Taking Specimens and Giving “Care”: The Curative Violence of Army Medicine and Anatomical Collecting in Nineteenth Century West Texas

Summary

This is an abstract from the "(De)Pathologizing the Past: New Perspectives on Intervention and Modification as Care in the Americas" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Bioarchaeologists have framed care as a largely positive, altruistic, and compassionate act of service given to chronically ill and disabled people. Medical interventions, especially surgical ones, often have lifelong consequences for people who survive them. This paper draws on critical disability studies’ concept of “curative violence” to understand how medicine, eugenics, and racial science in the 19th century United States became entwined and materialized in the creation of anatomical collections. US Army medical officers exploited the curative violence of surgical procedures such as amputation as an opportunity to strategically collect skeletal remains to enhance their own authority on the body. Examining case studies of men whose bodies and lives were shaped by the curative violence of Army medicine in the 1870s, through museum acquisition and archival records, we find that disabled and chronically ill infantrymen and cavalrymen were both vulnerable to and targeted by US Army medical officers for the collection and creation of “pathological specimens”. Documenting pathology in anatomical collections served as a justification for eugenic and racial science projects. Through this critical examination of care and its necropolitics, we suggest alternative ways bioarchaeologists may engage with notions of care and healthcare in the past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• (De)Pathologizing the Past: New Perspectives on Intervention and Modification as Care in the Americas

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50685