Ebony and Ivy (32 page)

The
New York Journal
complained that Manhattan had been terrorized unnecessarily because the practitioners had access to the bodies of executed felons and the unclaimed corpses of drifters and the poor. Students supplemented this allotment by “ripping open the graves of strangers and negroes, about whom there was little feeling,” Joel Tyler Headley found, but went too far when they “dug up respectable people, even young women, of whom they made an indecent exposure.”
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Grave robbers who deferred to the economic hierarchy still offended antiaristocratic beliefs about the individual value and equality of human beings, unalienable dignities that supposedly continued into death.

Academics struggled against these moral and political limitations. “You have doubtless been informed of the great disturbance lately excited at this Institution by the base and unjustifiable conduct of some individuals who in a secret and clandestine manner opened a recess of the dead, and taking there from a body, exposed the same (instead of a subject regularly and lawfully procured without wounding the feelings of humanity) in the medical department for anatomical dissection,” President John Wheelock of Dartmouth confessed to the Hanover attorney and official Benjamin Gilbert on December 18, 1809. That day, Wheelock's administration promised to prevent the repetition of this “criminal act” and assured Gilbert of the full cooperation of the faculty and governors in any investigations of any member of the college participating in body snatching or illegal dissections. They unilaterally selected officials from all the surrounding towns to form a visiting committee with the right to examine the medical department's labs and lecture rooms and the rooms of the medical or science students to pursue any rumors or reports of grave robbing. The medical students elected a committee of five who made a formal admission and apology to President Wheelock and the faculty. Their actions were “nothing short of sacrilege” and had unfairly damaged Professor Smith's reputation.
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“Whereas rumors of an unpleasant nature are circulated purporting that Bodies from the Cemeteries of the City have been brought to this College for dissection,” the trustees of Physicians and Surgeons began apologetically in 1814, before condemning such extralegal practices. It was the year of their union with Columbia College. The board mandated that the anatomy professor inspect all corpses to guarantee that they had been obtained legally and were treated “in a decorous and proper manner.” Such declarations were typically made with a wink. Just a few years later, the trustees aggressively bargained for a lot neighboring the medical school to enhance “safety and convenience” and “answer for the purposes of a stable.” The anatomist Wright Post put up the money. The new lot provided a more private and secure way to receive corpses stolen during the students' “nocturnal expeditions.” A contemporary Columbia medical student, Moses Champion, assured his brother, Dr. Reuben Champion Jr., that the school's “anatomical museum
is very extensive” and that the medical classes were already dissecting in rotation: six classes to a cycle, with four students in each class. In 1819 Governor DeWitt Clinton ordered a watch for Potter's Field and placed a $100 bounty on grave robbers—“no doubt to appease the people,” Champion complained, while admitting that the college had received more than thirty corpses that term.
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Professors, administrators, and students used bribery and collusion to create body-snatching networks that included local grave-diggers and mayors. “I heard that they would there give fifty dollars for a [human] subject,” Charles Knowlton recalled with delight. He became a skilled grave robber while apprenticing under Dr. Charles Wilder in Templeton, Massachusetts. Knowlton sold corpses to Dartmouth Medical School to pay his tuition, support himself, and fund private study in physicians' offices to supplement his courses. In 1823 he passed his exam for the doctor of medicine degree. He was jailed the following year for body snatching in Royalston. Dixi Crosby, an 1824 graduate of Dartmouth's medical program, disgraced himself and his family by grave robbing in his hometown of Gilmanton, New Hampshire; nonetheless, in 1838, Dartmouth extended Crosby a professorship in anatomy and surgery. Manhattan's medical colleges dispatched body snatchers to upstate New York during the winter to exploit a cold climate that preserved corpses in the ground and during transportation. Philadelphia's medical schools had a secret pact not to compete for corpses, to reduce the risks of public or professional scandals.
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“Civilization seems not to have removed the prejudice of the popular mind against the dissection of the human body,” complained Edward Dixon, an 1830 graduate of Rutgers Medical College. The union of Columbia's medical school with Physicians and Surgeons created a powerful lobby that weakened Rutgers's medical program—once second only to Philadelphia's. The rivalries also intensified the quest for cadavers. Dixon viewed this sport, however tasteless, as a logical consequence of an ill-conceived public policy. As editor of the
Scalpel
, a professional journal for surgeons, Dr. Dixon later vilified the hypocrisy of a government that held surgeons liable for “the most trivial blunder” while jailing those who exhumed bodies in order to practice their craft. After he was
released from jail, Dr. Charles Knowlton gave two lectures on the battle between science and superstition. In the decade before the Civil War, the professors of medicine at the University of the City of New York (New York University) were still lobbying the state legislature to deregulate dissection.
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Between the Revolution and the Civil War, seventeen separate mobs attempted to stop dissections and resurrections. In 1824 citizens from New Haven and West Haven raided the medical college at Yale after they discovered that the body of Bathsheba Smith, the teenage daughter of a local farmer, had been stolen from its grave. The residents found her corpse in the cellar of the school and carried it in a wagon through the city. Yale's students rushed to the medical school with guns and clubs, and officials eventually called out the militia. The Connecticut legislature responded by toughening the laws against body snatching and providing deceased criminals to medical programs. In 1830 a mob invaded Castleton Medical College in Vermont. The residents of Lexington, Kentucky, repeatedly vandalized Transylvania Medical College. Body snatchers trespassed upon the spiritual dignity of their most vulnerable neighbors in their most vulnerable state and disturbed the psychic comforts of the living. Doctors and students reached into the graves of those who could not protect themselves in death and practiced upon their bodies, rendering their corpses little more than “meat.” Those most vulnerable to exhumation and dissection were from the lowest social orders: African Americans, Irish, and Indians.
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Experimentation on colored corpses had fewer ethical, legal, and political constraints. The American printers who kept European anatomy texts and dissection manuals in constant circulation often sold these primers on newspaper pages that carried advertisements for slaves. The announcement for the anatomy course at New York Hospital, which appeared just months before the riots, ran alongside a plea for the capture and return of Isaac Allen, a twenty-three-year-old black baker enslaved to Ann Payne, and an alert that Bartholomew Andrew was looking to purchase a black boy through his dry goods store on William Street. White people's unlimited access to the bodies of slaves could hardly be thought to cease at death. Free black people and poorer white residents had
greater, but not full, self-determination. Researchers routinely accessed the corpses of poor and subjected people. In Philadelphia they took cadavers directly from the poorhouse, a practice that was certainly repeated in Manhattan, where the leading professors at the medical colleges were attending physicians at the almshouse.
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The dissecting room at Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia
SOURCE: Library of Congress

