Body, Gender & Health #4

Anatomy Museum Report

Kartikeya Jain

INTRODUCTION
The Museum of Anatomy & Pathology (MAP) in Manipal houses an
extensive collection of biological, i.e. human and animal specimens for
display in a sprawling, swanky space. It seems to be a proud exhibition of
the excellence in the medical sciences pursued at the Kasturba Medical
College of Manipal University. This is apparent in the language of its
description on the university website [] the museum boasts of over
3,000 specimens and samples of things anatomical, including the skulls of
an elephant and a whale, and the long skeleton of a King Cobra
(Anatomy Museum Overview n.d.).
The larger idea behind the project is seemingly, to make accessible the
vast bodies of knowledge related to anatomy, biology and pathology to
the general public, outside of these highly specialized disciplines.
There are two broad aspects that have come to light with my visit to this
museum that I would like to talk about in this piece. First, is the aspect of
display or representation itself of the various bodies (and body parts) in a
museum setup, and the gamut of questions that raises regarding
knowledge, and underlying narratives that come through within that
space. Second, is that of the affective or aesthetic spirit that creeps into
ones experience of, what is on the surface, supposed to be a sterile
educational experience for the visitor that is in part, induced by the
manner of presentation of and within the space.
The museum starts with a section on comparative anatomy with
specimens on display of various animals, as mentioned before, these are
skulls displayed in shelves along with cross sections of various birds,
mammals and reptiles preserved in formaldehyde. Some of the skulls are
newly painted in an odd colour scheme. For instance, the elephant tusk is
innocuously painted white while, on the other hand, there is a display of
an old man in typical Indian sadhu garb of orange robes, with skin painted
dark brown and a fake beard. This display oddly, does not have any
description - which makes one question its placement in the museum.
There is a similar obsession apparent throughout the rest of the museum
with representing specimens in a particular way, by further intervening on
them via painting (among other things), it seems, to either make them fit
for presentation (whatever that may mean) or also, to indicate a certain
status of health or disease through various colour tropes associated with
the many functions of the human body (red for arteries/clean blood and
blue for veins/dirty blood etc.). Some displays literally have buttons in
the place of eyes with eyeballs painted on them, presumably to maintain
some sort of propriety and normality. Although this provoked quite the
opposite, rather unsettling reaction in my experience exactly the sort of
thing that the curators, perhaps wanted to avoid. I shall come back to the
aesthetic aspect later in the piece.
SECTION I
The whole notion of displaying the multifarious internal organs of the
human body, to be seen as objects of biological knowledge can be

Body, Gender & Health #4

Anatomy Museum Report

Kartikeya Jain

contextualized in the backdrop of the rise of the discipline of biology itself,

shifting from the 18th century (and before) discipline of natural history to
the science of biology in the 19th century as described by Foucault
(1970). He points to Cuvier as the pivot around which the epistemological
transformation happens where the structure of knowledge of beings
changes from a flat, two-dimensional grid based on visible and outward
identities and differences to a centrifugal ordering and classification based
on identities and differences around an invisible and hidden notion of life.
This basically means that where previously, each organ was represented
in the grid of natural history on the basis of structure and function, that (in
its presentation) belied a certain independence or autonomous existence
of said organ within the larger body of the organism, and equal weightage
to both parameters; Cuvier subordinates the form, structure etc. of the
organ to the sovereignty of function whose aim becomes sustaining a
notion of life that is invisible to the naked eye (264).
From Cuvier onward, function, defined according to its nonperceptible form as an effect to be attained, is to serve as a
constant middle term and to make it possible to relate together
totalities of elements without the slightest visible identity. What to
Classical eyes were merely differences juxtaposed with identities
must now be ordered and conceived on the basis of a functional
homogeneity which is their hidden foundation (265).
The functional homogeneity is the larger functioning of the organism as a
whole, that introduces an interdependence and reciprocity of organs along
with an internal hierarchy according to their relative importance vis--vis
functions of the whole body. Thus for instance, within the digestive
system, the length, dilations and convolutions of the alimentary canal
become dependent on the form of the teeth. Also, the morphology of
limbs determines the type of food the organism will be able to tear and
capture and, accordingly ingest (265). Similarly, while gills and lungs may
not share any similarity with respect to form, magnitude or number, they
both serve the function of respiration, in general.
For Cuvier, the existence of the animal precedes the relationships
between its constituent parts, and they only interact to serve the purpose
of the former. There emerges a hierarchy of organs according to which the
various orders, classes, families et al. of animals are arranged, according
to a certain plan of nature. As a hierarchical principle, this plan defines
the most important functions, arranges the anatomical elements that
enable it to operate, and places them in the appropriate parts of the body
[] (267). Thus, the vital functions place their organs towards the centre
of the system and as we move outward toward the lesser organs, so to
speak, they become susceptible to other forms of determination fins are
equated with arms and so forth [] the species can at the same time resemble one another (so as
to form groups such as the genera, the classes, and what Cuvier
calls the sub-kingdoms) and be distinct from one another. What
draws them together is not a certain quantity of coincident
elements; it is a sort of focus of identity which cannot be analysed
into visible areas because it defines the reciprocal importance of the

