatomical profession in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly within the British Empire. It also demonstrates the porous barriers between academic disciplines and practices. Wood Jones’s career was global, with strong links to international institutions; his interests were for him part of a systematic exploration of human difference and seamlessly incorporated work that would now be considered anthropological and archaeological rather than strictly anatomical or medical.8

Having graduated with a medical degree from the London Hospital in 1904, Wood Jones traveled to Singapore and the Cocos Keeling Islands, where he developed an interest in ecology, writing on coral reef forma-tions.9 He then spent 1907 and 1908 taking part in the Archaeological Survey of Nubia, a project that arguably established paleopathology as a discipline, before returning in 1909 to England, where he held a num-ber of academic appointments. Wood Jones subsequently held positions in anatomy in Australia between 1919 and 1937.10 Throughout this time in Australia he was involved in large-scale collecting through fieldwork and expeditions, including the creation of a wildlife reserve designed to provide an “ark” for Australian fauna threatened by European patterns of land use, and as a commercial venture producing scientific specimens.11 In addition to his sojourn in Australia, Wood Jones held academic chairs in Hawaii (physical anthropology) and Manchester (anatomy) and finally at the Royal College of Surgeons in London (comparative anatomy), where

8. For Wood Jones’s global reach, see Ross L. Jones, “Macaws, Elephants and Mahouts: Frederic Wood Jones, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Human Biology Project,” Austral. Hist. Stud. 2013 (44): 189–205. On the evolving relationship between anthropology and the natural sciences, see Frances Larson, “Anthropology as Comparative Anatomy? Reflecting on the Study of Material Culture during the Late 1800s and the Late 1900s,” J. Material Cult. 12 (2007): 89–112.

9. Wood Jones’s work on coral atolls demonstrated that Darwin had been incorrect in some of his conclusions about their formation and informed his later Lamarckism. See Ross L. Jones, Humanity’s Mirror: 150 years of Anatomy in Melbourne (Melbourne: Haddington Press, 2007), 136–37.

10. Ibid., 79–102.11. Kangaroo Island Courier, October 9, 1926, 3.


he was responsible for the reconstruction of the Hunterian collection after its partial destruction, and evacuation, during the Second World War.12

With Arthur Keith (1866–1955) and Grafton Elliot Smith (1871–1937), Wood Jones was one of a small group of medically trained anatomists who dominated early twentieth-century physical anthropology and anatomy in Britain and the British Empire (Commonwealth). All three were biologi-cal polymaths, with interests in the evolution of humanity, race, social (as well as physical) anthropology, human history, and psychology. All were engaged in the major controversies that arose out of their diverse interests, perhaps most famously the Piltdown Man hoax.13 As a comparative anato-mist, Wood Jones became fascinated by Australia’s distinctive fauna and with its Indigenous people. During his close to two decades in Australia, he became a major public intellectual and influential popular writer and commentator. He also became a confirmed anti-Darwinian, a position based in part on his antipathy to social Darwinism, which he linked to the outrages of World War I, and on his encounters in the field, particularly within the Australian landscape.14 While Wood Jones was unusual in 1920s and 1930s in the strength of his commitment to a Lamarckian vision of evolution (with the exception of a few field naturalists), he operated well within the mainstream anatomical and anthropological communities.15

As will become evident, Wood Jones was a scientist at once dedicated to a vision of human diversity that emphasized difference rather than inferiority and committed to the acquisition and exchange of biologi-cal specimens. His commitment to the tenets of contemporary scientific practice meant that his knowledge and respect for Indigenous Australian culture did not, to his mind, preclude the need to collect and export their remains, despite such acts desecrating the fundamental precepts upon which they lived their lives and buried their family and tribal members. Hence, even as he produced popular texts arguing that Aboriginal Austra-lians were not racially inferior but perfectly physiologically and culturally

12. Wood Jones was in the Rockefeller chair of physical anthropology at the University of Hawaii, 1927–28, chair of anatomy at Manchester University from 1938, and the William Collins chair of comparative anatomy at the College of Surgeons, England, from 1945 until his retirement in 1951, after which he was honorary curator until his death in 1954.

13. For some of their activities, see Ross L. Jones and Warwick Anderson, “Wandering Anatomists and Itinerant Anthropologists: The Antipodean Sciences of Race in Britain between the Wars,” Brit. J. Hist. Sci. 48 (2015): 1–16.

14. Frederic Wood Jones, Habit and Heritage (London: Kegan Paul, 1943), 14.15. For Wood Jones’s meeting with the American Lamarckian field naturalist Henry

Crampton (snail specialist and inspiration for Steven Jay Gould), see Ross L. Jones, “Macaws, Elephants and Mahouts” (n. 8), 201. On the decline of Lamarckism, see Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 264–68.


adapted to their environment, Wood Jones was collecting Aboriginal skulls and bodies, many of which he sent to Arthur Keith at the Royal College of Surgeons, London.16 This intellectual commitment to the importance of collecting and preserving specimens remained strong throughout his career; for him the key was that such specimens be understood and interpreted in the context of a larger holistic system that included study in the field of living people and animals and the global exchange of information and specimens, a position that, like his Lamarckism, was in large part generated by his changing understanding of biological differ-ence developed through fieldwork and collecting. Wood Jones’s political and social advocacy, which might retrospectively be seen as discordant with his collecting and scientific activities, makes his description of the fetuses particularly inviting for analysis, as his own intellectual commit-ments shaped his reading of them in ways that highlight the intellectual mobility of specimens, and the data produced from them, and the tight bonds of the international scientific anatomical community that, as we shall see, placed the free flow of specimens and information above intel-lectual and political beliefs.

