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Are We Running Out of Bodies? Dissection and Medicine

I've spent a surprising number of hours unearthing the unusual history of anatomy, dissection, and yes--body snatching. That story links early anatomists like Vesalius (Fabric of the Human Body) to murderers Burke and Hare, to the grave-robbery that supplied bodies to a growing medical community. Here at the Dittrick Museum, we have a comprehensive collection of dissection photography as a rite of passage in American medicine 1880-1930, and curator James Edmonson and John Harley Warner put together an entire pictorial book of them. Between my work on the history of medicine and my research for Death's Summer Coat (US...

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Buried History: A Halloween Post

We've spent the last few posts describing the famous--and the infamous--body snatching incidents of our local, regional, and national past. What better way to follow up all that grave-robbing that with a Halloween post about our favorite Cleveland "graveyard": The Lakeview Cemetery. But what is a graveyard? And is it the same thing as a cemetery? The words are often used interchangeably, but there are historical reasons for the shift in terminology. Traditionally, the green space or yard area surrounding a church housed the graves of its parishioners, thus a grave-yard. But by the late 18th century, many of these...

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Grave Robbing for "The Benefit of the Living"

Rattle his bones over the stones, He’s only a pauper, whom nobody owns.  Imagine you are a sick pauper living in Cleveland, Ohio in 1855. For shelter and medical attention, you stay at the newly built City Infirmary, where faculty and students of the Cleveland Medical College offer their services. Alas, your illness cannot be cured and you die – friendless and alone. Your body is taken to the Potter’s Field in Woodland Cemetery across town. But there it is not to stay. In November 1855, the Cleveland police caught a young demonstrator of anatomy, Dr. Proctor Thayer, with two young medical...

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Body Snatching, You Say?

Gross Anatomy, or the dissection of bodies by medical students for study has not always been a given of medical training. In fact, the practice has been fraught almost since the first, a battleground over bodies from the religious prohibition of the pre-modern period to a “gory” New York City riot in the eighteenth century when an enraged public rose up against body-snatching anatomists. What caused these tensions? Inconsistencies of jurisprudence and issues of class and race were all factors in the race to obtain a suitable corpse... And, given shortages, that sometimes meant "by any means necessary." Let's...

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