Body Snatchers
Theft after Death: Getting Bodies on Anatomy Tables
In January 1998 sisters Janie Gaines and Sarah Cox surveyed Greenwood, a Birmingham, Alabama cemetery where their sister had been buried. It was falling apart.
Addie Mae was thirteen when she was murdered in the White Supremacist attack on Sixteenth Baptist Street Church, days after the city’s schools had been integrated. She died alongside four other little girls, and her eulogy had been given by none other than Martin Luther King Jr. himself. Her tombstone carried the inscription “She Died So Freedom Might Live”. She was considered a precious icon and martyr of the Civil Rights movement, and while many unnamed Black residents suffered terrorist attacks as pushbacks to the social gains and rights they were finally being granted, Addie Mae’s image and name were rightfully counted, seen, and honored alongside the three other victims, Carol Denise McNair, Cynthia Diane Wesley, and Carole Robertson.
It took thirty years for the sisters and family to muster up the courage to even visit their little girl’s gravesite. The neglect of Greenwood was obvious to them, so they decided to have her body moved. Much to their dismay, when the grave was uncovered, they realized that someone had already gotten to it first. Addie Mae’s casket and body, like so many buried in Black commentaries across the South, had been taken.
Harriet Washington recounts this story in chapter 5 of Medical Apartheid, titled The Restless Dead, to illustrate the far-reaching impact of the medical establishment’s tradition of primarily stealing Black bodies for anatomical dissection and display. Joice Heth’s public dissection in Chapter 4 happened when dissections were still not standard components of medical training. That spectacle had been for the public and entertainment. This private grave stealing practice was not for performance, but to meet the demands of the growing number of medical schools across America and the imported European standards of medical training.
Gone were the days of students gawking over a single cadaver while a professor performed a couple of examples on it. The new standard demanded that medical students and practitioners complete anatomical dissections of humans. This was deeply frustrating to American doctors. General society did not support the morality or ethics of such dissections on humans and no one wanted to give their bodies for dissections. But patients wanted highly trained medical professionals on par with those in Europe. The only way to get bodies was to steal them or demand that in the event of death, poor people with no options and Black people with few legal rights give their bodies over. The poor were considered useless and Black people -ironically- were barely human in life but perfect specimens in death.
Soon, medical schools openly boasted of their ability to provide specifically Black bodies explicitly for repeated medical training. The lucrative business of locating Black cemeteries in the colder months and shipping bodies across state lines began. Bodies were shipped in containers marked as other things such as turpentine, or hauled on freaky wagons under the dark of night by “resurrectors" or “night doctors” as the medical assistants and porters attacking graves came to be known.
The first response we might have over this history is that this is A) a gross overstatement or we might say B) Things Were Different Back Then. This chapter demonstrates by comparing populations and records to show that body snatching from primarily or solely Black graves was the standard and norm across the country and that yes, things were different back then. Just not in the way we might imagine. There are three major factors of that culture surrounding human dissections and display that we need to remember.
1: Unlike today the body of the dead across color lines and class lines was considered sacred, a part of the family, and to be handled with a deep sense of spiritual and physical care. The general society - again crossing all color and class lines- was accustomed to the idea of their loved ones dying right at home. Most sick people and their families wanted the death to occur at home. There was a huge market to support post-mortem family photo shoots where the dead were bathed, dressed, and lovingly posed by the family. Today, most of us prefer death to occur “with the professionals” and the site of death is usually a medical institution, and the preparations for the dead are also done by professionals. We have a marked discomfort with “trusting ourselves” to handle the dead. Not so in the 17th through 19th centuries. The dead were to be laid to rest in very specific ways and usually by careful familial tending.
2: There was a great social stigma against one’s body being used with consent for dissection, testing, or experimentation. There was widespread fear, horror, and a deep distaste for the idea. Magnanimously donating one’s body to science did not have the altruistic glow it does now. People did not want to even die in the months they knew the majority of grave attacks took place (the fall and winter).
3: Grave robbing and human dissection were in many places, outright illegal. The distaste permeated even the law.
4. Dissection was considered a double sentencing for the worst of murders. It was one thing to be executed, it was another thing to be sentenced to death and dissection. The shame and degradation were part of the sentence.
