The news broke this morning that the Wellcome Trust Collections is shutting down one of its most important exhibits–Medicine Man–because it celebrates Western medicine and is ableist. Medicine is ableist. Yep, it is. Gotta admit that, I guess.
In 2019 the Wellcome Trust appointed Melanie Keen as head of its collections, which includes over a million medicine-related items as well as an enormous library. Since that time Melanie has been on a journey of cultural vandalism, at first trying to “contextualize” the museum through non-Western interpretations and criticisms of the exhibits.
Now she has just decided to close the whole medical exhibit, which is the heart of Wellcome Collections.
A museum in London run by the Wellcome foundation health charity is to close one of its key galleries because it perpetuates “a version of medical history that is based on racist, sexist and ableist theories and language”.
The
Wellcome Collection’s announcement on Saturday, affects a free permanent display called Medicine Man, which includes objects relating to sex, birth and death and includes anatomical models in wood, ivory and wax dating back to the 17th century. These were collected by Sir Henry Wellcome who
amassed more than a million items on the history of health and medicine.
“The very fact that these items have ended up in one place, the story we told was that of a man with enormous wealth, power and privilege,” the museum said on Twitter.
Get it? The very possibility that a museum could be established is problematic. Wellcome’s wealth alone is bad enough, but using it to collect items significant enough to be displayed is doubly awful. Better that they have been disposed of, as most would have been, or dispersed into various hands unavailable for public viewing.
It is problematic that anybody could have established a collection important enough to share with the world.
What gave us the right to tell their stories? Good question. Who, exactly, has the right to tell anyone’s stories? And if not Wellcome, then whom?
Clearly, people long dead, living often in cultures without the written word, aren’t going to. Better to have them completely disappear into the fog of history than a wealthy white man, born of missionaries who actually tended to the sick in the American hinterlands (Wellcome was born of missionaries in the wilds of Wisconsin in the 19th century), have the temerity to tell their story.
Best have all these objects and stories disappear, lest they fall into the hands of a cisgendered heteronormative White males. The pale penis people must be crushed!
Honestly, that is clearly her assertion. The indigenous people for whom she has chosen to speak may have had great cultures, but they were illiterate and hence without a voice in history. She, more than Wellcome, is shutting them out of history by her actions.
hotair.com