Revealing the Smithsonian's 'Racial Brain' Collection
By Nicole Dungca and Claire Healy,
The Washington Post
| 08. 14. 2023
"Smithsonian Museum of Natural History" by melizabethi123 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
On the day Mary Sara died of tuberculosis in a Seattle sanitarium, the doctor caring for the 18-year-old offered her brain to one of the most revered museums in the world. The young woman — whose family was Sami, or indigenous to areas that include northern Scandinavia — had traveled with her mother by ship from her Alaska hometown at the invitation of physician Charles Firestone, who had offered to treat the older woman for cataracts. Now, Firestone sought to take advantage of Sara’s death for a “racial brain collection” at the Smithsonian Institution. He contacted a museum official in May 1933 by telegram.
Ales Hrdlicka, the 64-year-old curator of the division of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian’s U.S. National Museum, was interested in Sara’s brain for his collection. But only if she was “full-blood,” he noted, using a racist term to question whether her parents were both Sami.
The 35-year-old doctor removed Sara’s brain after she died and mailed it to Washington, D.C., where Smithsonian officials...
Related Articles
By Azeen Ghorayshi and Sarah Kliff, The New York Times | 08.12.2024
An emerging movement against in vitro fertilization is driving some doctors and patients in red states to move or destroy frozen embryos.
The embryo migration is most striking in Alabama, where the State Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos...
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...
By Amanda Becker and Shefali Luthra, The 19th | 07.08.2024
Image by Duke University Archives from Flickr
Republicans have adopted a slate of policy positions ahead of next week’s convention that does not call for a federal legislative abortion ban, but opens the door to establishing fetal personhood.
The Republican...
By Beth Duff-Brown, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research | 07.12.2024
The debate over in vitro fertilization (IVF) has become a hot-button policy and political issue, despite the medical procedure to help people become pregnant having been mainstream in the United States for nearly half a century.
The Alabama Supreme Court ...