Paul Apodaca and Dave Wells have presented views which I am not in
complete accord with; they will likely not agree with my views.  That's fair.
 
Paul Apodaca does not believe that children should be exposed to corpses
in a museum context.  He wonders whether or not autopsies and medical
exams should be displayed if corpses are displayed.
 
If memory serves, there is a museum of wartime pathology in amongst the
cluster of Smithsonian buildings in Washington, DC, and I seem to recall
that there were children there, looking at brain sections demonstrating
the effect of various munitions on soft tissue, and other displays too
numerous to detail here.  One of the cable channels I receive on my
television plays medical videotapes of operations.  And then there are
the bodies from Bosnia and Rowanda on the news and in the weekly news
magazines.
 
Dave Wells believes that the act of archaeology is desecration.  I could
not disagree more.  Science is not tainted by hewing to a philosophy; a
philosophy is nothing more than a framework within which a body of
knowledge may be built.  When the framework is no longer able to support
the body of knowledge, the framework is changed.  This has happened often
enough in the past to assure me that it will happen in the future.  But
without addition there will be no change.
 
To return for a moment to the original question, there are reasonable
solutions to the technical problems of displaying human remains.  The
Getty Conservation Institute has been working on this problem for some
years now and have developed some good solutions. The Canadian
Conservation Institute has also developed some good solutions to the
problem of creating and maintaining micro-climates.
 
Jack C. Thompson
Thompson Conservation Laboratory
Portland, OR
 
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