Michaela Clark reflects on the three-day workshop Curating Medical Heritage: Reconciliation and Indigeneity held in Uppsala & Stockholm on 23-25 September 2024 as part of the Matariki-funded project Curating Cultural Heritage for the Medical and Health Humanities.
In Europe, the dire consequences of race biology as fostered under the National Socialist rule of Germany are well known. Historians of colonial Africa, the Caribbean, North and South America, Australasia, and South Asia have also successfully demonstrated that the bioprecarity of indigenous peoples was frequently underpinned by eugenic thought (Pirak Sikku and Griffin 2020). Recently, however, it is countries who many have considered to be outside the maleficent use of science, technology and medicine that have begun to turn their gaze inwards – to reassess their national legacies with regards to racial differentiation, degeneration fears, and othering.
The workshop Curating Medical Heritage: Reconciliation and Indigeneity is testimony to this development. Part of the Matariki-funded project Curating Cultural Heritage for the Medical and Health Humanities co-developed by researchers at Queen’s University in Canada, Uppsala University in Sweden and Durham University in the UK, this three-day event saw historians, curators, artists, and custodians of medical and scientific collections come together to address precisely this topic within Sweden. Visits to the Archive of the Uppsala University Library, the Karolinska Institute’s Hagströmer Library (Hagströmerbiblioteket), and the newly reworked exhibition space of the Museum of Medical History (Medicinhistoriska museet) in Uppsala variously highlighted the fraught history of colonialism, race biology, and institutionalisation as they played out across medical disciplines in this country.
Day One: The Archive of the Institute of Race Biology
The first day of the workshop allowed participants to take a deep dive into the Institute for Race Biology’s photographic collection. Held at the University of Uppsala Library, photo albums compiled by Sweden’s most well-known race biologist, Herman Lundborg, came under scrutiny. Having founded the Swedish State Institute for Racial Biology (SIRB) in 1922, Lundborg’s assembled photographs and bodily measurements of the Sámi people in an attempt to differentiate white Europeans in line with eugenic notions of racial purity (Kjellman 2013). Compiled and published in his text The Racial Character of the Swedish Nation (1921), Lundborg used this data as evidence of the threat that intermixing posed to the (supposedly pure) Nordic race of Europe.
As visual evidence that serves to mark, organise, and categorise those depicted as ‘deviant’ in line with social power relations, these photographs can be seen to function repressively (Sekula 1986). Yet, in rifling through them, it became clear that multiple images had origins and intentions beyond Lundborg’s eugenic reading of them. A significant portion of those that entered the albums were made as family snapshots and sent to Uppsala upon Lundborg’s public request for such imagery, according to historian and archivist Christel Kraft and Per Widén. Captured by loved ones for personal use, these depictions break the scientific frame with glimpses of personal attire, homely living spaces, and facial expressions marked with joy or mischief.
This sense of intimacy was heightened during the second half of day one with a private viewing of the installation Agálaččat bivttastuvvon sohkagotti ivnniiguin/Ihkát ájttegij bájnoj gárvodum/För evigt klädda i ättens färger/ Ihkuven aajkan maadtoej klaeriejgujmie gåårveldihkie/Perpetually Wound in the Colours of the Ancestors (2021) by artist Katarina Pirak Sikku. The work takes a portion of Lundborg’s photo albums as their first port of call. Carefully wrapped in royal blue, red, yellow and green wool, the covers echo traditional patterns and materials of Sámi handcraft. In this work. Pirak Sikku has thereby reframed this archive of eugenic science by drawing out the voices of those imaged within. Rather than anonymous exemplars of a racial type, the albums are blanketed in symbolic traces of individual lives lived, enclosing and protecting those depicted from scrutiny.
In presenting her work, Pirak Sikku articulated the deep intimacy experienced in the process of engaging the photographs and crafting the covers. Some individuals featured in the collection are not-so-distant relatives, in response to which she draws on objects made by or belonging to her own familial links (including her mother, father-in-law, grandmother, and grandfather). Here, the tension between the autobiographical and the culturally representative dimension of the work comes to the fore. As Pirak Sikku states in conversation with Professor Allison Morehead of Queens University (CA), the artists had a deep desire to tell the stories of those photographed ‘the right way’, to stand with those on display, and yet also expressed the difficulty she felt in taking responsibility as a spokesperson for Sámi society, both living and dead.
Day Two: Catarina Larsdotter and the Repatriation of Indigenous Human Remains
Moving from photographs to human remains, the second day of the workshop took participants to the Hagströmer Library to discuss the role of this facility in the repatriation debate. Like many university collections related to 19th and 20th studies of the human, those curated by this facility are deeply imbricated in eugenic notions of biological and social difference. Most notable here is material associated with the practice of Anatomy at the Karolina Institutet. Founded by Anders Retzius, the collection in question is an assembly of skulls, bones, and plaster casts from Sweden as well as from across Europe and the wider colonial world including Greece, Russia, China, France, Britain, East Asia, the Canary Islands, Australia, and Africa (Ljungström 2014). Rather than a testimony to scientific rigor, the material seen today offers a hodgepodge of items brought together by a man with a particular curiosity (if not obsession) and is testimony to the imperfect, changeable, and fundamentally inaccurate nature of the racial sciences.