The widespread business and profit of stealing dead Black bodies for medical schools did not happen in spite of the above elements but because of it. The legal standing of Black bodies was barely articulated outside of simply being property. The social sentiment of Anti-Blackness was so thick and the medical establishment had already thoroughly dehumanized Black people, that it wasn’t a secret to take advantage of them.
This chapter illustrated what routine body snatching and display did to both communities: Medical and nonmedical.
The wonton display and theft of the bodies from the graves to rooms where they were put in jars, hung from ceilings, “hilariously” dressed up on tables, and skinned for book covers of medical books had a chilling effect on the Black community and poor whites. The cavalier way these bodies were treated -as curiosities and souvenirs -relayed a message to the nonmedical community that certain bodies were sacred and deserved rest, and others belonged - without consent or approval- to whoever in the medical establishment wanted them. It also said that certain bodies were simply worth less, but in death still useful to make other people money. The poor Whites, the Poor Blacks, all the homeless and friendless, and all the Blacks across classes knew that they were not worth protecting in death, but that their social value actually skyrocketed after death. Black communities despised the idea that even after death their bodies would remain in a kind of eternal slavery, being used by White establishments to amass tuition money, graduate more of the White doctors that abused them, and in remaining on display as objects belonging to White men forever. This was no small fear, as medical schools like Harvard’s would go to great pains to be as close to possible populations from which they could harvest “appropriate dead”. Harvard’s medical school moved to Boston specifically to be closer to some poor houses with large Black populations.
To the up-and-coming medical establishment, this culture of body snatching continued the false narrative that Black bodies were less worthy than others. It also perpetuated myths of classism, such as that poor people by virtue of not having much capital must sacrifice what they did have -their bodies- as capital for the medical business. This of course negatively impacted how living Black patients or poor Whites were viewed when they did dare venture into the hospitals or clinics for treatments.
Yet again, abolitionists, aggrieved family members, and some doctors found this practice abhorrent and called for the laws to be enforced in some cases or changed in others. But Washington details that there was a fear among White legislators that even if the laws changed, the doctors’ need for bodies wouldn’t. White cemeteries would be at risk, and anyone who owed money, committed a crime, or simply got drunk and died would find themselves carved up on an anatomy table. So laws across various states were encouraged to ensure that the disparities would remain. Washington notes one example in Georgia, where it was expressly put down that only Black convicts would be used in a dissection program and not any White convicts.
When Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy of utilitarianism hit the states, doctors found themselves with a populace of middle and upper-class Whites who wholeheartedly supported the use of Black people and poor Whites to “benefit the greatest number”. The absolute legal bans on dissection dissolved in many states, with new acts being passed (the “Ghastly” Act and “Bone” Bill to name two) that gave the medical establishment greater access to the bodies of the friendless, the poor, the Black community, or the homeless. This lay the groundwork for the 1968 federal Uniform Anatomical Gift Act (UAGA). This act was created to modernize the use of cadavers for medical school laboratories, scientific research, and specialized surgical training. Washington ends the chapter by noting that each state has its own statute or implementation of this act and that the distribution of cadavers still skews towards harvesting from poor communities, homeless people, and ethnic minorities. People who cannot afford to bury their family members often find their family members being donated to this research. Today, an overrepresentation of these groups makes up the organ donors and research subjects, even in locations where those members are well in that population’s minority. The bias of the past still affects the legal and medical practice today, and laws that “presume consent” allow coroners to harvest tissues and body parts in some states without the formal consent of anyone. The opt-in (and opt process) is so unknown or blatantly non-disclosed that families don’t know about it until it is too late.
This chapter does manage to end on a hopeful note, in that Washington finds that today medical schools are starting to treat the bodies with more respect, hold ceremonies for the dead, and publically reflect as a community on the precious gift and privilege it is to handle another human’s remains. Washington’s research here is yet another reminder about how easy it is to justify in death the kind of degradation we tolerate in life. It’s also a check to closely look at ongoing disparities in research subjects and not write it off as a coincidence. There is nothing coincidental about the same kinds of people with less power, legal protections, or resources continually being financial fodder for our most powerful institutions.