Body, Gender & Health #4

Anatomy Museum Report

Kartikeya Jain

various functions; on the basis of this imperceptible centre of

identities, the organs are arranged in the body, and the further they
are from the centre, the more they gain in flexibility, in the
possibilities of variation, and in distinctive characters. Animal
species differ at their peripheries, and resemble each other at their
centres; they are connected by the inaccessible, and separated by
the apparent (267).
Thus, the dark, invisible space - the great, mysterious, invisible focal
unity that one has to penetrate the surface of visibilities (only through
dissection) indicates the conditions of possibility for biology (269).
Concomitant with biology, comes the underlying teleological narrative that
breaks the continuity of time implicit with the natural history grid. It
presupposes a progression of life towards a telos, to the top of the
pyramid. A common example of this is the horshoe crab that is commonly
known as the living fossil (Sadava et al; 2009). This betrays a line of
thinking that would claim that despite its primitiveness, the horseshoe
crab survived into the modern epoch wherein only creatures of a certain
evolved state are able to adapt and ensure their survival. Whereas in the
classical taxonomy system it wouldve just fit into the flat grid, placed in a
box according to its features.
Thus, fragmented by life, that isolates forms that are bound in upon
themselves, the organs become representative of (and tending towards)
a normative ideal of a healthy and good life (Foucault, 273). This
underlying ideology informs the displays at the Anatomy Museum as well.

Body, Gender & Health #4

Anatomy Museum Report

Kartikeya Jain

SECTION II
There are moreover, explicit visual markers such as mannequins of male
torsos above some of the glass shelves that definitively indicate a notion
of perfection in human health. The specimens are flexing their well-built
musculature and have networks of blue and red blood vessels, implying
peak physical condition. Additionally, there is graphic visual imagery in
the circulatory system section that shows, besides the blue-red schema
that is common throughout, blood travelling like forces of electricity
across the body (Figure 1 below).

Figure 1
While there are numerous displays of the ideal human body strategically
positioned around the place, they were paradoxically swarmed by the
innumerable other displays that illustrated how life can radically deviate
from the norm.
The first part of the answer to this phenomenon would be with reference
to the vast collection of fetuses on display. From premature still births to
aborted babies, there is an impressive spectrum on offer. Of special
significance are some of the taxonomical specificities, such as the
hydrocephalic monster - one among the many monsters that
showcases the still archaic residues of what was initially a discipline that
arose from encounters of European expansion with the rest of the world.
Franklin contextualizes the trajectory of the practice of collecting, storing
and displaying human and animal remains that, in the early modern
period, occupied the European aristocrat, that was not only intended to
educate but had the character of a frivolous pastime, intended to amuse
and titillate (Anker & Franklin, 104, 2011). So there is element of an
aestheticization of the exotic, horrific, the bizarre and monstrous in the
history of this practice. This purportedly changes however, with the
gradual emergence of natural history and then biology, when the practice

Body, Gender & Health #4

Anatomy Museum Report

Kartikeya Jain

is absorbed into the serious pursuit of knowledge of the natural world

(104).
At the anatomy musuem however, the aesthetics of my encounter with
the specimens formed a significant part of the experience. The bright
lights, the sterile spick-and-span surroundings and the eerie interventions
on the specimens in the glass cases as well as the other visual cues
mentioned before, induce an inadvertent and unsettling reaction from the
spectator in the event of the unabashed presentation of grotesquerie. Part
of the motivation, evident especially in the pathology section that deals
with lifestyle diseases and their consequences on various organs of the
body, seems to come from a didactic, moral voice that seems to warn,
with its graphic accompaniments, against excesses of smoke, drink and
harmful foods.
CONCLUSION
The larger epistemological point of note here is that the incremental
mediation and intervention on the organic body in service of uncovering
the inner invisibilities driving biological life managed to counter-intuitively
widen the chasm between the representational modalities of knowledge
and the actual, living beings that are the purported objects of study
(Franklin, 104). Meaning that extracting and displaying, in a very specific
manner, the many parts (organs) that make up a single, whole human
body, and opening it up to unified human spectators results in a
significant reconfiguration of the relationships of the objects (parts)
between themselves and with the wholes. I sensed this myself, in the form
of a curiously alienating feeling being amidst that cornucopia of glass jars
filled with preserved dead organs, fetuses and cross-sectionals of animal
remains.
Concurrently, this ordering of objects betrays, as mentioned before, a
conception of an ideal of (human) life guiding the particular science of
biology. Consequently, this can become the grounds on which one could
begin questioning the discourse of biology and destabilising its positivist
claims to knowledge, by uncovering (in the Foucauldian sense) the
underlying and ever-changing ideological impulses driving this particular
discipline.
Bibliography
Anatomy Museum Overview. http://manipal.edu/kmc-manipal/kmcexperience/putting-manipal-on-the-map.html (accessed September
Sunday, 2015).
Anker, Suzanne, and Sarah Franklin. "Specimens as Spectacles Reframing
Fetal Remains." Social Text 29, no. 1 106 (2011): 103-125.
Sadava, David E., David M. Hillis, H. Craig Heller, and May Berenbaum.
Life: the science of biology. Vol. 2. Macmillan, 2009.

Body, Gender & Health #4

Anatomy Museum Report

Kartikeya Jain

Foucault, Michel. The order of things: An archaeology of the human

sciences. Vintage Books, 1994.