Mary Ashberry
I AM LOOKING at the skeleton of a 3’6” tall woman on display in a glass case in the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. Mary Ashberry is her name, dead in childbirth, the year 1856, long before the antibiotics that could have saved her were discovered. Her baby’s cracked, broken skull lies at her feet, a tiny piece of a tiny being.
I am shocked and dismayed as I read the museum card, a description of a baby too big for its dwarf mother to deliver, frantic doctors trying to save Mary, breaking up the baby’s head to get it out of her small, misshapen body, a last minute C-section to extricate a babe stillborn. Mary herself died a few days later. Peritonitis, the card says.
I am curious to find out more about Mary. I search online and find out she worked in a brothel. A prostitute, a sex worker, her baby likely fathered by a john. Perhaps this baby was wanted. Something, someone, she could love, call her own and cherish. I think of the anguish Mary felt giving birth, the doctors who most likely had never treated a patient like her. Were they kind, compassionate, dedicated? Anxious to save mother and child? Probably not. Prostitutes have always been marginalized, reminders of a part of society no one wants to acknowledge.
I wonder how her skeleton came to this museum.