New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
‘Problematic’ display part of British art exhibit
We’re not the most misinformed age of the past three centuries, despite whatever you think of president-whisperer Sean Hannity. In September 1726, news reached the court of King George I of the alleged birth of several rabbits to Mary Toft, an illiterate servant in Godalming, England.
The story became a national sensation there, aided by obstetrician John Howard, who was duped into belief as he pulled dead rabbits out of Toft.
“Nobody knew what to believe,” said Nathan Flis, head of exhibitions and publications for the Yale Center for British Art. “And this is a great reflection of the fact that so little was known about the reproductive system at the time, that so many could be hoodwinked.”
This strange chapter in gynecological history is part of an exhibit featuring the collection of Dr. William Hunter, a trusted royal physician who was not only a famed anatomist and obstetrician (he delivered 14 of the 15 babies born to George III’s wife Charlotte) but also arguably the father of the modern museum.
More than 370 objects
from his wide-raging collection are newly on display at the Yale museum in New Haven, on loan from The Hunterian at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.
The rabbit woman hoax is far from the grossest item in the exhibit. Oh, no, no, no. That would involve the drawings, proof plates and a cast plaster model (in color!) depicting dissections of a gravid, or pregnant, uterus. It was all part of Hunter’s research, which he documented meticulously and which set the foundations for advances in obstetrics.
But the plaster model of a female midsection is horizontally displayed (from a, you know, obstetrician’s view) in a glass case with a near-fullterm baby depicted in the womb. And it was the result of pouring plaster over a woman who had died suddenly while late in pregnancy. Hunter would then direct his artists to paint the midsection based on his dissection.
Other drawings on the walls are also quite graphic, as is Hunter’s landmark book “The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus Exhibited in Figures.”
Perhaps this room should come with a warning label: Not for the squeamish.
At a preview of the exhibition Tuesday, lead curator Mungo Campbell, who is deputy director of The Hunterian in Scotland, said that learning about medicine in that era was changing from just reading to seeing the body’s processes depicted, using art to capture and convey that knowledge. So art and anatomy were very much linked.
“You learned by doing,” Campbell said. “One of the things that was changing was the making of objects of communicative tools. So conducting dissections and successfully preserving these things, and a culture of communicating (such information) was deeply embedded.”
Hunter worked for most of his career in London, becoming professor of anatomy of the new Royal Academy, where he had access to the anatomical drawings of Italian Leonardo da Vinci from two centuries before. But in a world with no photography or computer graphics, Hunter saw the need to preserve (and interpret) the visuals of this growing field of obstetrics — as teaching tools.
There are other nods to dark realities of the 18th century. Men in the patriarchal society were gaining influence in the midwifery field via new tools, such as the forceps (a model of which is displayed here) — used sometimes to brutally extract stillbirths threatening a woman’s life. But Hunter became reluctant to use that tool and developed a practice that was less interfering.
The fact that the fated woman who served as Hunter’s model for his gravid uterus cast was quite possibly poor is among the “problematic questions” about it and spurred “a lot of thought,” said Hunterian curator María Dolores Sánchez-Jáuregui — “because we have to keep in mind the context but we also are now in the 21st century and there are many issues that we have to address with this cast.”
While the graphic object was previously displayed vertically, it is horizontal in the YCBA exhibit because that’s how Hunter would have used it to teach students, she said.
Still, Yale and Hunterian curators were so concerned about the cast’s graphic nature (which we are not depicting here) and its subject possibly being a “marginalized” person in society that they had various conversations about “the possible ethical problems with displaying such objects, and such drawings, too,” said YCBA’s Flis.
Community members were consulted and Flis felt he had to defend Hunter’s 18th-century work from “many angry voices.” The result: The museum solicited four contemporary artists to add their counterpoint art to the room in question, to “address all these complex issues about marginalized bodies, or the possibility of (that),” said Flis.
That ambitious result, including a Tejo on the floor (a sort of Spanish hopscotch) with small impressions from cadavers, is a bit obscure and perhaps a bridge too far, or it takes more study than is convenient in a casual visit. But back to the 18th century.
Hunter learned a lot from James Douglas, a suave doctor who attended to Queen Caroline who was given a royal grant to study “female maladies.” (He’s also the man who gets Mary Toth to confess to the rabbit hoax.) And he had items — such as leg bones on display here — that added to knowledge and ended up in Hunter’s collection.
Hunter collected other artwork from old masters (probably informative to his students in some way), including a Rembrandt sketch of Christ’s entombment and Reubens’ “Head Study of an Old Man with Beard.” But there are also collected minerals, beetles, mastodon bones from America, ancient coins and metals that sparked his interest and are displayed in this exhibit running through May 20.
The YCBA’s third-floor exhibit is a logical follow-up to the previous “Enlightened Princesses” exhibit in 2017, featuring a few of the same characters. There is a good deal of classic art (the always-stunning animal paintings of George Stubbs are represented, too) and some intriguing historical objects. The medical “art” and craft, however, may be best appreciated by medical historians and practitioners.
jamarante@nhregister.com; @Joeammo on Twitter