Power, Privilege, and Forgotten Babies: The Unequal Origins of Fetuses in New Zealand Anatomy Collections

In this analysis of the W.D. Trotter Anatomy Museum at the University of Otago, the authors uncover how fetuses and infants entered medical collections during a period of colonial expansion and eugenic thinking. Author: The Conversation.

• Disparities in who could refuse body relinquishment meant unmarried, institutionalised, and disabled infants were disproportionately collected.
• Remains were catalogued and displayed as anonymous specimens, severed from personal histories.
• The work links collection practices to eugenics and patriarchal control over birth and motherhood.
• The authors dedicate the study to the babies who died and call for ethical remembrance and restitution in medical museums.

Introduction

This article examines the origins of fetuses and infants in early colonial New Zealand anatomy collections, focusing on the W. D. Trotter Anatomy Museum at the University of Otago. It argues that these collections are not neutral scientific resources but fragile records of power, marginalisation, and social stigma that influenced who could be taken from the living and how their bodies were used after death.

Historical backdrop and collections

The piece situates these remains within a broader museum culture that often normalised the display of preserved human tissue. It details how fetuses and infants, including those with congenital differences, appeared among teaching aids in museums such as Hunterian Museum and Museum Vrolik, and how such displays have continued to be accepted as neutral repositories of knowledge. However, the Otago collection reveals a darker underside: the identities of these babies were largely erased, and their remains were descended into “specimens” that illustrated development and pathology rather than individual lives.

Colonialism, marginalisation, and the making of the Otago collection

The authors show that the collection was amassed in a period when eugenic thinking shaped Western and colonial thought. They explain that those born outside marriage, with congenital conditions, or to mothers in institutions were disproportionately acquired into medical repositories. The account references sites such as Mount Magdala and the Forth Street Maternity Hospital, which reflected institutional control over reproductive lives and infants during this era. Diet, housing, poverty, and social judgement all influenced both mortality risk and the likelihood of bodies being retained for medical study.

Power, gender, and the politics of loss

Delivery and childbirth increasingly occurred under institutional supervision, typically controlled by male doctors within patriarchal systems. The article argues that this context permitted doctors to retain bodies for scientific use, sometimes without parental knowledge or consent. Grief was socially regulated; many deceased infants were removed from sight, treated as clinical waste at times, and thus rendered invisible within the public memory of science. Once in the anatomy collection, these babies lost their identities, with little connection to archival records or personal histories.

Ethical reflection and memorialisation

The authors emphasise the human cost of these archival practices and argue that understanding these social forces forces a reckoning with whose lives have been valued in the past and present. They dedicate their work to the babies who died and remained in collections, treating memory as a form of ethical accountability and calling for more careful, just, and transparent handling of human remains in museums.

Conclusion

The article reframes anatomy museums as sites where power, stigma, and social prejudice intersect with scientific progress. It invites ongoing reflection on how histories of marginalisation are preserved or erased in archives and urges contemporary practice to acknowledge and memorialise the individuals behind the specimens.