Eszter Őze: Museum of Working Bodies-Social Museum (1901-1945): Body and Work, Care and Discipline

By the end of the nineteenth century, museums had long become more than mere showcases for the private collections of privileged collectors, having also turned into community educational spaces for the general public. Likewise, the social and public health museums, which emerged at the turn of the century, did not simply aim to be the latest spaces opening up the hidden treasures of palaces to the public, but rather sought to share a different kind of knowledge connected to the present. All of this lead to the appearance of the body, living conditions, and problems of the worker; museums included the lower classes in their unity of representations, classes that should have remained invisible in their previous representational practices: poverty, poor health, or the sick body of the urban worker would not fit into any previously existing museum categories. However, this was not merely a gesture of inclusion, it also coincided with the strengthening of the worker movement and the institutional steps taken to pacify it. Thus, the working class appeared not only as visitors but also as exhibited ‘objects’ in museum spaces, which simultaneously served the purposes of social control and addressing social issues.

Eszter Őze examines the cultural history of health and education museums, focusing on the Social Museum in Budapest in particular. Through the representational policy of the exhibitions, the book unveils how body, illness, hygiene, and biopolitics are presented within the museum spaces at the turn of the century. It displays the history of an institution where the biological traits of the human race were translated into strategic instruments for exercising power, one which represented the care guidelines for the collective body of the population – guidelines that have by now almost been destroyed without a trace.