En 1849, the faculty of the Ohio College of Medicine unanimously passed a staunch rule: “Students shall not divulge the secrets of the dissecting room or they shall lose the privilege of access therein.”
. Similar warnings were issued in the late 19th century by most medical schools in the United States. One had to be prudent if one wanted to continue with one of the fundamental practices in the training of future doctors. But why so much secrecy?
The reason is that anatomy professors, given the enormous increase in medical schools, had to sometimes move within the limits of the law to obtain the essential element in dissections: dead human bodies. They had tried to push for laws to allow bodies that were not claimed in hospitals to go to medical schools, but the supply was always less than the demand.
Given the shortage of corpses, the ‘resuscitators’ were paid, who stole recently buried bodies. A student found his own father’s on the table
To meet the needs of their students, they reached agreements with the so-called ‘resuscitators’, professionals who recovered recently buried bodies from their graves. Students might be tempted to divulge the source or identity of those bodies they were studying, hence the need to keep the dissecting rooms secret. Professors John Harley Warner and James M. Edmonson have inquired into these secrets, who in their book Dissection They do an exhaustive review of this practice.
One of the most macabre ways of obtaining bodies for science occurred in Europe, in 1820, in Edinburgh. William Burke and William Hare strangled 16 people before selling their bodies to a renowned Scottish anatomy professor. Burke went down to posterity, because his last name is used to name in English the action of killing someone and then trafficking his body. The business demanded that the ‘product’ be in the best possible condition. Some corpses were transported in barrels with sawdust and alcohol from the cemeteries of the south to the north. The vast majority were black corpses.
Some students also wanted to participate in the business and became ‘resuscitators’ in order to finance their studies. The body was listed for around $15. Such a proliferation of corpses caused situations that forced the students to break the secrecy of the dissection room, sometimes with a shout. That happened to John Harrison, a medical student at Ohio College, who in 1878 discovered the body of his father on the table, which he himself had buried a few days before.
More than for what was learned, the dissection functioned as a ritual, a test of the student’s vocation. Hence it was ‘immortalized’
Both teachers and students understood that dissection was a transgressive practice, practiced within social, legal and moral limits, but at the same time it was perceived as a rite in the training of the doctor. Beyond what it provided in terms of practical knowledge, it meant a moral transformation for the students, a true litmus test of their vocation and one of the few activities they did in a group. Dissection becomes an unavoidable element in the configuration of its own identity as a medical collective.
He identifies them to such an extent that medical students begin to photograph themselves in the dissection room next to the corpses.
Until the 18th century, dissections were made by an expert and the students observed. In the 19th century, students began to examine the bodies and the act became for them a key and identity activity. In the image, students from the University of North Carolina pose outside in 1890, where they have taken out the dissection instruments. They are formally dressed and only the one closest to the corpse wears an apron. In the first line appears the beadle, sitting on one of the buckets used to deposit remains. That the photo included the doorman, always African-American, was quite common, because they were also guardians of the room’s secrets.
Most of the dissected corpses were African American. According to John Harley Warner Professor of the History of Medicine, 79 percent. Even when the bodies were obtained only pursuant to law, more than two-thirds were still black. In Philadelphia, in 1882, a gang that had been grave-robbing African-American graveyards for a decade was broken up.
Put without losing your composure
As women entered the university, so did dissections. In the image, students of anatomy and hygiene at the University for Women in Oxford, Ohio, pose with a skeleton in 1904. They had to do it “without compromising their dignity or sacrificing their femininity.”
Students from the first dental school in the United States pose in 1891 with a corpse under which, despite the seriousness of their faces, they have humorously written ‘Jack the Ripper’. These images weren’t widely publicized, but they weren’t hidden either. Sometimes they were sent as greeting cards for Easter and Christmas. Other times what appeared in the image was the sarcasm or macabre ingenuity of the young students. Thus, under the corpse they wrote: «He Lived for others, he died for us», «Their loss of him is our gain» or «He rests in pieces». A whole catalog of black humor of the time.
‘Dehumanized’ medicine
Sometimes the photos with the corpses served as a ‘harmless’ joke. But, in others, it was spread with racist texts on the front, such as “sliced black.” The dissemination of these photographs fostered, from the 70s, a debate among doctors regarding how to humanize the student’s encounter with the corpse, what to do so that the custom of death or illness does not dehumanize them.