In the Field

Fieldwork in diverse landscapes shaped Wood Jones’s work in a number of specific ways, profoundly molding his intellectual world view and giving him access to specimens and data that were invaluable currency in global scientific networks. Like many scientists of the period, Wood Jones used photography, field notes, diagrams, and specimens in his work. He was particularly explicit about the role of such devices in creating “maps” of individual ecologies and recorded abundant evidence about his (nonhu-man) collecting practices. Believing that anatomy was inseparable from function, he insisted on the importance of direct observation in the field and the study of organisms in life as well as in death, and as such found the study of preserved specimens in isolation inherently problematic.17

The importance of place, locale, and context in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientific work has become an issue of sustained intellec-tual interest. The distinctive nature of science in the field has many dimen-sions, from the porous boundaries between amateurs and professionals

16. Ross L. Jones and Warwick Anderson, “Wandering Anatomists and Itinerant Anthro-pologists” (n. 13).

17. Frederic Wood Jones, “Anatomy and a Life Principle” (commemoration address, Adelaide University, 1923), in Life and Living (London: Kegan Paul, 1939), 120; Wood Jones, Habit and Heritage (n. 14).


on the one hand, to tensions between artifacts as commercial commodi-ties or objects of scientific inquiry on the other.18 Over the course of the long nineteenth century, the relationship among the field, the laboratory, and the museum as sites of science changed profoundly; as Robert Kohler has noted, “the lab-field border in biology is of recent origin, probably no older then the mid-nineteenth century, when laboratories outgrew museums and herbaria as the premier places of modern science.”19 At the same time natural history in the field, with its emphasis on compari-son, declined in the face of experimentation, relying on model organ-isms in the laboratory. Bruno Strasser summarizes this historiographical approach in order to demonstrate the need to complicate this account, and to explore how the “natural history way of knowing,” relying on col-lection, description, comparison, and computation, retained its currency with laboratory-based biological sciences.20 Unquestionably, the synthetic projects of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century science relied on amassing vast amounts of material and data. Yet, the accumulation of data was not merely, as Strasser argues, an end in itself. Rather it was part of an attempt to “bring order to the bewildering diversity of natural forms by examining large amounts of collected ‘data.’”21 The collection and trade in anatomical specimens were central to the project of Keith, Wood Jones, and Elliot Smith, as a route to new understandings of the evolution of mammals. Strasser’s work emphasizes that their project should be read as part of an ongoing continuum, not the dead end of an earlier tradition.

Wood Jones operated in multiple national and environmental “fields” across the British Empire. The origins of contemporary scientific prac-tice cannot be disentangled from those of European imperialism and colonialism.22 Colonial collectors were frequently subservient players in global networks of exchange, but such relationships were subject to

18. Henrika Kuklick and Robert E. Kohler, “Introduction: Science in the Field,” Osiris 11 (1996): 1–14, esp. 4–5.

19. Robert E. Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 3.

20. Bruno J. Strasser, “Laboratories, Museums, and the Comparative Perspective: Alan A. Boyden’s Quest for Objectivity in Serological Taxonomy, 1924–1962,” Hist. Stud. Natural Sci. 40 (2010): 149–82; Bruno J. Strasser, “Data-Driven Sciences: From Wonder Cabinets to Electronic Databases,” Stud. Hist.& Phil. Sci. C Stud. Hist. & Phil. Biol. & Biomedical Sci. 43 (2012): 85–87.

21. Strasser, “Data-Driven Sciences” (n. 20), 85.22. Suman Seth, “Putting Knowledge in Its Place: Science, Colonialism, and the Post-

colonial,” Postcolonial Stud. 12 (2009): 373–88, esp. 374–75; Kuklick and Kohler, “Introduc-tion” (n. 18), 7.


change and negotiation.23 In recent scholarship, the depiction of imperial scientific practice as one in which material flowed to the “center,” where new knowledge was generated and disseminated to the “periphery,” has been complicated. The relationships between the questions being asked and the knowledge produced in locations beyond the metropole, and indeed beyond the field or laboratory, are anything but straightforward.24

Wood Jones was deeply embedded in the global networks of material and intellectual exchange and communication and competition on which comparative anatomy relied. The network involved in the exchange of intellectual capital between anatomists encompassed many and was spread far and wide, with individual, institutional, and national interests, agendas, and prestige in play. Australian biological material, both human and non-human, was in high demand across this anatomical world. Wood Jones, due to his physical presence in Australia, with its proximity to Asia and the Pacific, was a regular and prolific source of material to many institutions and individuals, and able to leverage his proximity to coveted biological material into relationships, influence, and intellectual authority.

Recent scholarship, including that of Cressida Fforde, Ross Jones, Helen MacDonald, and Paul Turnbull has begun to uncover the processes by which human remains were collected and incorporated into collec-tions in the Australian context.25 In the case of human remains, many “sites” constituted the “field” for the collectors—from hospital mortuar-ies to graveyards, prisons, asylums, massacre sites, and Indigenous burial grounds. The collection of Indigenous Australian artifacts and remains was an extremely popular pursuit of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that crossed the boundaries of ethnographic, scientific, and commercial concerns. Aboriginal remains were collected for variety of

23. R. W. Home and Sally Kohlstedt, “Introduction” and Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, “Inter-national Exchange in the Natural History Enterprise: Museums in Australia and the United States,” both in “International Science and National Scientific Identity, Australia between Britain and America,” ed. R. W. Home and S. G. Kohlstedt, Austr. Stud. Hist. & Phil. Sci. 9 (1991): 1–17, 121–49.

24. Warwick Anderson and Vincanne Adams, “Pramoedya’s Chickens: Postcolonial Stud-ies of Technoscience,” in The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 3rd ed., ed. Edward J. Hackett et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 181–204, 184–85.

25. See Cressida Fforde, “Collecting the Dead,” in Collecting the Dead: Archaeology and the Reburial Issue (London: Duckworth, 2004), 43–59; Ross L. Jones, Humanity’s Mirror (n. 9), 43–60; Helen MacDonald, “The Bone Collectors,” in Human Remains: Dissection and Its Histories (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 96–135; Paul Turnbull, “Scien-tific Theft of Remains in Colonial Australia,” Austral. Indigenous Law Rev. 11, no. 1 (2007): 92–104. The main focus of these works has been on skeletal remains. While the processes of acquiring tissue samples and wet specimens were concurrent, there is as yet much less documentation of the scope of such collecting in Australia.


