Dissection as Social Process: Anatomical Products in the Nineteenth-century United States

Summary

In the nineteenth-century United States, the number of medical schools increased significantly, which in turn spurred efforts to ensure a steady supply of bodies for gross anatomy courses. Supply was largely derived from marginalized groups such as African Americans and almshouse inmates. Based on available archaeological and skeletal evidence this paper approaches dissection as a multivalent process that transformed participants in radically different ways. For the medical student, the process of cutting into the body was cast as a heroic journey and the triumph of reason over superstition. In this rite of passage, the medical student was the novitiate, the dissection room the stage, and the body the focus upon which new identity and social bonds were forged. Alternatively, many of the individuals appropriated for dissection were removed from their communities and isolated from process of memorialization. Rather, their bodies were transformed into teaching tools, curated and displayed as specimens, or treated as trash. These material outcomes underscore both the distance between social personhood and anatomical object and the unease practitioners sometimes felt with the “products” of their work. Remnants of anatomized bodies occupied a shifting materiality between person and thing which further naturalized structural inequalities of race and wealth.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• The Poetics of Processing: Memory formation, cosmology and the handling of the dead

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