Don't Display Human Remains in Museums Without Consent

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hi. I'm Art Caplan. I'm at the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine.

Have you ever been to a museum where there are medical exhibits, bodies, anatomical exhibits, different forms of genetic anomalies, or even freakish examples of human anatomy on display? I have, both in the United States, in places like Philadelphia, and overseas, in places like England.

There are many medical museums out there. Many of them have collections, including skulls, skeletons, medical oddities, conjoined twins, and anomalous fetuses with strange and terrible genetic defects. Very few of the museums have permission or consent for any of these materials. There are many museums that display things like skeletons from 19th-century criminals who were executed. None of those people gave consent to be on display.

Let me tell you a story about the Hunterian Museum in England. Recently, the Royal College of Surgeons announced that it was going to take out of a display case the so-called Irish giant: a man who was 7 ft 7 in tall, who had died in 1783, I believe it was. During his life, he had been something of a celebrity, with many doctors and scientists coming to examine him.

He realized that he was something of a medical — to use the term — freak. He was valuable, as people tried to understand why he was so big and how his physiology worked. He said, before he died, "I want nothing to do with a medical museum. I don't want to be on display. I want to be buried at sea."

Well, a famous doctor, Dr Hunter, actually got his body somehow — I'm not sure exactly how — and after dissecting him, got the skeleton, cleaned it, and put it on display in his private museum. The Irish giant, Charles Byrne, did not get his wish fulfilled, and indeed, he's been in there for a very long time without his consent.

Protests have been mounted over the years about the display of someone for whom there is a record of saying, I don't want to be put on display in a museum. Finally, although they're not going to take him out of the museum, they're at least going to take him off display and put him in a storage room. I think they should be taking him straight to the ocean and giving him the burial that he had asked for with his remains.

Be that as it may, the issue of medical museums and the displays and materials they have is coming at a time when many museums are struggling with the question of what to do with art objects, architecture, different types of statues and so on that were obtained through war, theft, and purchase that are on display in countries that are not the place of their origin. Many of those countries, such as Greece, Egypt, and Benin in Africa, are asking for the return of these art objects.

It's not clear what policy we have in place to say if you have something without permission, something that you stole, or something that you purchased but it was against the will of the person whose body is being displayed, or against the will of some artist who made the object, what we should do. I think this is an emerging problem that we're finally starting to address in our medical museums.

The next time you visit one or attend a reception, party, or a field trip with a group of friends, think about what permission we have for these exhibits. Who gave the permission? Is it adequate? Are we exploiting people because of their unusual anatomy or appearance?

What sort of rules do we need to put in place to make sure that we don't repeat the errors of the past and that we do honor our own values about consent and permission? You don't want museums full of materials that are basically displays that are inconsistent with current values.

I'm Art Caplan, at the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Thank you for watching.

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