reasons, most commonly for donation, sale, or exchange within the broader scientific community, whether to dealers, museums, or col-leagues; but also at times without with any explicit intellectual program in mind, through a desire for curios, for remuneration, or as an antiquarian hobby.26 While skeletal Indigenous Australian remains were voraciously collected, many activities and encounters were referred to obliquely, discussed in coded language, or not recorded at all in the published literature, a reflection of varying local laws governing access to remains and the techniques employed by collectors to evade restrictions.27 Scien-tific collectors in Australia were equally aware that their collecting and exchanging habits were transgressive—in fact often illegal—and that their positions would allow them to bypass such restrictions.28 As Wood Jones told Arthur Keith about his collection in private correspondence, “there is a law against the export of these things, but I could easily get a permit to send or take them out of the country.”29

Returning to the fetuses as a case in point, their description by Wood Jones in the Journal of Anatomy reveals a tension between the need to assert pedigree and provenance in order to establish the authenticity and importance of the specimens and the almost complete lack of any details about the actual circumstances of their acquisition (and creation as specimens). Curiously, while he produced detailed documentation of his animal collecting, no extant records can be identified that detail how or where Wood Jones acquired his own collection of more than fifty Australian skulls.30 With no details about their provenance beyond their collectors, Wood Jones was forced to fall back on asserting the credentials and authority of the scientists with whom the specimens were associated on their acquisition into the anatomical collections at the University of Melbourne’s School of Medicine. Hence the female fetus “was pre-

26. On the tremendous volume and mobility of specimens generated from Australia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

27. See Paul Turnbull, “‘Ramsay’s Regime’: The Australian Museum and the Procure-ment of Aboriginal Bodies, c. 1874–1900,” Aboriginal Hist. 15 (1991): 108–21, http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=038955263923927;res=IELIND (accessed March 18, 2015).

28. The (il)legality of practices at the time when remains were originally acquired con-tinues to inform debates around the repatriation of Indigenous materials. See Ross L. Jones, “Medical Schools and Aboriginal Bodies,” in Power and the Passion: Our Ancestors Return Home, ed. Shannon Faulkhead and Jim Berg (Melbourne: Koorie Heritage Trust, 2010), 50–54.

29. Letter, Wood Jones to Arthur Keith, November 9, 1936, MS0018/1/37, Wood Jones Papers, Royal College of Surgeons Archives, London (subsequently Wood Jones Papers).

30. Letter, Wood Jones to Arthur Keith, September 15, 1939, MS0018/1/37, Wood Jones Papers.


sented to the Anatomical Museum of Melbourne University by the late Sir Baldwin Spencer in 1912. By him it was obtained at Port Darwin; and if it be not now, as its original label described it—‘probably the only one in existence’—it is certainly one of no more than two or three that have ever been preserved.”31 The male fetus acquired Wood Jones describes as having had “a rather chequered career” since its procurement “many years ago by the late Mr Herbert Basedow at Alice Springs.”32 Baldwin Spencer (1860–1929) and Herbert Basedow (1881–1933) were both lead-ing figures in Australian anthropology and, like Wood Jones, developed their interest in aboriginal cultures from fieldwork and collecting expedi-tions.33 With no further information about how or where the fetuses were acquired, or the possible vagaries and consequences of the “chequered career,” Wood Jones would allow “no doubt about its authenticity.”34 The assertion of reputable and authoritative sources for their specimens was one method by which scientific collectors proclaimed the legitimacy of their practices, as opposed to that of amateurs or purely commercial col-lectors. Provenance, data, and their ability to bring new insights through comparison with other specimens already encompassed within collections all added value to new material found in the field.

Under Analysis

The female fetal specimen appearing in the 1933 Journal of Anatomy was reproduced in a photograph, and described textually with measurement

31. Wood Jones, “External Characters of an Australian Foetus” (n. 2), 549.32. Wood Jones, “External Characters of a Second Australian Foetus” (n. 2), 301.33. Baldwin Spencer originally trained as an evolutionary biologist in Britain before

being appointed to the foundation chair of biology at the University of Melbourne in 1886. He developed a strong interest in anthropology and undertook extensive fieldwork in the northern parts of Australia. Baldwin Spencer’s theories about social evolution became extremely influential; for instance, his theories were used extensively by James Frazer in his study of comparative mythology, The Golden Bough. Baldwin Spencer combined fieldwork with teaching and key administrative roles at the University of Melbourne and National Museum of Victoria. See D. J. Mulvaney and J. H. Calaby, “So Much That Is New”: Baldwin Spencer, 1860–1929, a Biography (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1985). Herbert Base-dow trained as a geologist, anthropologist, and medical doctor in Australia and Germany and was involved in the 1900s–1920s in many expeditions in the north of Australia, briefly becoming Protector of Aborigines, a position he resigned in protest over the workability of the 1911 Aborigines Act. Basedow was actively interested in Aboriginal culture and chal-lenged the treatment and negative views of Aboriginal Australians. See Heidi Zogbaum, Changing Skin Colour in Australia: Herbert Basedow and the Black Caucasian (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010).

34. Wood Jones, “External Characters of a Second Australian Foetus” (n. 2), 301.


data and diagrams. The male fetus was described more briefly in 1938, lacking a photograph but including diagrams and tables recording gen-eral characteristics and measurements. These fetal specimens “worked” for Wood Jones on a number of intellectual levels. His presentation was consistent with the established norms of international anatomy in the 1930s, situated as part of a much larger, additive project, which relied on bringing together data gathered from a vast number of biological speci-mens on a global scale. Both were made intelligible to the larger scientific project they serve through a process of quantification that transformed material specimens into data expressed through drawing, diagrams, mea-surements, and comparison with other—similarly described—specimens. The publication of data generated through the close analysis of single specimens contributed incrementally to the creation of an overarch-ing intellectual system. At the same time, a focus on specific attributes of the fetuses gave Wood Jones the opportunity to provide evidence for his Lamarckian theories of the inheritability of acquired characteristics, a reminder of the intellectual mobility of specimens, and the ongoing importance of individual, especially rare, specimens within a scientific endeavor dedicated to the creation of norms, standards, and series.

In his 1933 description of the first specimen, the seventeen- to eighteen-week-old female fetus, Wood Jones noted that two decades of immersion in formalin (followed by spirit and glycerin) had altered its appearance, so that its coloration “differs but little from that of a formalin-preserved white foetus of a similar stage of development.”35 Having highlighted the issues at play when dealing with preserved specimens, he asserted his ability to nonetheless draw information from them based on his own background knowledge, stating that “the face of the foetus is unmistakably that of an Australian aborigine,” a reminder of the tacit knowledge needed to cor-rectly interpret natural specimens.36 Wood Jones’s analysis of both fetuses included comparative measurements and morphological features includ-ing pigmentation, relative limb length, and hair tracts, the last two features being of abiding interest to Wood Jones and of particular importance in the context of his Lamarckian understanding of biological difference.

