A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. [Hardcover]
Author: Michael Sappol | Language: English | ISBN: 069105925X | Format: PDF, EPUB
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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 Ministers praised or denounced anatomy from the pulpit; rioters sacked medical schools; and legislatures passed or repealed laws permitting medical schools to take the bodies of the destitute.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.
- Hardcover: 448 pages
- Publisher: Princeton University Press; 1 edition (January 1, 2002)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 069105925X
- ISBN-13: 978-0691059259
- Product Dimensions: 1.1 x 6 x 9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,619,939 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
In this book Sappol examines the practice of anatomy and its place in the developing medical profession in 19th century America. The book goes on to explore the deeper cultural significance of what anatomy meant to the profession as well as its social implications when it came to procuring bodies for anatomy classes. The issue of the impact of anatomy on self fashioning of identity as well as its uses for social and moral education of young people are also explored. The chapter on Edward Foote's Sammy Tubbs children's anatomy books was especially interesting and is a good illustration of both 19th century social mores and social attitudes. The second-to-last chapter on the anatomy museums contrasts and put into opposition the lofty claims of the medical profession and its use as popular entertainment.By Lionel S. Taylor
In his conclusion Sappol states that anatomy was invested with a variety of meanings and that not all of these meanings were intended. In its efforts to popularize anatomy in order to gain legitimacy and authority for itself, the medical profession opened it up for the appropriation of others from enterprising businessmen to social scientist reformers and of course politicians all seeking to use it for their own ends. In many ways this is similar to the way medical knowledge is used to this day. This is a very good book on the place of anatomy in the medical profession and society at large.
This book is incredibly well researched and written. My only complaint is the binding, pages fell out several times during the first reading!By Nikki
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