In Georgia the exploitation of black bodies was carried out in medical schools as well. The best example of this practice is found in the history of the Medical College of Georgia, the medical school now associated with  the University of Georgia. As mentioned in the piece of cadaver theft, the Medical College of Georgia employed the services of Grandison Harris as a resurrectionist. Mr. Harris was bought as a slave and jointly owned by the seven faculty members at the medical college.[1]  He was purchased so that the school could maintain a constant supply of anatomical material, and he found the best sources for this supply in black graveyards, such as Augusta’s Cedar Grove Cemetery, an all-black graveyard.[2]  The employment of Grandison Harris continued after the end of the Civil War and slavery when he was employed as a janitor by the medical college for $8 per month, receiving a promotion and raise in 1895.[3] His status as employee instead of slave, however, did not change his job in sourcing cadavers for the school, and he continued to do so long after the end of slavery.[4] Mr. Harris’ service to the Medical College of Georgia was not novel, as established resurrectionists were commonly employed throughout the United States for the procurement of cadavers for anatomical use while diverting legal repercussions for the white professors. This situation was revealed in 1881 when Grandison Harris was arrested for cadaver theft, but his white employers were never charged.[5] Further, Harris’ presence on the roster of the Medical College of Georgia provides a clear example of how dehumanizing, racist views of black Americas was present in Georgia during slavery and segregation and influenced medical education in the Southern state.

          In time, however, the use of resurrectionists generated public outrage, and Georgia passed an act in 1887 legalizing dissection and ways to procure human remains.[6] In Georgia, this law neither stopped the use of resurrectionists[7] nor curbed the exploitation of marginalized bodies. In fact, the law only opened new pathways to target abuse of black bodies. A Georgia Anatomical Board was created to reinforce the act itself which legalized the channels for acquisition and possession of cadavers by “medical and dental schools and colleges of [the] State.”[8] The bodies this act designed for medical school use were those required to be buried at “public expense,” typically people who died in a “prison, chain gang, penitentiary company, morgue, public hospital,” or were simply unclaimed.[9] The Georgia Anatomical Board oversaw the sourcing, transport, and payment for cadavers to different schools with the Board’s secretary functioning as the main individual who managed the distribution of cadavers.[10] Yet, despite the passage of the act formalizing cadaver possession and the establishment of the Georgia Anatomical Board, little changed regarding the use and exploitation of bodies of color by white male faculty and students in Georgia medical schools.

          It is clear throughout the preserved correspondence of the Georgia Anatomical Board that the marginalized and disenfranchised were directly targeted for cadaver use in medical schools. In 1918, for instance, medical schools were enticed by the promise of government support after World War I and focused on improving institutional offerings in Georgia.[11] To facilitate this push for expansion, schools extended the list of permissible bodies for use in medical education to include those who died in state sanitariums, people who are institutionally marginalized.[12] In addition to the prospect of federal support, this decision to use bodies secured from state sanitariums was enhanced by a desire to compete with schools in other states also marketing the accessibility of human remains for dissection which was thus considered necessary to maintain the standing of the medical colleges in Georgia. On November 17^th, 1919, James Papez, secretary for the Georgia Anatomical Board, wrote that the use of bodies from sanitariums would maintain Georgia schools’ “grade A standing,” and cited Harvard and the University of Chicago as chief competitors already benefitting from similar actions.[13]  Other than sanitariums, other human remains secured for medical schools included the bodies of convicts,[14] the poor,[15] and bodies unclaimed from black morgues, like those run by David T. Howard and the Cox Brothers of Atlanta, who were paid $15 per body.[16] In all instances, these bodies belonged to those who were marginalized and outcast and were usually black, causing little to change concerning the source of bodies placed on anatomy tables.

