As scientific understanding of the human body expanded in the nineteenth century, a growing interest arose in the desire for anatomical research and training in American medical institutions.[1] During this time American medical schools began to follow the French model of hospital medicine that emphasized dissection which came to be viewed as a new and crucial step on the path toward essential medical practice for it provided some of the only hands-on experience students received.[2] Accordingly, this interest gave rise to a serious need for cadavers to accommodate the new expectations of medical training that included anatomical work.[3] In this way, the prestige of medical institutions relied on the ability to resource cadavers, and access to dissection material was advertised in local newspapers and medical journals.[4] Todd Savitt states, “Institutional reputations were made and broken on the basis of the availability of teaching specimens.”[5]  This need for bodies for human dissection led to the further exploitation and targeting of marginalized bodies, particularly black bodies, both before and after the Civil War.

            Indeed, the number of cadavers a school had available was at the forefront of administrative concern. However, the anatomical landscape of America in the 1800s was rife with controversy concerning cadaver acquisition and dissection. On one hand, Christian religious groups objected to dissection for it destroyed the body and conflicted with Biblical ideas about resurrection on judgement day,[6] On the other hand, many secular observers objected to dissection as a disrespectful action that corrupted the medical students who practiced it.[7] Consequently, dissection and cadaver collecting remained illegal in most of the country for most of the 19^th century.

Even so, medical schools needed students, and in the early 19^th century before there were any laws legalizing dissection or cadaver acquisition, the faculty at American medical colleges worried about losing potential students to schools abroad, like those in France, where dissection was legal, and cadavers were plentiful.[8] Before the Civil War, most cadavers were supplied through the use of marginalized bodies such as executed convicts[9] and the sale of the bodies of enslaved people in the South.[10] The supply of cadavers was never enough and thus what resulted from the demand was the genesis of illicit practices around the country. The most egregious form of cadaver acquisition was the employment of “resurrectionists” or body snatchers who exhumed corpses from graveyards and sold them to medical schools. In the South resurrectionists were most often black Americans and usually former slaves, men like Grandison Harris at the Medical College of Georgia, who procured cadavers for the faculty both before and after the Civil War.[11] The bodies supplied by resurrectionists invariably were stolen from graveyards and were rarely anything other than black bodies.[12] In addition to the use of black resurrectionists, elaborate systems of cadaver exports were established to ship bodies around the country, hiding the cadavers in shipments with other products, further squelching value from the corpses and involving the cooperation of medical colleges and their anatomists on staff.[13]

In time, outrage over graveyards being desecrated grew and incited legal action, often leading to the arrest of faculty members for trafficking in dead bodies.[14]  By the end of the 1880s, a bevy of laws concerning cadavers and grave theft were passed, making it a crime in most states and leading to the creation of the first anatomy acts for the legal procurement of cadavers.[15] These laws, however, did little to change the demographics of the bodies procured for dissection. After legalization, bodies used in medical schools remained inordinately those of the black and marginalized; furthermore, prices were still placed on the bodies, about $10 per cadaver.[16] Inevitably, these laws hurt the resurrectionists who were still employed by medical schools after 1880 but who bore the brunt of legal action if caught, as opposed to their white, institutional employers.

The history of cadaver theft in America for the use of medical education is blatant exploitation. The practice was popularized due to a pressing need for the bodies to be used as marketing tools to recruit students thus ensuring medical schools stayed in business.  The views on dissection, however, were never honorable, and because of the history of dehumanization and racism, black bodies were chosen to fulfill that need. Exploited by medical institutions, the marginalized were also made to carry out the illicit procurement of bodies as resurrectionists.  In this way, the corpses of marginalized people of color were used emotionlessly and shamefully to ensure that the smooth operation of medical schools continued and that white bodies were spared the humiliation and destruction of dissection.[17] Black bodies in the dissection room were stolen from their graves and commodified with each scalpel cut.

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[1] Michael Sappol, A Traffic of dead bones: Anatomy and embodies social identity in nineteenth-century America (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002), 57-58.

[2] John Harley Warner and James M. Edmonson, Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine: 1880-1930 (New York: Blast Books, 2009), 9; Todd L. Savitt, “The Use of Blacks for Medical Experimentation and Demonstration in the Old South,” Journal of Southern History 48, no. 3 (August, 1982), 332.

[3] Dauba Ranet Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017), 157.

[4] Edward C. Halperin, “The Poor, the Black and the Marginalized as the Source of Cadavers in the United States Anatomical Education,” Clinical Anatomy 20 (2007): 491.

[5] Savitt, “The Use of Blacks,” 333.

[6] Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), 40-41.

[7] Sappol, Traffic, 95-97.

[8] Roach, Stiff, 42.

[9] Berry, Price,  152.

[10] Lane Allen, MD, “Transcript of Lecture,” Early History of the Medical College of Georgia: Grandison Harris. Augusta University Scholarly Commons (Accessed August 1, 2022), 3,    https://augusta.openrepository.com/handle/10675.2/623613.  Grandison Harris was a Gullah slave that the Dean of the Medical College of Georgia purchased in 1852 for $700.  Harris worked as a “resurrectionist” for the college securing bodies from Cedar Grove Cemetery.  After the Civil War he was paid $8 a month and eventually given the title of “janitor.”

[11] Berry, Price,  178-179.

[12] Berry, Price, 151.

[13] Halperin, “The Poor, the Black,” 489-95.

[14] Berry, Price, 183.

[15] Berry, Price, 182-186.

[16] Berry , Price, 186-187.

[17] Sappol, Traffic, 87.