What happens when a museum director is woke?
You get a museum deciding that being a museum is “problematic” and hence decides to close down its own exhibits. Seriously. Because the idea of a museum itself is racist, sexist, and ableist.
What’s the point of museums?
Truthfully, we’re asking ourselves the same question.
— Wellcome Collection (@ExploreWellcome) November 25, 2022
The news broke this morning that the Wellcome Trust Collections is shutting down one of its most important exhibits–Medicine Man–because it celebrates Western medicine and is ableist. Medicine is ableist. Yep, it is. Gotta admit that, I guess.
In 2019 the Wellcome Trust appointed Melanie Keen as head of its collections, which includes over a million medicine-related items as well as an enormous library. Since that time Melanie has been on a journey of cultural vandalism, at first trying to “contextualize” the museum through non-Western interpretations and criticisms of the exhibits.
Now she has just decided to close the whole medical exhibit, which is the heart of Wellcome Collections.
A museum in London run by the Wellcome foundation health charity is to close one of its key galleries because it perpetuates “a version of medical history that is based on racist, sexist and ableist theories and language”.
The Wellcome Collection’s announcement on Saturday, affects a free permanent display called Medicine Man, which includes objects relating to sex, birth and death and includes anatomical models in wood, ivory and wax dating back to the 17th century. These were collected by Sir Henry Wellcome who amassed more than a million items on the history of health and medicine.
“The very fact that these items have ended up in one place, the story we told was that of a man with enormous wealth, power and privilege,” the museum said on Twitter.
Get it? The very possibility that a museum could be established is problematic. Wellcome’s wealth alone is bad enough, but using it to collect items significant enough to be displayed is doubly awful. Better that they have been disposed of, as most would have been, or dispersed into various hands unavailable for public viewing.
It is problematic that anybody could have established a collection important enough to share with the world.
The Twitter thread announcing the closure of the exhibit is a masterwork of woke idiocy.
This was problematic for a number of reasons.
Who did these objects belong to?
How were they acquired?
What gave us the right to tell their stories? pic.twitter.com/6RQAFQRPQZ
— Wellcome Collection (@ExploreWellcome) November 25, 2022
What gave us the right to tell their stories? Good question. Who, exactly, has the right to tell anyone’s stories? And if not Wellcome, then whom?
Clearly, people long dead, living often in cultures without the written word, aren’t going to. Better to have them completely disappear into the fog of history than a wealthy white man, born of missionaries who actually tended to the sick in the American hinterlands (Wellcome was born of missionaries in the wilds of Wisconsin in the 19th century), have the temerity to tell their story.
Best have all these objects and stories disappear, lest they fall into the hands of a cisgendered heteronormative White males. The pale penis people must be crushed!
Honestly, that is clearly her assertion. The indigenous people for whom she has chosen to speak may have had great cultures, but they were illiterate and hence without a voice in history. She, more than Wellcome, is shutting them out of history by her actions.
We can’t change our past.
But we can work towards a future where we give voice to the narratives and lived experiences of those who have been silenced, erased and ignored. pic.twitter.com/JRDMyN4lDL
— Wellcome Collection (@ExploreWellcome) November 25, 2022
An empty exhibit box with text written by woke staff is the new thing, apparently. Think on that. Melanie Keen is literally erasing history and replacing it with her own interpretation. In order to wipe away White Western oppression. Uh huh. That makes sense.
You cannot see history for yourself; in the service of people who cannot speak for themselves, Keen will tell you what they should have thought and done. Wellcome Trusts will now remove the evidence and write the history without that pesky “fact” and “historical object” stuff to muddy the waters.
This is not striking a blow for justice; it is Orwellian rewriting of history.
This is how we overcome Western bias. Have woke Westerners tell the story as they like.
This is why this Sunday on 27 November, we will be closing Medicine Man for good. https://t.co/WFrtvkCPRW
— Wellcome Collection (@ExploreWellcome) November 25, 2022
The “artist interventions” of which she speaks are pieces of wokery designed to make you hate yourself and your culture. Or, if you are not White and Western, to hate White Westerners. A neat trick if you can pull it off, since the museum is in London and probably attended by people who have used Wellcome’s medicines. Keen herself is British and I assume avails herself of Britain’s health care, forgoing the ministrations of witch doctors.
Too few people walked away from the exhibit hating the idea that the pharmaceutical company has spent nearly two centuries helping heal illness and relieve suffering. Hence the exhibit must be closed.
We want to change that. We want to do better. And we invite you to help us get there.
Tell us: what’s the point of museums? pic.twitter.com/kKG9Bv3xmg
— Wellcome Collection (@ExploreWellcome) November 25, 2022
What is the point of museums? Uh, if you can’t answer that question then get the hell out of the business of running one. Most of us know immediately, which is why we take the time to visit museums. Keen has spent her entire career curating art, so if she hasn’t figured it out, then perhaps she should give up the job.
The closure of the Medicine Man exhibit was announced Sunday morning, and already the museum has been flooded with criticism. While a few uber-woke people embrace the idea, most seem to think that this is a form of cultural vandalism. It amounts to an erasure of history–removing from view irreplaceable historical artifacts in order to…what? Pretend that Western medicine hasn’t been a boon to humanity?
The most “problematic” exhibit–removed over 2 years ago–was a painting of a doctor tending to an African child in the 19th century. It was described by the museum curator as depicting an African man kneeling before a Western doctor. But the painting clearly does not show the scene that way at all.
In fact, the doctor too is on his knees. Both the doctor and the African man are tending to an ill child. Certainly nobody is worshipping the doctor–how could they be? Jesus himself is there imploring the doctor to selflessly help a fellow human being.
This is wokery at work. They see things that aren’t even there. Every single person in the painting is fixated on the ill boy, certainly not worshipping either the doctor or even Christ Himself.
Perhaps a Western Christian man helping a non-Western/non-Christian person is offensive? Would it be better to have dismissed the suffering of a person from another culture?
Woke people shoehorn everything into a very constrained and ridiculous set of conceptual boxes. “White bad” being the biggest. And in order to get their point across they are willing to literally wipe away vast amounts of evidence, including entire museums apparently. Museums are too multifaceted, have too much evidence that needs to be hidden. Hence, apparently, they should be closed.
It has only been a few hours since this announcement, so it is impossible to know whether the decision will actually stick. I expect that the museum’s director anticipated some pushback, but the volume may surprise her. I hope it has.
Western culture has incubated ideas that are destroying it from within. Unfortunately the elite in charge in the last generation handed the reigns over to a generation determined to destroy our civilization. They are succeeding.
