Contagion Thinking as a Basis for Museums

Last week I caught an interesting story about water reclaimation on NPR's Morning Edition.  The gist of the story is that even when they're assured that sewage has been fully cleaned, most people will not want to drink the treated water--the clean product is too associated with its dirty beginnings in their minds.  You can listen to the full story here, but the part that interested me the most is excerpted here from the transcript on Morning Edition's website:

"Carol Nemeroff is one of the psychologists Haddad recruited to help him with his research. She works at the University of Southern Maine and studies psychological contagion. The term refers to the habit we all have of thinking — consciously or not — that once something has had contact with another thing, their parts are in some way joined.'It's a very broad feature of human thinking,' Nemeroff explains. 'Everywhere we look, you can see contagion thinking.'  Contagion thinking isn't always negative. Often, we think it is some essence of goodness that has somehow been transmitted to an object — think of a holy relic or a piece of family jewelry. Nemeroff offers one example: 'If I have my grandmother's ring versus an exact replica of my grandmother's ring, my grandmother's ring is actually better because she was in contact with it — she wore it. So we act like objects — their history is part of the object.'"

The bedroom in Petersen House where Lincoln died

And really isn't this thinking what's behind any historical museum?  The Petersen House in DC is like any other late 19th-century home...except that Abraham Lincoln died there.  The pillow that's encased in plexiglass there is not different from any other pillow, except for a connection to Lincoln that is almost completely intangible.   But even as I type that, I feel differently--that's the pillow that Abraham Lincoln died on.  No other pillow that was in that house on April 14th, 1865 matters, but that particular piece of bedding is now a piece of history, thanks to its proximity.  Other pillows from that house don't matter, and a replica wouldn't carry the same weight.

Even Ford's Theater is an example of Dr Nemeroff's contagion thinking, in a more roundabout manner.  The original theater was converted to office space and store house for decades, and all the furnishings from Lincoln's day were removed.  What visitors see now is a replica of the original theater that reopened in 1968, not the actual theater where Lincoln was shot.  If someone were to build that same replica even a block away, it would be a chintzy recreation of a morbid slice of American history.  But to rebuild it in the place where Lincoln actually died...well, that's just preserving history.

While I can stand back objectively from the waste water discussion in the original article and assert that the cleaned water is totally separate from it's origins, I can't say the same thing for the artifacts in the museums I love.  The objects we have that have touched history--whether it's a grandmother's ring of a president's pillow--are important, in ways that it is sometimes hard to define.