Murray Gilbert was born with an elbow that bent the wrong way. Edith Murrock, the wife of a successful 19th-century surgeon specializing in physical deformities, made Gilbert a jacket with a special sleeve to accommodate the errant arm–or so Jennifer Friedrich would have you believe.
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Friedrich, an artist who manages Columbia College’s experimental photography and printmaking lab, has created an installation for the International Museum of Surgical Science that treads the fine line between fact and fiction. Titled “Artifacts From the Cabinet of Dr. Murrock,” the installation features antique objects, handmade clothing, and mock daguerreotypes–images printed on glass with a liquid photo emulsion using a polyurethane and iridescent-paint base–all displayed in glass cases borrowed from the museum. A series of explanatory cards begins, “In the 1950s, an anonymous party donated a large trunk to the museum, the contents of which are displayed in this room.” The cards go on to lay out a sentimental narrative of the Murrocks, a childless Boston couple whose “family” consisted of people suffering from deformities and injuries: people who needed love, attention, and, of course, medical treatment.
Some of the “daguerreotype” images, most appropriated from medical textbooks, depict horrific calamities inflicted on the human body: a jawless woman, a man with a goiter the size of a melon, a Civil War soldier whose leg is rife with gangrene. Others are simple portraits or group photos of men and women in period attire. Friedrich interpreted the images as she saw fit, inventing the names and stories of the victims. “This guy here, I’m saying he had a deformed arm at birth that bent the wrong way, because it kind of looks that way in the photo,” Friedrich says, pointing to the image of “Murray Gilbert.” “But actually he’s holding his forearm up with his other hand, and this upper part [of his arm] has no bone in it. I sewed a coat to fit a backwards arm, so I changed his story.”
–Susan Stahl
