Trigger warning: this article includes references to infant death and institutional abuse

If you’ve been to a museum about the history of medicine or surgery you’ve probably seen loads of preserved human remains that have been used as teaching aids or in scientific research.

At London’s Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons you can see human tissue like the Evelyn tables from the 1600s. These display the dissected system of arteries, nerves and veins from an unknown adult, which were then pasted on four boards.

But it’s often not just adult remains on show and it is common to see those of fetuses and infants among collections.

Museum Vrolik in Amsterdam in the Netherlands boasts an acclaimed collection featuring embryos, preserved fetuses with congenital anomalies, and foetal skeletons. These remains are normal viewing at such institutions and are often presented as neutral repositories of scientific knowledge. However, who they belonged to and how they were obtained rarely feature alongside how scientists used or learned from them.

Our research into a skeletal collection of fetuses and infants from early colonial New Zealand, held in the W.D. Trotter Anatomy Museum at the University of Otago, reveals how deeply embedded inequity was in the making of these collections. We examined how societal control – from birth through to death – shaped whose babies bodies were taken and why. What emerges is a stark picture........

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