Bodies of glass: collecting and preserving human remains on histological slides, 1850-1990 – ExHum

“Bodies of glass: collecting and preserving human remains on histological slides, 1850 1990” focuses on a peculiar form of preservation of human remains, the histological slide, to write the material history of microscopic human tissues and their glass support, i.e., the practices and purposes of sampling, preparing, preserving from the perspective of the history of collections and material cultures of science, and their subsequent recognition as heritage. For this purpose, the time span of the research is deliberately extensive: from the middle of the nineteenth century at the time of the explosion of the study of microscopic structures. In the medical field, this was spurred by the exploration of the human body at tissue level, together with their categorisation, alongside human biological pathogens. The project closes at the end of the twentieth century marked by molecular approaches (from the 1960s onwards) with the transition from the microscope to the sequencer and the profound transformation in the use of human remains as archives mobilised by genomics. Through an interdisciplinary and innovative approach that brings together the history of collecting, human remains and histology, Bodies of Glass considers, side by side, life and medical sciences in their relation to their utmost ordinary and small-scale materialities, the histological slides. These were not designed as collection objects. But whose mass presence in cabinets in university, hospital and museum collections in Europe makes them collections ‘by accident’. Whether cluttered, forgotten or treasured, fragments of human bodies on slides will be the basis of an innovative, ground-breaking project which will deeply renew the heuristic frameworks in the history of collected human remains and scientific heritage.