Boxed Bodies:Lessons from a Medical School Bone Box

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper Bodies: Excavating Archival Tissues and Traces", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This presentation will focus on a medical school bone box that was recently discovered in the basement of the Milton J. Rubenstein Museum of Science and Technology in Syracuse, New York. We view the isolated bone box as an archive in and of itself and reflective of the consequences of structural violence on living people. The bone box contains the isolated remains of at least 4 unknown individuals and likely dates to the early 1900s, a time when the demand for medical school cadavers led to increases in grave robbing that targeted marginalized individuals. Here we describe how the individuals in the bone box were reduced and separated from their living identities during their transformation into teaching specimens. This transformation can be used to challenge the boundaries of “bodies” by exploring the interactions of structural violence, the use of human remains in medical school education, and identity.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Paper Bodies: Excavating Archival Tissues and Traces

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow