"THE CREATION OF SILENCES": Medical Officers & the Morton Collection

Summary

Official historic documents proclaimed nineteenth-century medical officers as heroic for administering to the inflicted during wars that defined and expanded the United States’ national borders. Military doctors were especially welcomed by U.S. soldiers and Euro-American settlers on the Florida frontier where life was precarious. Yet, their activities were often far from benevolent; many advanced necropolitical conditions. Rather than humanitarian crisis, medical officers regarded the epidemiological disasters and forced relocations of Native Americans as a scientific opportunity. Their gathering of data—observations on infectious diseases, collection of crania—worked to further erase, to let die, native peoples and the places they had inhabited. “The production of traces,” Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us, “is always also the creation of silences.” Can a biohistoric study of these traces—archival and skeletal—yield understandings of past events and peoples that counterpoise official histories? Or, does giving voice to those silenced in the past simply reflect researchers’ social privileges, thereby reinforcing social inequalities in the present? As an example, I discuss the Samuel G. Morton Crania Collection. I concentrate on the decedents acquired for Morton by medical officers stationed in Florida during the Seminole Wars.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• The Bioarchaeology of Frontier and Borderlands

Keywords

Spatial Coverage