While including a full page of diagrams detailing the first fetus’s hair tracts, Wood Jones noted only that “they are those of a typical and simple human type.”37 Yet, this was a key observation, reflecting the importance of hair tracts as an exemplar for the acquisition of inheritable characteristics,

35. Wood Jones, “External Characters of an Australian Foetus” (n. 2), 553.36. Ibid., 553. 37. Ibid.


one that he returned to on multiple occasions.38 For instance, in his 1934 examination of hair tract patterns in “the remnant of the full-blooded aborigines of Victoria,” Wood Jones observed that for twenty-three sub-jects “every individual, without exception, showed the dorsal hair directed in a cephalad direction [toward the head or anterior end of the body]. The cephalad trend was so pronounced in most cases that a photograph of the dorsal surface of the body looks exactly like the dorsal surface of a typical Mammal with the head where the tail should be.”39 In his popu-lar volume Australia’s Vanishing Race (1934), Wood Jones also noted the tendency for Aboriginal Australians to have hair patterns pointed inward and upward, while “the white man” demonstrated hair pointed inward and downward, and monkeys, apes, and all “lower animals” had hair that grew downward and outward: “Though the white man has departed from the ordinary animal condition in the direction of growth of the hair of his back, the aborigine has gone a stage further, and has entirely reversed the disposition present in all other animals.”40 While Wood Jones described this tendency as “a curious little point,”41 it clearly also suggested equal-ity, if not more, between Indigenous peoples and the white population, a current that ran through much of his work.

Wood Jones’s analysis of hair tracts, like much of his work, moved seam-lessly between human and animal examples. Embryonic marsupial hair tracts grew in different directions compared to other mammals; proof for Wood Jones argued that their grooming habits had changed their genetic information. Examining the relative hair tract directions in kan-garoo and koala pouch embryo specimens, he argued that the direction of hair seen in the neck and upper trunk of many animals could be linked to their habits in life, depending on the areas that could be groomed by their limbs: “Long before the little animal has any occasion to scratch itself, there is demonstrated the whole complexity of reversals, whorls,

38. Louis Bolk, “On the Hair Slope in the Frontal Region of Man,” J. Anat. 58 (1924): 206–21; Frederic Wood Jones, “On the Causation of Certain Hair Tracts,” J. Anat. 59 (1924): 72–79 and “The Hair Slope in the Frontal Region of Man,” J. Anat. 59 (1924): 80–82. Wood Jones also returned to the question of hair tracts in his Man’s Place among the Mammals (London: Edward Arnold, 1929).

39. Frederic Wood-Jones, “The Dorsal Hair Tracts of the Australian Aborigine,” J. Anat. 69 (1934): 91–92. Later work by J. H. Gray, demonstrator in anatomy at the University of Adelaide, made the claim that similar patterns could be found in over six hundred Indig-enous South Australians. See J. H. Gray, “The Hair Tracts of the Australian Aboriginal,” J. Anat. 69 (1935): 206–25.

40. Frederic Wood Jones, Australia’s Vanishing Race (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1934), 24.

41. Ibid., 24.


and partings ingrained upon the coat by no more deep-seated, life-saving or useful process than the toilet methods adopted by its ancestors. If this is not, in the old hackneyed connotation of the term, a case of acquired characters being inherited, it is difficult to conceive what circumstances could afford a satisfying demonstration of that phenomenon.”42 Making the connections between human and animals, or fetal morphology and behavioral habits in life was critical to Wood Jones’s conception of ana-tomical science. He frequently argued that had anatomists of his genera-tion paid attention to living specimens in the field—as did the anatomists of the previous century—many controversies would never have emerged. Hence, as was typical for Wood Jones, he advised readers to find evidence themselves for hair grooming behaviors through watching adult animals in their natural state, self-experimentation with hair grooming, and observ-ing Aboriginal dancers imitating kangaroos.43

The other morphological feature of most interest to Wood Jones was the relative limb lengths of both fetuses, which, like the hair tracts, he considered a demonstration of prenatal expressions of “typical” Australian characteristics (and evidence for the superior adaption of Aborigines to the Australian landscape). The first fetus was compared with Portuguese and Chinese–Hawaiian examples held at the University of Hawaii in terms of absolute measurements and indices of comparative limb length. The measurements of the second fetus were compared with those of “normal white foetus of slightly larger size.”44 In both cases, the relative length of the limbs was deemed to be already discernible, demonstrating for Wood Jones that “the great relative length of the limbs, which characterises the adult Australian aborigine, is already well established at this early stage.”45

The fetal expression of “typical racial” characteristics acted as evidence of his conviction “of the certainty of the reality of the inheritance and (even trivial) ‘acquired’ characters.”46

Developing his argument that Australian Aboriginal characteristics generally read in terms of purported inferiority could be better under-stood as adaptations to the demands of a particular environment, Wood Jones stated that when “in poor condition” the long forearms and shins of Aborigines produced “to our eyes” a “somewhat unaesthetic picture,” but “as some of them live today in the more bountiful regions of the tropical north; or as they lived in the south, before the white man had

42. Wood Jones, “On the Causation of Certain Hair Tracts” (n. 38), 79.43. Ibid., 74, 78.44. Wood Jones, “External Characters of a Second Australian Foetus” (n. 2), 301.45. Wood Jones, “External Characters of an Australian Foetus” (n. 2), 550.46. Wood Jones to Keith, August 14, 1927, MS0018/1/37, Wood Jones Papers.


usurped their hunting grounds; it is safe to say that no more beautifully balanced human figures than those of the native in the prime of his life could be found among any race.”47 According to Wood Jones, Indigenous adaptations to Australian conditions also included visual and auditory acuity superior to that of Europeans. However, he argued that European Australians reared in a similar rural or outback environment also showed evidence of improved visual and auditory skills, suggesting an environmen-tal rather than genealogical basis for the traits.48 Just as the ability of white Australian born farm boys to see farther than their European counterparts demonstrated the adaptation of the white population to their new environ-ment, the fetal specimens, with their early expression of features Wood Jones regarded as “typically” Australian, was proof of the degree to which Indigenous Australians had, over long periods, adapted to the specific environmental challenges of the landscape in which they lived, and their distinctive features had become consolidated as inherited characteristics.

