In 1876, a Virginia man named William Massie, eager to spare hisfamily from smallpox, sent to his father by mail a tiny, reddishsplotch of human tissue, the size of a baby's fingernail. It was asmallpox scab, which the recipients would rub onto an open cut intheir skin in an effort to inoculate themselves.
Today, you can view that scab in a strangely alluring exhibit atthe Virginia Historical Society in Richmond titled "Bizarre Bits:Oddities From the Collection." There is also a disturbing littlenecklace made from the hair of James Madison, and a block of treefungus that a 20th-century artist in Wytheville carved into anadoring portrait of Robert E. Lee on his horse, Traveller.
In Washington, the various curated exhibits at the Smithsonianmuseums draw audiences large and small, depending on the subjectmatter and perhaps the marketing. But just mention that theSmithsonian is showing a selection from its legendary attic ofcurios and Americana, and the crowds come flocking, almost withoutregard for what particular items are on display.
There's something about a random collection of cool stuff thatattracts attention, even though such randomness would hardly be amagnet in almost any other area of the arts: No way you'd get bigcrowds for a concert of random music, a gallery of art chosen byhappenstance or an evening of one-act plays selected by dart-toss.But museums, especially those that have been around for a long time,find themselves with storehouses full of stuff that isn't quite thework of acclaimed masters, and hauling odd pieces out for a show nowand then ends up being strikingly illuminating.
The Virginia Historical Society, which has been collecting since1831, owns a surfeit of what it calls "peculiar, perplexing or evengrotesque objects" that "provide insight into the hopes, fears,assumptions and practices of the past."
That it does, but that raises a question about today's museumsand curators: Are they still collecting such wonderfully strange andrandom bits? The Richmond show displays the cigar confiscated fromConfederate President Jefferson Davis was captured by Union troopsin 1865; it was kept by the authorities even after the U.S.secretary of war ordered the other contents of Davis's trunkreturned to the owner in 1874. And now here the cigar is, in a glassvial, a rather thin stogie, lending its onetime owner a slightlysevere yet dashing air.
Today's curators know enough to capture this sort of item. TheSmithsonian has an R2-D2 model used in "Star Wars," and surely themuseum would have wanted Monica Lewinsky's blue dress, but it wasreturned to its owner after the FBI completed its analysis of thepresidential semen stain.
But those are easy calls. What are the contemporary equivalentsof the item I spent the most time with in this collection ofcuriosities? It was a letter written in 1857 from a U.S. Navylieutenant, Robert Minor, to his wife back home in Virginia.Landonia Minor was so much in love with her traveling husband thatshe not only saved the letter (and donated it to the HistoricalSociety) but she also kept her man's fingernail and toenailclippings, which he had lovingly included in the envelope.
The woman did not willy-nilly hand over her most personalpossessions to those who would save them for posterity. No, shefirst took care to black out from her husband's letters thosephrases that described his fantasies of what they would do when hereturned home. He would, he wrote, "hug her up, so close" that,well, we'll just have to use our imaginations because the next bunchof words is most severely blackened, which itself tells us a gooddeal about the Minors and the world they lived in.
People become amateur collectors and seek to save their treasuresin museums either to assure their own legacy or because they'reparticularly proud of what they've gathered and want to share itwith the future. But what will be saved from our ever moreelectronic lives?
The rise of the Internet has raised questions about whetherfuture historians will have anything quite as intimate a record ofthe loves and spats and passions of this era as the letters and lovenotes of past generations provided. Will too many of the mostrevealing and important documents of our time vanish because theyexisted only electronically and were erased or simply neverextracted from behind a password-protected wall?
Most likely we will have a more complete record of official andlegal actions than ever before. But will the electronic records oftoday's courts be as revealing as a handwritten account in theRichmond show of an 1832 trial of one Grace Sherwood of PrincessAnne County on charges of witchcraft? The account says the judgeappointed five "antient weamen" to examine Sherwood's body in full,whereupon they found "two things like titts on her private parts ofa black coller [color]" that she apparently used to suckle demons.Sherwood, who had been accused of bewitching a pregnant woman andcausing her to miscarry, was convicted, clapped in irons and put injail.
As one might hope, the oddities on exhibit in the grand temple ofVirginia history - built as a Confederate memorial, the building nowhouses some well-balanced shows on the state's struggles with raceand slavery, as well as earlier murals that paint the Confederacy inmore heroic light - fit no easy categories. Some are here justbecause they're bizarre, and once again, inquiring minds want toknow: Would today's curators overcome their ethical qualms andcollect items that represent cruelty, ignorance or invasion ofprivacy?
We can only hope they will, because only then will ourdescendants be able to figure out just who we really were, in allour glory and infamy. The "bizarre bits" on display here include abunch of medical specimens and instruments, such as the smallpoxscab, various saws used for amputations and neurosurgery, and atrepan, a grotesque device used to perforate the skull, which wasbelieved to aid in treating mental illness, epilepsy and migraines.The thing, from 1908, looks like a particularly powerful hand drill.
To see it, you can visit the oddities show in Richmond. But suchare the times we live in that without rising from your chair, youcan find the inevitable on the Web: Yes, there are those today whocall for a return to trepanation. The International TrepanationAdvocacy Group is online, ready to be collected for a virtual museumshow of the next century.
marcfisher@washpost.com
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