Teaching With the Archive When the Archive Shuts Down
In this essay, I discuss the design of “Anatomy and the Archive,” a 300-level writing-intensive medical humanities class for students in the health sciences and liberal arts, and how I adapted when the 2020 COVID pandemic disrupted our plans to mount a gallery exhibition of archival anatomical textbooks as its final project. Students read about medical museums, the history of art and anatomy, book history, and ethical issues surrounding working with human remains, and they visited our campus’s cadaver lab. Experts in these fields guest lectured via Zoom and assisted students remotely to assemble the exhibition. When we were unable to visit a local archive or the gallery space, we brought some of the archive to the classroom and watched video tours of the gallery. Students successfully designed an exhibition “Between Beauty and Knowledge: Women’s Bodies in Anatomical Atlases,” which will open once COVID restrictions have lifted.