In Circulation (and on the Market)

Central to the anatomical network was the production and flow of both specimens and the data they produced. Casts, photographs, field reports, and published material stood in for and situated specimens, allowing a more nuanced interpretation by the recipient. Without the evidential authority of the specimens themselves, asserting the lineage and authority of collectors and researchers allowed the data produced by specimens to be given them meaning and credibility beyond their material presence, even as the exact manner of their acquisition was frequently elided. In fact, in order to become fully active commodities in intellectual exchange networks, specimens needed to go beyond their material forms and be transformed into data, text, drawings, and, above all, measurements. While the materiality of specimens acted as the primary marker of their authenticity and reliability, in their absence, the data—and their reli-ability—became crucial. The ability to link data and object was crucial in conferring authority to conclusions drawn from specimens. In cases where details about provenance were lacking, the authority of the donor, collec-tor, or initial describer became important as proof of both authenticity and intellectual credibility and importance, hence the emphasis Wood Jones placed on the provenance of the two fetal specimens, each acquired by highly prominent figures in Australian anthropology.

47. Wood Jones, Australia’s Vanishing Race (n. 40), 20–21.48. Ibid., 27.


Sampling Wood Jones’s exchange transactions reveals the variety and reach of his interests, and his network. For example, he provided specimens, including fetal whales, to the prosector of the Zoological Society of London, Frank Beddard; provided insectivore brains for the young Wilfrid Le Gros Clark; swapped live salamanders for the hair of the Aboriginal Australians “Old Charlie, Fred, Dick and Annie Wombat” with the American eugenicist Charle H. Danforth; arranged donations of Aboriginal skulls to Elliot Smith’s old school in Cairo; and received and distributed large numbers of marsupial specimens from the Tasmanian biologist Theodore Thomson Flynn.49 These are just a small selection of the numerous recorded exchanges of specimens. Michael Oldfield Thomas, the important mammal morphologist at the Natural History Museum in London, received many specimens from Wood Jones and asked him to “get out of the habit of asking ‘do we want this, that or the other?’ but please remember we always do want them—for we have so lamentably little from Australia since Gouldian times. … So please don’t leave off sending material to the old country, and don’t help the Americans, who are already too strong for us with their great numbers and unlimited dollars—but we keep on doing our best to hold our end up.”50 While specimens in isolation could be mined for information, they

49. From C. H. Danforth, American Eugenics Society, Aug 2, 1926, MS0017/1/4/1/1-2, Wood Jones Papers: “Dear Professor Wood Jones, on my return from a short trip to the mountains I was delighted to find the specimens of hair that you so kindly sent me. Even the names are fascinating—Old Charley, … Fred, Dick and Annie Wombat!” Grafton Elliot Smith was considered the most important British anatomist of his generation, while Beddard was the prosector of the Zoological Society of London. Knighted in 1955, Wilfrid Le Gros Clark was Clark Professor of Anatomy, University of Oxford (1934–62). Charles H. Danforth was an anatomist, eugenicist, and geneticist who established the idea of equilibrium in gene pools. Theodore Thomson Flynn was a Tasmanian biologist with a career in Australia and Great Britain (and father of the swashbuckling Australian actor Errol Flynn). See Warren R. Dawson, ed., Sir Grafton Elliot Smith: A Biographical Record by His Colleagues (London: Jona-than Cape, 1938); “Obituaries Notices of Fellow Decease,” Proc. Roy. Soc. London B 99 (May 1, 1926): xxxvi–xxxvii; Lord Zuckerman, “Wilfrid Edward Le Gros Clark. 1895–1971,” Biog. Mem. Fellows Roy. Soc. 19 (1973): 216–33, esp. 226; Benjamin H. Willier, “Charles Haskell Danforth 1883–1969,” in Biographical Memoir (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1974), 44. See Wood Jones Papers, MS0017/1/1-11 F, Wood Jones General Cor-respondence A-O, from Frank Evers Beddard, October 12, 1917, MS0017/2/4/1; Black to Wood Jones, December 5, 1919; Le Gros Clark to Wood Jones, January 2, 1928; from C. H. Danforth, American Eugenics Society, August 2, 1926, MS0017/1/4/1/1-2; from Douglas G. Derry to Wood Jones, April 1, 1922, Headed: Khedivial Buildings S, Chareh Emad-el-Dine, Cairo, MS0017/1/4/3/1; from T. Thomson Flynn to Wood Jones, May 14, 1921, MS0017/1/5/6/1-3.

50. Oldfield Thomas to Wood Jones, March 13, 1925, MS0017/1/15/4/1-6, Wood Jones Papers.


became fully intelligible only in comparative analysis with broader group of specimens and within a frame of accumulated data. Note that the first Australian fetus was compared with Portuguese and Chinese–Hawaiian examples held at the University of Hawaii. As items in larger collections, specimens become intelligible on multiple levels, with their individual characteristics secondary to their role as part of a systematic exploration of the explicability of the natural world through the accumulation of material and data. Specimens not only were made meaningful in relation to each other, but also contributed to the creation and maintenance of communities, acting as commodities conferring status and value in the international networks of favor, exchange, and intellectual authority in which they were embedded (and in which they effectively embedded anyone wishing to practice comparative anatomy). Wood Jones was not alone in considering collecting in situ as best practice whenever possible, however comparative anatomy relied on the trade in specimens. Most anatomists in the British Empire attempted to travel and collect for their own research, but it was impossible to encompass the evolutionary process across all the major continents without the ability to receive specimens from others traveling in foreign parts. As Frances Larson points out in her study of the material objects of late nineteenth-century anthropology, when data collection and analysis are often taking place in geographically distant locations, material objects become particularly valued as tangible points of connection.51

