by Taylor Hamrick
The Davidson Research Initiative (DRI)-funded trip to Washington D.C was transformative for me in terms of my understanding of the importance of material objects to disability history. I experienced numerous “ah-ha!” moments, particularly during our visit with the Smithsonian Museum of American History’s curator for the division of medicine and science, Katherine Ott. For the purposes of this post, I’ll focus on just one of those moments. Standing in the whitewash room, surrounded by drawers and closets with curiosity-piquing post-it labels, on a restricted-access floor in the Smithsonian, we huddled around a table of various artifacts of disability history: two variations of prosthetic legs, cochlear implants, infants’ leg braces, transorbital lobotomy knives, and cane tips, to name just a few.
We studied and discussed the artifacts, one by one, and, in the middle of this disability culture show-and-tell, Dr. Ott opened a box of eye-color slides—the kind you might use if you were going to buy colored contacts. The glass slides, which exhibited a spectrum of greens, blues, and brown irises, were used as shade determinants for making glass eyes. If one eye was intact, the doctor or professional would use the slides to match the glass eye to the existing eye. We discussed how this artifact might exemplify inclinations towards “passing” as nondisabled. We also acknowledged that the disabled may use the glass eye as a medium for playful adornment or self-expression (through, for example, a glass eye embossed with a Chicago Cubs insignia in place of the iris or pupil).
But this comparatively benign artifact conjured an image of another artifact, from another museum that I had visited earlier in the morning: the glass eye slides on display in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The slides were not part of the exhibit specific to disability and the Holocaust—which chronicled the euthanasia of the disabled population under Operation T-4—but in a display recounting the lead-up to the Holocaust, which detailed how the false “science” of eugenics was used to justify genocide. (According to Nazi logic, lighter eye color denoted a person of a purer race). Unlike the artifact in the Smithsonian archive, these eye color slides were instruments that facilitated not “passing” or in some way aiding a disabled person, but in “outing a Jew” or person of “impure” genes and creating a hierarchy of value based upon physical traits.
The potential duality of purpose associated with this artifact wasn’t evident to me until witnessing it in two different physical and historical contexts; this realization solidified for me the importance of materiality to the history of disability and eugenics. Physical alteration—of appearance, of movement, of functionality—and attempts to destroy physical difference ( by taming or erasing the non-normate body or populations of non-normate bodies) are rooted in physicality itself. In terms of disability history and disability studies, material, physical interactions with an artifact—through feeling the heft of a strait jacket, studying the nicked ridges of used cane tips, and observing eye color slides in different contexts—proves just as important to, if not more important than, gaining understanding of theory and culture as reading text.
