Targeting D.C.’s most vulnerable residents
Hrdlicka, an immigrant from what is now the Czech Republic, grew up in New York and joined the Smithsonian in 1903 to run its new division of physical anthropology. At what was then called the U.S. National Museum, Hrdlicka began assembling what would become one of the largest collections of human remains in the world.
The anthropologist, who was active in the later-discredited field of eugenics, started gathering brains almost immediately, eager to create a collection that would allow him to compare anatomical differences among races.
In 1904, Hrdlicka wrote a guide for donating brains and other human remains to the museum and noted that laws sometimes required permission in cases of a premature or stillborn infant, but that “smaller specimens” such as fetuses and embryos could be “sent directly to the Museum.”
Two years earlier, D.C. officials had outlawed removing bodies from graves without a permit, but allowed medical schools to secure unclaimed or unburied bodies through the D.C. Health Department’s Anatomical Board.
To obtain remains, Hrdlicka enlisted help from the Anatomical Board and individual doctors in the Medical Society of the District of Columbia. Working with Hrdlicka, the doctors — often prominent members of D.C. society — took organs from Black people, children and people at institutions such as the city’s almshouse.
Museum records show Hrdlicka performed most of the autopsies of the local residents himself, though doctors also removed and sent brains to him.
In 1909, Daniel S. Lamb, a pathologist at the Army Medical Museum who would send more than 20 brains to Hrdlicka over nine years, performed a postmortem examination on a deaf and mute man and offered the brain to Hrdlicka. At the time, deaf people across the country had been targeted by eugenicists who wanted to establish sterilization laws to prevent them from having children.
“If you care to have it I will turn it over to you; and if you should find anything interesting in it I trust that you will let me know,” Lamb wrote in a letter to Hrdlicka, who eventually added the brain to his collection.
Lamb lamented how new laws and policies prevented access to human remains. During a 1903 speech to the medical society, Lamb said doctors could previously conduct postmortem examinations without consent.
“That time has passed,” he said. “The consent of relatives or friends must now be first obtained. … It is especially difficult now to obtain permission to examine the brain.”
In the Smithsonian’s files on the 74 local brains, The Post found correspondence indicating that only three brains had been donated by the person or their family.