Collecting was a complex activity and the need for a specimen, or the data it generated, could also act as an intellectual bottle neck. For instance, in 1921, Grafton Elliot Smith, then professor of anatomy at University College London, wrote to Wood Jones in Adelaide, “I wonder if you would collect some evidence for Eugene Dubois [discoverer of Java man], who as you know is Prof. of Geology at Amsterdam. Lately some of us here have been worrying him to get his stuff published and he tells me that he cannot publish the full paper until he gets the body weights (and if possible brain weights also) of Australian aboriginals! I wonder if you would help him: he will be immensely grateful to you if you would: he is so obsessed with the importance of body weights that he won’t stir without them.”52 Scientific collectors were acutely aware that they were bound together by the ties of their profession and its requirements for cooperation, including the exchange of prized intellectual anatomical currency. It was hence of the greatest importance for the discipline that

51. Larson, “Anthropology as Comparative Anatomy?” (n. 8), 260.52. Elliot Smith to Wood Jones, March 2, 1921, MS0017/1/14/4/1-16, Wood Jones

Papers.


the infrastructure of collecting—the open routes for trade and the grasp-ing of every opportunity for collecting—was adequately maintained. In 1924 Elliot Smith advised Wood Jones to leave Adelaide and apply for the chair of anatomy at Liverpool University in part because “its trade with West Africa offers unique facilities for getting interesting zoological material.”53 On the other hand, the Cambridge anthropologist Arthur Haddon, who, arguably, had instigated modern anthropology as a result of his role in the Torres Straight expedition (1898), urged Wood Jones (who had sent him some Aboriginal material) to stay put in the Antipodes as he believed that there was “so much more to be done and there are so few local workers. I eagerly await your investigations on the Australian skull and stone implements.”54

Although specimens were the most highly valued currency of this com-merce, information exchange relating to specimen collecting was also very important, especially when it complemented specimens. Data, whether relating to provenance or generated from a specimen, added a level of authority to the specimen, its collector, and the conclusions that could be drawn from its analysis. In 1939, for instance, Wood Jones (back in England), preparing to move house and unable to fit his collections into his new home, asked friend and mentor Sir Arthur Keith for help in find-ing a buyer for his personal collection of marsupial and aboriginal skulls, stating that “you know better than anyone else what sort of market value the human skulls have. … Tell me roughly what you think I should ask.”55

Of course, such specimens had a market value, but Wood Jones stressed that the skulls had both data and mandibles attached, emphasizing their physical and intellectual integrity, and perhaps also his own professional position. Documentation and data attached to collections at once legiti-mated their scientific nature, part of the process by which human remains were intellectually transformed into specimens, and distinguished them from the amateur and private collectors on whom scientists often relied for material. For instance, in order to create that comparative descrip-tion of ninety-one Tasmanian skulls for a 1933 article for the Journal of Anatomy, Wood Jones and a colleague needed to source examples from different collections, both public and private, some containing only one or two skulls.56 Indeed, the authors noted that some of the skulls discussed

53. Elliot Smith to Wood Jones, March 19, 1924, MS0017/1/1-11 F; from Elliot Smith, MS0017/1/14/4/1-16, Wood Jones Papers.

54. A. C. Haddon to Wood Jones, n.d., MS0017/1/7/1/1, Wood Jones Papers.55. Wood Jones to Arthur Keith, September 15, 1939, MS0018/1/37, Wood Jones Papers.56. James Wunderly and Frederic Wood-Jones, “The Non-metrical Morphological Charac-

ters of the Tasmanian Skull,” J. Anat. 67 (1933): 583–95. Based at the National Museum, Mel-bourne, James Wunderly was a craniologist who published extensively on Tasmanian skulls.


in the paper were recorded as having been lost, in which case drawings and measurements made by previous researchers were used to stand in for the skulls themselves.57

The exchange of specimens was like a highly choreographed dance in which specimens were offered, favors asked, and exchanges made while attempting to avoid offense. Concurrently, academic competition cre-ated antagonisms as well as winners and losers. Establishment of one’s academic superiority involved requesting significant favors from others. Also, it was sometimes necessary for favors to be asked of antagonists, for it was an unspoken agreement that, without a degree of entente, the whole program of understanding the evolutionary history of man would come unstuck. Thus, despite his antagonism toward William K. Gregory, a staunch Darwinist, who rejected both Wood Jones’s arboreal theory of human origins and his Lamarckism, Wood Jones continued to supply specimens to him at American Natural History Museum where (over the course of a long career within the institution) Gregory worked as cura-tor of vertebrate paleontology, comparative anatomy, and ichthyology.58

While providing evidence for his specific arguments, the description of the two fetuses also located Wood Jones’s pursuits within a tradition of knowledge accumulated through cumulative inquiry and documentation over generations. For instance, he noted patches of deep pigmentation present on the back of the first fetus known as the “Mongolian mark.” Wood Jones clarified that this “mark” was first observed in babies of the “primordial tribes of North Celebes” by a doctor Redial of Batavia, who communicated its discovery to Charles Darwin in a letter written June 30, 1875. While stating that this was the first Australian example, Wood Jones then listed more than thirty other groups in which the “mark” has been found, as documented by twenty anatomists.59 Such lists of peoples, places, authorities, and authors, almost relentless in their level of detail, allowed Wood Jones to locate this specimen—and its description—in a global network of inquiry resting on a lineage of evolutionary thinking stretching back to Darwin’s extensive networks of communication and dissemination. Such background information not only emphasized the

57. Ibid., 583. 58. Wood Jones Papers: from William K. Gregory, American Museum of Natural History,

August 19, 1917, MSS0017/1/6/3/2-3; from Henry Fairfield Osborn, president, American Museum of Natural History, May 4, 1923, MS0017/1/11/1/1. On Gregory’s long career at the museum, see Edwin H. Colbert, William King Gregory: 1876–1970, a Biographical Memoir (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1975). For the exchanges between Greg-ory and Wood Jones, see Ross L. Jones, “Macaws, Elephants and Mahouts” (n. 8), 195–97.

59. Wood Jones, “External Characters of an Australian Foetus” (n. 2), 553.


collaborative and cumulative nature of the inquiry into human difference, but also located Wood Jones and his project in a temporal as well as geo-graphic network, and made the fetal specimens, for all their singularity, comprehensible in a larger system of knowledge.

