Things have changed in the past few decades
Have you heard of the Mutter Museum? You probably have heard of this infamous Philadelphia medical museum, even if you haven't been. It has a range of wax models and preserved human remains.
I've been reading About Us, a collection of New York Times pieces from a two year focus on disability. In Riva Lehrer's essay (which you can read online if you have a NYT subscription or haven't read your allotment of free articles yet) she writes about the powerful experience of visiting the Mutter Museum for the first time and the assignment it inspired her to give her students:
I could easily have ended up as a teaching specimen in a jar. But luck gave me a surgeon. Fiery parents gave me a life outside of an institution. Today, I teach drawing in the Medical Humanities program at Northwestern University. My first- and second-year students draw the anomalous fetus collection in the cadaver lab. Each fetus has a different developmental impairment.
I teach my students to depict the specifics of every inch of the fetal bodies, until the drawings become profound examinations of bodies stopped in time. Their final assignment is to research a contemporary person with the same condition as their chosen fetus and do a presentation on his or her life. It helps these future doctors to stop seeing the specimens as historic artifacts or tragic medical problems. It’s as if we’re back at the Mutter, but this time those fetuses are given possible present lives, going forward in time.
PS. I'll be spending the end of November and almost all of December in Montreal. Is there someone there you think I should meet with? Who's doing interesting work to build community and help make a healthcare system that treats people like people, not specimens?