mama
Jim Edmonson, 29. august:
Contraception in North America: Science, Society, and Stories
Exhibit Prospectus – Plan for reinterpreting and displaying Percy Skuy Collection on the History of Contraception
Project Director, James M. Edmonson, Ph.D.
Dittrick Medical History Center
11000 Euclid Avenue
College of Arts and Sciences
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, Ohio 44106
216.368.6391 cell 216.965.6127
james.edmonson@case.eduGuest Curator, Jimmy Wilkinson Meyer, Ph.D.
Ebert Art Center 108
The College of Wooster
1189 Beall Avenue
Wooster, Ohio 44691
330.263.2243
jmeyer@wooster.eduFrom Casablanca to Vienna, Africa to Australia, Vancouver to Baltimore, couples across the centuries used plants, pots, potions, and pills to attempt to space their pregnancies. Before the advent of medical devices for contraception, women and men employed yams, honey, beeswax, stones, lemons, fennel, and Lysol. Despite medical advances, modern folks have tried plastic wrap, candy bar wrappers, and airplane parts. Each method, effective or not, carries its own human story. The Percy Skuy Collection on the History of Contraception documents these stories, and much more.
From Casablanca to Vienna, Africa to Australia, Vancouver to Baltimore, couples across the centuries used plants, pots, potions, and pills to attempt to space their pregnancies. Before the advent of medical devices for contraception, women and men employed yams, honey, beeswax, stones, lemons, fennel, and Lysol. Despite medical advances, modern folks have tried plastic wrap, candy bar wrappers, and airplane parts. Each method, effective or not, carries its own human story. The Percy Skuy Collection on the History of Contraception documents these stories, and much more.Purpose and Import
The Dittrick Medical History Center is seeking to bring to the public the varied and intriguing tale of human efforts to plan family size. This phase involves the reinterpretation and installation of the Skuy Collection in a dedicated 846-sq.-ft. gallery at the Dittrick Museum of Medical History, the public area of The Dittrick Medical History Center on the campus of Case Western Reserve University. The permanent exhibit, tentatively titled Contraception in North America: Science, Society, and Stories, will examine the interface between contraceptive development and innovations in science and technology and the impact of changes in contraception upon daily life and public policy. Set within the historical and cultural context of women’s health in general, this will be the first national, permanent, artifact-based exhibit to focus on the history of contraception. The display will employ the objects in the Skuy Collection as lenses to reveal this social history and its accompanying personal stories. In addition the exhibit will include multimedia images to illustrate and elaborate on historical or cultural themes. The museum experience permits visitors to consider a potentially controversial topic in a neutral setting. Exploring the complex dynamics of this history, the exhibit’s overarching goal will be to educate rather than advocate.
Scope
Contraception in North America: Science, Society, and Stories will concentrate on the history of contraception in North America from the 19th through the 21st centuries, although the Skuy Collection documents methods that go back at least four thousand years. The display will feature and interpret the variety of contraceptive methods from these time periods, changes in those methods over time, and public reaction. It will focus upon the American experience, mirroring the dominant role of U.S. companies in this arena. The exhibit will be presented in tiers, general to specific, similar to the construction of Web sites. Visitors will be able to explore the history of contraception according to their level of interest, studying the subject in depth or giving it a cursory look.
Description
Displays will present pivotal events and developments chronologically, within the larger history of women and the family. Among other topics, visitors will learn about the following: legal restriction of contraceptive information and devices, beginning in the 1840s; the venereal disease epidemic during World War I, ended only by reluctant acceptance of condom use in the military; the reform campaign led by laywomen like Margaret Sanger and Clevelander Dorothy Brush to secure women’s rights and preserve the family unit; the connection of the birth control movement and eugenics beginning in the 1920s; the medicalization of birth control, with diaphragms dispensed by prescription in the 1930s; the advent in 1960 of oral contraception, the first highly reliable form of birth control; and the impact of recent innovations, from Norplant to the NuvaRing®.
Museum visitors will learn about the history of popular knowledge and practice. They will learn that while science proposes, society disposes: no matter what advances medical science offers, social norms and personal preference determine what form of birth control will be available and used. The chief “take-home message” of a visit to Contraception in North America will be that the desire to space one’s progeny—as old as human society—led people to be, at times creative, daring, and committed.
Audience
This exhibit will appeal to people across a wide spectrum. In addition to attracting tourists and those interested in history and/or medicine and health care, the unique display and its documentation will serve as an a resource for health care providers and educators, medical and historical researchers and professors, and students from middle school through high school and college to medical, law, or other graduate school. In the project’s second phase, a Web-based version and a traveling exhibit will take the information to a wider audience. Increased traffic on the Dittrick’s Web site since the arrival of the Skuy Collection already indicates extraordinary interest.
Background
The Dittrick Medical History Center traces its origins to 1898. Since 1926 the center has maintained a museum that presents the medical past to the public through exhibition galleries, lectures, monographs, and a Web site, www.case.edu/artsci/dittrick/site2/. Today the Dittrick is an interdisciplinary study center of the College of Arts and Sciences of Case Western Reserve University. The Dittrick Museum ranks in the top five medical history museums in North America.
In November 2004, the Dittrick sought and acquired the Percy Skuy Collection on the History of Contraception, the largest and most comprehensive of its kind in the world. Before this time, this remarkable group of about 700 objects was available to the public on only a limited basis at the Janssen-Ortho Inc. plant in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Then called the Museum of Contraception, the collection is now on temporary display at the Dittrick, while the center constructs a new gallery that will house the permanent exhibit, Contraception in North America: Science, Society, and Stories.
