Frederik Ruysch's cabinet of curiosities, commonly referred to simply as the Cabinet, was a museum Ruysch created in the Netherlands in the late 160ss. The Cabinet filled a series of small houses that Ruysch rented in Amsterdam and contained over 2,000 specimens, including preserved fetuses and infants. The collection remained in Amsterdam until it was purchased by Tsar Peter the Great of Russia in 1717 and transferred to St. Petersburg, Russia. Similar to Gunther von Hagens' twenty-first century Body Worlds exhibition, which presents bodies preserved through plastination, the Cabinet was open to both medical professionals and laypeople. The pieces in the Cabinet were life-like and aesthetically pleasing, making them valuable education tools for prenatal and infant anatomy as well as an effective way of garnering public interest in anatomy.

The US Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, on 27 October 1990, and then-President George H. W. Bush signed it into law on 16 November 1990. Overseen primarily by the US National Parks Service, NAGPRA is a federal law that governs the treatment and possession of Indigenous human remains and culturally significant objects discovered on federal or tribal land. Prompted by demands in the 1970s and 1980s for repatriation of Indigenous remains and objects held in museums and research centers, the act grants direct familial descendants and associated tribes the authority to determine the appropriate fate of those items. It also establishes a legal process through which tribes can reclaim those items from museums or other institutions receiving federal funding. As the first US federal law to directly assert Indigenous people’s legal ownership over their cultural items and bodily remains, NAGPRA established a structured system of repatriation and collaboration among tribes, museums, and scientific institutions.