Into the Museum and Out of View

Networks of intellectual exchange and networks of material exchange were (and are) inextricably intertwined. Yet, once incorporated into collections, specimens often became static, appearing to be, or actually, forgotten, even as the data they generated often remained in intellectual circulation. One of the (many) outcomes of calls for repatriation for materials held in medical collections has been the realization of just how many specimens were collected and stored without any evidence of sub-sequent use being made of them.60 The apparent neglect of collections is a common complaint today, as it was when Wood Jones was active in the field. His own ambivalence about specimens notwithstanding, Wood Jones clearly had a commitment to the value of creating and preserving specimen collections as an integral part of the scientific endeavor, as demonstrated by his position at the Hunterian Museum in London. He made a point of visiting specimen collections whenever he could, and on a 1926 Rockefeller Foundation–funded trip to the United States was almost universally unimpressed with the state, and status, of collections in American medical and anthropological institutions.61 Among Wood Jones’s concerns were the neglect of collections as tools for teaching, lack of management and physical care of collections, poor storage conditions, and inadequate or inaccurate labeling.

60. As historian John Mulvaney wrote about the Murray Black collection of Aboriginal remains at the University of Melbourne, “For decades the remains were virtually unstudied. Partly due to my prompting, a summary of ‘knowledge’ was published in the 1959 Proceed-ings of the Royal Society of Victoria. Even with illustrations, a mere four pages sufficed!” John Mulvaney, “Reflections on the Murray Black Collection,” Aust. Nat. Hist. 23 (1989): 66–73, esp. 68. The article to which he refers is S. Sunderland and L. J. Ray, “A Note on the Murray Black Collection of Australian Aboriginal Skeletons,” Proc. Roy. Soc. Victoria 71 (1959): 45–52. There was one other, L. J. Ray, “Bilateral Coraco-clavicular Articulations in the Australian Aboriginal,” J. Bone Joint Surg. 41B, no. 1 (1959): 180–84.

61. Among the institutions Wood Jones visited and commented on were the National Museum in Washington, the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, the Wistar Institute, the Warren Museum at Harvard, the Anthropological Museum at the University of Califor-nia, San Francisco, the Peabody Museum at Yale, and the American Museum of Natural History. For details of the Wood Jones’s visits and impressions, see Ross L. Jones, “Macaws, Elephants and Mahouts” (n. 8).


These were not unusual reactions to the state of medical specimen collection, and were observations that could equally have been made about many scientific collections. Over the course of the early twentieth century, museums, and their sustaining conviction that material objects were a source of knowledge and meaning, gave way to laboratories and universities as the primary locations of science.62 As Erin McLeary has explored, the 1920s was a pivotal moment for the identity of medical museums.63 The decade saw increased professional consolidation and connection among museum workers and expanding collecting activities. At the same time, students and researchers were increasingly failing to utilize these same collections as tools for learning. McLeary documents a shift in which the ability of specimens to both embody and transmit knowledge was questioned and increasingly discounted. Medical museums began to be seen, as she puts it, as places that “represented stasis rather than progress,” offering taxonomic description without the possibility of generating new knowledge.64 Museum professionals were left asserting the central importance of their practices to medical education and research, while simultaneously bemoaning the lack of use, and recognition, they, and their collections, encountered.65 In more recent decades, changing research practices and cultural expectations about the care of the dead and the retention and display of human remains have also led to changes in the management, and in some cases the dismantling, of collections.66

62. Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 15–18.

63. Erin McLeary, “Classroom or Cabinet? The IAMM and the Museum, 1907–1940,” in “Science in a Bottle: The Medical Museum in North America, 1860–1940” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2001), 156–212, http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3031694.

64. Ibid., 209.65. Beyond the specific case study of medical museums, the 1920s were a key period

when museums, whether of natural history or anthropology, gave way to universities as the primary sites for production of new knowledge. See Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life (n. 62), 72; George W. Stocking, “Philanthropoids and Vanishing Cultures: Rockefeller Funding and the End of the Museum Era in Anglo-American Anthropology,” in Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, ed. George W. Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 112–45.

66. This shift has been influenced by a number of factors including scandals around the use and retention of biological material in hospital settings as well as activism from source communities. See Lisa O’Sullivan, “Material Legacies: Indigenous Remains and Contested Values in UK Museum Collections,” in Biomapping Indigenous Peoples: Towards an Understand-ing of the Issues, ed. Susanne Berthier-Foglar, Sheila Collingwood-Whittick, and Sandrine Tolazzi (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 391–414; D. Gareth Jones and Maja I. Whitaker, “The Contested Realm of Displaying Dead Bodies,” J. Med Ethics 39 (2013): 652–53.


It is the common fate of the anatomical specimen to become physi-cally immobile, even neglected, once incorporated into a collection. This could lead to the suggestion that specimens in their materiality act as a kind of bottleneck; after scientists have extracted the intangible data they want, the specimens become curiosities. Yet, the continued retention of specimens, unlike much biological material that is destroyed after analy-sis, relates to the rhetorical role not only of individual specimens, but of collections as entities. At least some of the resonance of these specimens is centered around the charismatic authority of the original scientist with whom they become associated, as proof of both authenticity and intel-lectual credibility and importance. As tangible remnants of past scientists and past scientific practices, they take on a rhetorical role apart from their specific possibilities for knowledge production and become instead evidence of the importance of scientific endeavor, and material homage to the work of individual scientists. In this reading, specimens are largely performative, acting as illustrative examples of theoretical claims widely made elsewhere.

In her analysis of the importance of skull collections to nineteenth century French anthropology, Nélia Dias has remarked that “anthropo-logical collections cannot be analyzed without constant referral back and forth between the visual and the textual, which signifies that the practices of collecting, describing, naming, comparing and displaying need to be viewed as closely interdependent.”67 This argument is equally applicable to the closely related discipline of anatomy and its practices. The fetal specimens analyzed here joined a cornucopia of other material, from specimens to casts, images, diagrams, and texts, locating the practice of comparative anatomy in all of its competing contemporary theoretical frames within an intellectual lineage and a complex chain of collecting and information exchange. The specimens performed multiple roles for Wood Jones; they were primary evidence for his evolutionary ideas, a guarantee of an authentic reality underlying his Lamarckian arguments; they also placed his project within a lineage and a comparative network; and, in comparison with other specimens, they acted as a reminder of an understanding of scientific practice as seamlessly connected between human and animal life, fieldwork, collecting and creating networks.

