From Person to Specimen: Exploring the Necroviolence of Medical “Progress” from Charity Hospital Cemetery #2, New Orleans, LA (1847–1929)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Charity Hospital, which operated from the eighteenth century until Hurricane Katrina in 2005, served New Orleans’s poorest citizens. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the remains of many individuals who died at the hospital were used for medical dissection and autopsy. A collection of commingled skeletal remains associated with one of the Charity Hospital cemeteries shows evidence of the anatomization of these individuals. The sample (~1,000 fragments, MNI = 61) contains elements with standard autopsy cutmarks, as well as nonstandard cutmarks associated with either dissection, experimentation, or less-practiced student mistakes. Through an analysis of skeletal indicators of biological stress, we also see the embodiment of structural violence that these individuals faced in life etched onto their remains. Borrowing De León’s (2015) concept of necroviolence, we explore their (mis)treatment in death as a form of subjugation and structural violence, which was echoed by the inequalities they faced in life.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32084