Helena Franzén

The working title of my thesis is "Bodies in Transformation: Obstetrical and Embryological Collections at Uppsala University"

These collections and their contents of preserved pelves, fetuses and embryos, along with models, casts, and instruments have a long history as scientific objects at the Medical faculty, starting in the mid-eighteenth-century. Over time, items were added and destroyed, and their placement shifted depending on notions about their purpose. By the late-twentieth-century the collections had been re-imagined as historical objects and instead situated as a problematic heritage. In my dissertation I explore how and why the collections were assembled, used, and how their meaning changed over time by contextualising them within societal trends.

By examining the processes of knowledge production; mainly collecting, use of instruments, collection-management, preparing specimens, and specimen-imaging, I investigate the links between the collections and broader themes such as ideas about race, pathology/normality, and development. I aim to analyse and nuance how these collections were shaped by, and shaping, understandings of reproduction and its consequences in the 19th-century and early 20th-century Swedish medical community.

My research is part of Medicine at the Borders of Life