Wood Jones appears to have been correct in his belief about the rarity of the specimens.68 Certainly, other examples may exist or have existed

67. Nélia Dias, “Nineteenth-Century French Collections of Skulls and the Cult of Bones,” Nuncius 27 (2012): 330–47, quotation on 344.

68. It is their Indigenous origin that makes these examples unusual. Fetal specimens were collected in large numbers in the first half of the twentieth century, with such collection


in museum collections, but these are the only published descriptions the authors have encountered. Despite his gesture toward the original acquir-ers (and perhaps creators) of these specimens, their later lack of detailed history and eventual disappearance from view are eloquent both of the frequent historic silences around the acquisition of human remains and the subsequent, and still contested, attempts to redefine the hierarchies of knowledge and control relating to specimens of human origin. The display of human remains to public audiences and the use of remains in research have been increasingly contested over the past few decades in many national contexts. Scandals and new sensitivities have led to new museum practices, and in some cases new legislation, relating to the treat-ment of human remains in numerous countries, particularly former impe-rial centers and their previous colonies.69 Debates around these changed practices have frequently been framed in terms of Enlightenment values, universalism, and science, against localism, spirituality, and postcolonial politics. This is particularly the case when they become connected (as they often do) with demands for the physical repatriation of remains to their countries or Indigenous communities of origin (also known as source communities). In Australia, this debate is largely one of the past. Since 1993, Australian institutions have recognized the intellectual and physical control of Indigenous communities over their cultural property, including human remains. Requests for repatriation of Australian remains in international collections are coordinated by the federal government.70

(All Australian human remains incorporated into the Royal College of Surgeons Hunterian Museum have now been returned.)71 Remains are

becoming a standard part of their practice for many gynecologists, pathologists, surgeons, and practitioners. See Lynn M. Morgan, Icons of Life: A Cultural History of Human Embryos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 3–9. On the rise of human embryology as a discipline, which provided the intellectual framework for such collecting, see Nick Hopwood, “Producing Development: The Anatomy of Human Embryos and the Norms of Wilhelm His,” Bull. Hist. Med. 74 (2000): 29–79.

69. For different expressions of recent contention over the status and identity of biologi-cal material from Indigenous communities, see Berthier-Foglar, Collingwood-Whittick, and Tolazzi, Biomapping Indigenous Peoples (n. 66).

70. The Australian Indigenous Repatriation program is situated in the attorney-gener-al’s department and facilitates requests from communities for the return of remains from international institutions. See http://arts.gov.au/indigenous/repatriation (accessed March 18, 2015).

71. The Royal College of Surgeons of England, “Repatriation of All Australian Aboriginal Human Remains” (press release, April 2003), http://www.rcseng.ac.uk/media/news/the-royal-college-of-surgeons-of-england-repatriation-of-all-australian-aboriginal-human-remains (accessed March 18, 2015).


normally either repatriated for culturally appropriate reburial or—par-ticularly in the case of remains without sufficient provenance information attached—held in designated “Keeping Places” in museums. Within the secular confines of museum stores, access to Keeping Places is restricted to designated individuals including those from local Indigenous commu-nities with a connection to the remains.72 Scientific and anthropological research using such remains is conducted with community consultation and involvement.

The two Australian fetal specimens carry a heavy burden of potential identities. Emerging from the historical analysis of the collection of Indig-enous Australian material is a desire to reinstate a sense of the potential or previous subjectivity of these scientific “objects,” particularly explicit in MacDonald’s restoration of “personhood” to subjects of dissection, and an engagement with the social, political, and racial contexts shaping the possibilities and limitations of anatomical practice in a specific colonial context.73 However, this is far more than an Australian story. The fetuses take their place in broader debates about the use of dead body parts, particularly organs in medical practice; an understanding of postcolo-nial legacies of collections of Indigenous biological material; displays of human bodies and body parts in public contexts; and ownership of biological materials. The plasticity of their identities, from potentially lived identity to scientific specimen, is embedded in a web of potentially violent colonial encounters, complex processes of exchange and creation of meaning, and contemporary negotiations around the reassertion of the status of medical specimens as human remains. The photograph of the first fetus is on some levels the most evocative reminder of the human-ness of the specimen. Yet, its inclusion raises questions about the ethics of displaying an image of a human specimen, whose display would be con-sidered inappropriate in its country of origin, hence its nonappearance here.74 The process by which these fetuses became “scientific” artifacts,

72. Keeping Places may also act as repositories for other Indigenous material culture. For guidelines on the current treatment of Australian Indigenous remains, see Museums Australia, “Continuous Cultures, Ongoing Responsibilities” (n. 5).

73. Helen MacDonald, “Dissecting Mary McLauchlan,” in Human Remains (n. 25), 42–85.74. The British legislation relating to the retention and display of human remains (the

Human Tissue Act of 2004) specifically excludes images from regulation. However, in Aus-tralia, the display of images of remains is considered equally inappropriate as the display of remains themselves. The issue of including representations of sensitive material in critiques of racial science is raised by Michael Pickering in his review of Ricardo Roque, “Headhunt-ing and Colonialism: Anthropology and the Circulation of Human Skulls in the Portuguese Empire, 1870–1930,” J. Pacific Hist. 46, no. 3 (2011): 411–12, quotation on 412.


incorporated into the comparative framework of contemporary scientific analysis through collection, preparation, and dissemination, has increas-ingly been contested by source communities and other groups. Among the many interpretative resistances and forms of intellectual mobility specimens retain may be included the process of “unmaking” their very identity as scientific specimens rather than as human remains.

Lisa O’Sullivan is director of the Library and Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health at The New York Academy of Medicine. She was previously senior curator of medicine at the Science Museum, London.

Ross L. Jones is an associate in the History Department, University of Sydney, and a Senior Fellow, Department of Anatomy and Neuroscience, University of Melbourne.

Documents

Two Australian Fetuses: Frederic Wood Jones and the work of an anatomical specimen.pdf