According to his death certificate, a black man died of pneumonia after he was admitted to the hospital in the 1930s. The Robert J. Terry Anatomical Skeletal Collection is one of the most studied collections of human remains in the US. A team of researchers has been able to confirm the pathogen that killed him by studying the plaque on his teeth, an achievement that opens new avenues for studying diseases of the past.
In their paper, published last month in Communications Biology, the researchers took steps to address ethics and social justice that surround the Terry collection. They helped build the collection by reconstructing the context in which a now-nameless man lived.
According to a biological anthropologist at the University of South Carolina, this may be a way of doing research with the Terry collection. She says that analyzing dental calculus is a great way to find out more about an individual. It shouldn't be ignored.
Molly Zuckerman, a bioarchaeologist and paleopathologist at Mississippi State University, Starkville, is one of the authors of the new study. They have been turned into a collection of objects for scientific research. She and her colleagues aim to set a new ethical standard for studying anthropology with controversial pasts as the field of biological anthropology grapples with a complex history of racism. Rachel Watkins is a biocultural anthropologist at American University. She says that offering up this way of re-positioning the Terry collection is important.
Dental plaque is used to study diseases of the past. Calculus is accumulated over a lifetime and doesn't decay after death. In 2015, Rita Austin, then at NMNH and the University of Oklahoma, decided to look at the causes of death, including invisible diseases such as pneumonia, which don't leave any markings in bones and are often misdiagnosed in historical documents. Austin says that there is a lot of potential for thinking about what kind of pathogens could end up in your teeth.
The Terry collection contains more than 1700 skeletons of people and death certificates. She and her team could compare their findings with the recorded causes of death.
To make a profile of thebacteria that used to live in their mouths, Austin first removed the dental calculus of several individuals who had been diagnosed with Tuberculosis, and then took the DNA from it to make a picture. Acinetobacter nosocomialis and Klebsiella pneumoniae are two of the most common causes of hospital infections. The man's death certificate states that they were proof of his pneumonia.
Zuckerman says, "Recovering biomolecular evidence that completely aligned with the recorded cause of death was just amazing." It made us understand what dental calculus can tell us.
The researchers wanted to know more about the life of the individual. Zuckerman says that they did not come to the collection thinking that it was neutral. The lack of legal protections for marginalized people in the 19th and early 20th century made it possible for him to accumulate thousands of bodies of people who died in public institutions. The individuals were stripped of their identity during the process. They were degraded from the start. The majority of the individuals in the Terry collection are black.
The discussion of structural racism in St. Louis needed to be more focused on the medical profession. The researchers outlined their efforts to "rehumanize" the St. Louis individual and show how structural racism, from poor-quality medical care for Black people to physical violence, shaped his life. They wanted to bring some of the St. Louis Individual's life history, previously obscured and erased, into broader recognition, fostering a shared remembrance of him and others in the Terry collection.
His skeleton showed a lot of signs of a hard life. He had a fractured jaw that had healed poorly and several other signs of poor health care. The researchers didn't find any evidence of the bacterium that causes the disease in the plaque on his skeleton.
It was hard to see this as a study of an individual, given how little we had to know about him. A review of historical documents was added to the research. Newspaper clippings were used to reconstruct the medical context of 1930s St. Louis, including how Black people would often delay seeking medical care because of distrust of medical institutions and how conditions at City Hospital #2 were said to be worse than at the local zoo. Jim Crow laws and local anti-Black political violence made things worse for the St. Louis Individual. Zuckerman says that his life was likely socially, mentally, and physiologically stressed, which could have made him vulnerable to a fatal pneumonia. His body ended up in the Terry collection because of the same injustice.
The study is part of the field's broader effort to move towards more ethical practices and have conversations about fairness and justice. The Samuel George Morton Cranial Collection at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology has recently sparked a discussion about racism in the collection.
New guidelines for studying anthropology collections in a more ethical way are being created by Austin, Zuckerman, and their colleagues. The current study is off-limits because NMNH no longer approves new research requests on black individuals. In May, the Smithsonian adopted a new policy that allows museums to share ownership of or return entire collections if there is no consent. It is possible to identify relatives of these individuals and to offer returns. Researchers can take action even if families can't be traced. She says that nothing should happen before the descendants are engaged.
Even though it is too late for the St. Louis Individual, the researchers are going to engage with the community to raise awareness of their findings. Zuckerman wants to encourage everyone to remember that these are once living individuals.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
