A Response to Medicine Bottle with Sponge

The digital image of a mid-19th century, “medicine bottle with sponge” from the archeology collection of the Abiel Smith School illuminates a relationship between historical silences, race, medicine, and computer vision. Established between 1834 and 1835 as a segregated public school for free Black students in Boston, the Abiel Smith school was the first public school in the city and one of the first in the United States to educate Black children.  In 1845 the school served approximately 100 students from a population of approximately 1,900 Black Bostonians and was named for white, wealthy philanthropist, Abiel Smith. Historical records indicate that mostly white teachers oversaw the education of the Black students in a physical building that lacked the same quality and provided fewer educational resources than those which white students in Boston experienced. During the existence of the school, Boston’s Black residents successfully protested segregated education and petitioned for the removal of white teachers for inappropriate conduct and harsh treatment of Black students. By 1855, Abiel Smith was converted into an integrated school.

On its face, the discovery of the medicine bottle and sponge in the archeological dig of the Abiel Smith School indicates that the mostly white teachers and a few Black staff may have treated Black students with chloroform or ether for pain and other ailments, to “aid in symptoms caused by poor urban living.” Prior to the United States’ Civil War, few devices existed to administer ether and chloroform. This meant that the drugs were administered by pouring liquid onto a sponge or cloth in a bottle, so that a person could inhale the vapors of ether and chloroform to sedate the central nervous system. Although concerns about their safety were widely debated, both ether and chloroform were administered as anesthesia to children during painful medical procedures in the 19th century. Chloroform was particularly risky, often resulting in high mortality rates when administered incorrectly.

However, given that Black parents accused teachers and administrators of harsh treatment and nineteenth century scientific racism falsely indicated that Black people’s bodies were biologically different from white people, we must analyze the significance of medicine and bottle through anti-Black racism. According to German physician and phrenologist, Johann Spurzheim, who practiced a pseudoscience that involved the measurement of the skull to predict mental traits and intellect, “colored children of the colored population Boston” exhibited “faculties less, and the whole forehead in general, smaller than in the whites.” Medical and scientific racism about Black children’s mental aptitude such as this ran parallel to ideas that their bodies exhibited “greater muscular development,” again, relative to white children. Antebellum medicine also determined that Black people’s nervous systems were “peculiarly excitable” and Black women’s reproductive organs were in a “constant state of either erotic excitement or disease from puberty to old age. Characterizations of Black children and people as having intellectually deficient minds and diseased bodies, ones that were more suited to physical labor, relegated them to a sub-human status, one that was closer to animal than to full humanity. 

Situated in medical and scientific racism of the nineteenth century, then, the image of medicine bottle with sponge goes beyond simply indicating that white teachers, or even Black staff or teachers, may have benignly used chloroform or ether to treat their Black students’ aches and pains. Mid-nineteenth century Black Bostonians not only experienced segregated schools but a healthcare system that was stratified by race. While Boston’s oldest hospital system, the Boston Dispensary (1796) did not explicitly prohibit or designate care for patients by racial categories in the early nineteenth century, its lack of specific language around race should not suggest that Black patients received equitable care relative to their white counterparts. Indeed, the growing development of hospital systems after the Civil War that were segregated or inaccessible to Black people demonstrates a racist healthcare system that provided substandard care to them. Accordingly, the hypothesis that white teachers treated Black students with chloroform or ether must sit at the intersections of a racially hostile medical and educational system that threatened and posed harm to their health and wellbeing. 

Viewing “medicine bottle with sponge” through computer vision – artificial intelligence that trains computers to analyze and interpret digitized images – allows for deeper insight into the significance of decontextualized images as well as historical silences. Image processing algorithms (IPA) provide a means to go within the digital image of medicine bottle and sponge. When the digital image of medicine bottle and sponge is uploaded to Google Cloud Vision API, the Safesearch detection analyzes it, searching for the presence of “explicit content” that might place the image in five categories (adult, spoof, medical, violence and race). Computer vision returns results that indicate that the image medicine bottle with sponge is “very unlikely” to contain information that is either medical or violent. 

While one could argue, depending on a specific vantage point, that the image, medicine bottle with sponge, might be representative of all five categories, I am most interested in exploring the notion of “very unlikely” in relationship to “medical” and “violence.”  Machine learning models deny and lack the capacity to see medicine bottle with sponge as both medical and violent. However, historical context and facts belie the “ground truth,” knowledge, according to computer scientists, that is established by image processing algorithms (IPA). Corresponding materials found at the Abiel Smith School validate the bottle as a medical device for chloroform or ether.  Ironically, despite a jpg file that is labeled “Medicine Bottle with Sponge,” the IPA is unable to recognize it as such. Nonetheless, medicine bottle with sponge contains a figurative and literal history of violence through educational, medical, and scientific racism. 

Ironically, the IPA’s rather banal designation of “very unlikely” to analyze the image of the medical bottle and sponge’s description as medical or as violent puts computer vision and human vision in conversation with each other in a remarkable way. Like the historical myth that racism in the North did not inflict harm on Black people – unlike the Southern counterpart – the IPA is trained to see medicine bottle and sponge as relatively harmless. The deceptive translucency of the medicine bottle is what makes it such a powerfully opaque image as it suggests to viewers a rather simplistic reading. However, on closer analysis, one realizes that the black sponge literally blocks the vision of both computer and human vision, challenging both from reading through the image to a more accurate and likely history of violence. In this regard, we might read the sponge as symbolic of a functional, and often intentional, effort, to ignore the history of Black people’s pain and suffering from systemic and structural anti-Black racism. Therefore, both human and computer vision obscure the full significance of medicine bottle with sponge for understanding how the seemingly benign might turn racially malignant for Black people.

The computer vision analysis of medicine bottle with sponge holds a powerful lesson on how we might combat and correct the historical silences fostered by human vision. Much like algorithms that must be trained with diverse data and examples to understand the various ways images might be interpreted and understood by computers, so too does human vision require education and training to help people recognize the history of anti-Black racism in the most innocuous of images.