| Author |
Sappol, Michael |
| Year |
2002 |
| Publisher |
Princeton: Princeton University Press |
| Keywords |
|
Abstract
Amazon (2013):
"A Traffic of Dead Bodies" enters the sphere of bodysnatching medical students, dissection-room
pranks, and anatomical fantasy. It shows how nineteenth-century American physicians
used anatomy to develop a vital professional identity, while claiming authority over
the living and the dead. It also introduces the middle-class women and men, working
people, unorthodox healers, cultural radicals, entrepreneurs, and health reformers
who resisted and exploited anatomy to articulate their own social identities and visions.
The nineteenth century saw the rise of the American medical profession: a proliferation
of practitioners, journals, organizations, sects, and schools. Anatomy lay at the
heart of the medical curriculum, allowing American medicine to invest itself with
the authority of European science. Anatomists crossed the boundary between life and
death, cut into the body, reduced it to its parts, framed it with moral commentary,
and represented it theatrically, visually, and textually. Only initiates of the dissecting
room could claim the privileged healing status that came with direct knowledge of
the body. But anatomy depended on confiscation of the dead - mainly the plundered
bodies of African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, and the poor. As black
markets in cadavers flourished, so did a cultural obsession with anatomy, an obsession
that gave rise to clashes over the legal, social, and moral status of the dead. Ministers
praised or denounced anatomy from the pulpit; rioters sacked medical schools; and
legislatures passed or repealed laws permitting medical schools to take the bodies
of the destitute. Dissection narratives and representations of the anatomical body
circulated in new places: schools, dime museums, popular lectures, minstrel shows,
and sensationalist novels. Michael Sappol resurrects this world of graverobbers and
anatomical healers, discerning new ligatures among race and gender relations, funerary
practices, the formation of the middle-class, and medical professionalization. In
the process, he offers an engrossing and surprisingly rich cultural history of nineteenth-century
America.