Most pronounced is the collection of Sámi remains including those of Christina Catarina Larsdotter, the so-called Giantess Stor-Stina or “Big Stina”. Larsdotter was widely known to Sweden’s scientific and popular communities through examinations and great expositions (most notably that of the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London). Her remains were exhumed after her death and brought to the Karolinska Institutet where some of her bones were cast in plaster and her skeleton put on display as part of Retzius’s collection (Hjort 2021). Thought lost in a fire, Larsdotter’s skeletal remains were rediscovered and re-identified by library staff in 2022 upon which a path to repatriation was successfully pursued. The complexities of initiating and negotiating this process was carefully outlined by the institute’s researchers and curators, Olof Ljungström, Maria Josephsson, and Ann Gustavsson. Larsdotter was laid to rest again in her home of Brännäs, Malå municipality at a local church the building of which she, as a landowner, had endorsed (Karolinska Institutet 2024).
Day Three: The Museum of Medical History’s New Exhibition
The final day of the workshop included a tour of the newly reworked exhibition space of the Museum of Medical History (Medicinhistoriska museet) in Uppsala. Located on the grounds of the administrative office for an Asylum (a psychiatric hospital in the Ulleråker area), the museum is physically rooted in the space and history of ‘madness’ in this region. The original exhibition related to this institutional and disciplinary environment had been curated in the 1980s and sought to do what many medical museums do: demonstrate development in diagnosis and treatment through the use of medical objects or the biographies of associated medical professionals.
This standard mode of historical storytelling and display was largely left unchanged, until now. Under the guidance of curator Thérèse Toudert, the exhibition of psychiatric history underwent a significant transformation, particularly in relation to its collection of patient art. Produced by those interned at the Asylum, the artworks (predominantly drawings, paintings, and sculptures) offer a personal expression of patient experience both within and beyond this facility. Works offer glimpses of daily life within the institutional walls, of living with mental illness, and of life beyond confinement. This emphasis on patients as persons – as individuals with complex internal worlds and social lives – aims to destigmatise disease and disrupt the institutional and disciplinary lens of ‘madness’. In their display and labelling, it is clear that items exhibited are celebrated as artworks and their creators acknowledged as artists.
As Swedish historian, Mattias Tydén (2012, 364), argues: “(a)ccording to the standard narrative Denmark, Norway, and Sweden constituted peaceful and egalitarian democracies” in the aftermath of World War One. Like its neighbouring Scandinavian nations, Sweden famed Eugenic thought as something that took hold outside of its borders. This first workshop on Curating Medical Heritage fundamentally challenged this view.
Over the three days, it was revealed that there is no singular way to make sense of colonial rule, indigeneity, subjugation, and reconciliation. While scientific racism fundamentally serves to hierarchise people, how these structures emerged (historically) as well as how they are channelled or challenged (today) is highly localised. What unifies efforts is custodial attempts to tap into intimacy, personhood, and emotion in order to confront the dehumanising gaze of science. The ongoing project seeks to highlight the importance of bringing together disciplines, research interests, and national frameworks when desiring to untangle and address this past.
Curating Medical Heritage: Reconciliation and Indigeneity is part of the project Curating Cultural Heritage for the Medical and Health Humanities, funded by a grant from the Matariki Network of Universities. The workshop was convened by Cecilia Rodéhn (Uppsala University), and co-funded by the Matariki Network of Universities; and CIRCUS, the Centre for Medical Humanities, and the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University.
About the Author
Michaela Clark is a Research Associate at the Department of the History, Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine (Institut für Geschichte, Theorie und Ethik der Medizin) of Heinrich Heine University, Germany.
Twitter: @michaelaclarkba
References
Hjort, Nils. 2021. “Christina Catharina Larsdotter.” Svenskt kvinnobiografiskt lexicon. Effective 16 January 2025. https://skbl.se/en/article/ChristinaCatharinaLarsdotter.
Karolinska Institutet. 2024. . “Christina Larsdotter.” About Karolinska Institutet – a medical university. Effective 16 January 2025. https://ki.se/en/about-ki/history-and-cultural-heritage/medical-history-and-heritage/christina-larsdotter.
Kjellman, Ulrika. 2013. “A Whiter Shade of Pale: Visuality and race in the work of the Swedish State Institute for Race Biology.” Scandinavian Journal of History 38(2): 180-201. https://doi.org/10.1080/03468755.2013.769458.
Ljungström, Olof. 2014. “Swedish Golgotha. Anders Retzius’ collection of human crania at the Karolinska Institutet according to an 1862 manuscript.” Lychnos: Annual of the Swedish History of Science Society: 159-171.
Pirak Sikku, Katarina, and Gabriele Griffin. 2020. “‘My body, my self’: Indigeneity, bioprecarity and the construction of the embodied self–an artist’s view.” In Bodily interventions and intimate labour: Understanding Bioprecarity, edited by Gabriele Griffin and Doris Leibetseder. Manchester University Press. https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526138576.00021.
Sekula, Allan. 1986. “The body and the archive.” October 39: 3-64. https://doi.org/10.2307/778312.
Tydén, Mattias. 2012. “The Scandinavian States: Reformed Eugenics Applied.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, edited by Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195373141.013.0022.