527 permits for burial or removal are preserved in the Woodruff Health Sciences archives at Emory University that document the bodies which passed through the Georgia Anatomical Board to the Emory University School of Medicine from 1915 to 1941.  Of these cadavers, 511 or 97% were the human remains of people of color.[17] In other words, the passage of a law allowing for cadaver possession and methods of legal acquisition changed little about the kinds bodies used in medical schools in Georgia for marginalized bodies remained the primary source of human remains found on dissection tables.  Additionally, the reasons for hunting and hoarding cadavers remained the same; self-interest and the marketing of medical schools for prestige and to attract students.  The need for bodies was great, and black bodies were easily accessible.

          Throughout the history of medical education in the State of Georgia and in other parts of the country as well, the bodies of black people were targeted explicitly for use in dissection both before and after the Civil War.  The legalization of dissection changed nothing about the identity of bodies acquired. On both sides of these temporal boundaries of the Civil War and the creation of the Georgia Anatomical Board, black bodies were sacrificed and destroyed for the advancement of medical schools and the medical education of primarily white men. The only thing that changed was the creation of a legal mechanism to obfuscate this injustice subsumed in institutionalized racism.

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[1] Edward C. Halperin, “The Poor, the Black, and the Marginalized as the Source of Cadavers in United States  Anatomical Education, Clinical  Anatomy 20 (2007), 492.

[2] Harold Jackson, “Race and Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Georgia,” in Bones in the Basement: Postmortem Racism in Nineteenth-Century Medical Training,” ed. Robert L. Blakely and Judith M. Harrington Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 200; Tarrya Telfair Sharpe, “Grandison Harris: The Medical College of Georgia’s Resurrection Man,” in Blakely and Harrington, Bones in the Basement, 206.

[3] Sharpe, “Grandison Harris,” 215.

[4] Jackson, “Race and Politics,” 200.

[5] Daina Ramey 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), 186.

[6] Berry, “Price,”186.

[7] Robert L. Blakely, “A Clandestine Past: Discovery at the Medical College of Georgia and Theoretical Foundations,” in Blakely and Harrington, Bones in the basement, 5.

[8] “An Act,” Georgia Anatomical Board Papers,” Historical Collection, Woodruff Health Sciences, Emory University, Box 2, Folder, 9, http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/pr7s3.  The Georgia Anatomical Board Papers will henceforth be listed as GABP.

[9] “An Act,” GABP, Box 2, Folder 9.

[10] “GAPB, Box 1 Folder 1.

[11]“Letter form Colonel Henry Page to James Papez,” GAPB, Box 1, Folder 2, dated February 15, 1918.  

 [12]“Letter from J. T. Brantley,” GABP, Box 1 Folder 2, dated September 4, 1918.  

[13] “Letter from James Papez,” GABP,  Box 1, Folder 2, dated  November 17.

[14] “Letter from the Coweta County Commissioner’s Office, GABP,  Box 1 folder 2, dated November 19, 1918.

[15]“Permit for burial of Elijah Gilbert,” GABP, Box 3 Folder 2.

[16] “Checkbook stub receipt to the Cox Brothers Funeral Home for $30,” GABP, Box 1 Folder 13 dated March 19, 1920; “Receipt for 3 bodies for David T. Howard Mortuary,” GABP, Box  2, Folder 3, dated November 1, 1917.  The Cox Brothers Funeral Home and David T. Howard Mortuary were African American businesses in Atlanta, Georgia.

[17] “Permits for removal or burial (1 of 4), 1915-1931,”GABP, Box 2 Folder 10; “Permits for removal or burial (2 of 4) 1915-1931,”GABP,  Box 2 Folder 11; “Permits for removal or burial (3 of 4) 1915-1931,” GABP, Box 2 Folder 12; “Permits for removal or burial (4 of 4) 1915-1931,” GABP,  Box 3, Folder 1; “Permits for removal or burial (1 of 4) 1932-1941,” GABP,  Box 3, Folder 2; “Permits for removal or burial (2 of 4) 1932-1941, GABP, Box 3, Folder 3; “Permits for removal or burial (3 of 4) 1932-1941,” GABP, Box 3, Folder 4; “Permits for removal or burial (4 of 4) 1932-1941, “ GABP, Box 3, Folder 5.