Atlantic slave traders, planters, and land speculators funded the rise of colonial science, incentivized a competition to prove the natural bases of social relations, and exposed colored peoples to invasive and involuntary research. The rampant violations of nonwhite bodies in daily life repeated in the social order of the human sciences. American and European medical students used anatomies that read like primers on the proper preparation and exhibition of Negroes and Indians. American medicine exploited colored
bodies precisely because the racial civilization placed them—free or enslaved, alive or dead—beyond the protection of the law or of moral civilization. By the end of the eighteenth century Indians and Negroes stood as universal objects of anatomical inquiry, science had generated a world of myths about their bodies, and the dissection of their corpses was a cornerstone of research.

Influenced by the work of colonial theorists such as Edward Long and Thomas Jefferson, the English physician Charles White was certain that science had established racial difference to an extraordinary degree of specificity. Anatomists, he celebrated in 1799, had even proved black men's penises to be larger than those of white men. “I have examined several living negroes, and found it invariably to be the case,” White reported of his research upon black people confined to the asylum in Liverpool. There were real-world consequences to such observations. They reinforced notions of African primitivism and encouraged scientists to take black people to the cutting table. On both sides of the Atlantic, colored people in public institutions became prey for race researchers. Claims about the size of black men's penises led White and his contemporaries to hypothesize about corresponding peculiarities in the genitalia of black women, and a search for clitoral elongation, peculiar vaginal folds, extraordinary buttocks, and outsized breasts and nipples began anew. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, for example, dismissed the suggestion that African women had larger than normal breasts based upon his own research but affirmed the “cloud of witnesses” who testified that black women's breasts were “long and pendulous.” He was also compiling data on black penises. Andrew Fyfe's anatomy text, published in the United States through Philadelphia, instructed students to seek large penises for dissection.
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White's assignment of this particular characteristic fit neatly with Fyfe's directions for choosing specimens to point students toward Africans. Social and scientific racism demanded such desecrations. Black penises, for example, were on view in natural history museums and academies across Europe and North America. Charles White and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach even kept such trophies in their offices.

Science, at their benign Command,

Holds out her guiding Ray;

Nor Suffers Error's treach'rous Hand

To lead our Steps astray.

—HYMN SUNG BY CHARITY SCHOLARS,
ST. GEORGE'S CHAPEL, NEW YORK, 1783

A new era is arising in which the powerful and wealthy

are with generous ardor responding to the claims of

science and humanity. Thrice honored be New England,

that the jubilee of that inauguration has been already

heard within her boundaries and that her liberal sons

while providing for the intellectual and moral wants of

the community, through their rich endowments in

behalf of knowledge, are by the generous training thus

diffused, preparing the way for that time when power

and riches will be everywhere blessed as the customary

ministers of philanthropy.

—WILLIAM BARTON ROGERS, ADDRESS
AT WILLIAMS COLLEGE, 1855

I may as well note that this College [of Physicians and

Surgeons], established by an act of the Legislature of

the State in 1791, has had among its trustees, since it

commenced operations in 1807, some of the best