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Resurrectionists\u27 Excursions: Evidence of Postmortem Dissection from the Spring Street Presbyterian Church
Shannon Novak
2014
In this paper we contextualize two unique individuals recovered from the historic Spring Street Presbyterian Church burial vaults in lower Manhattan (ca. 1820-1846). The crania of one adolescent and one infant display clear evidence of a craniotomy. Both had complete circumferential incisions to remove the calvarium for internal examination. Both crania were sectioned using a saw, though the adolescent underwent further postmortem preparation: thin scalpel marks indicate defleshing, and metal pins embedded in the frontal and occipital bones would have facilitated disarticulation and rearticulation of the vault, presumably for teaching. By the early 19th century, the illicit exhumation of graves to obtain cadavers for anatomical dissection was a widespread phenomenon and particularly prevalent in New York City. Though the bodies of criminals, the destitute, and the marginalized were often targeted, resurrectionists were opportunistic in their pursuits. Thus, the presence of two disse...
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Postmortem Examination as Necroviolence at Charity Hospital Cemetery No. 2 (1847-1929).
Christine Halling, Alex Garcia-Putnam
Historical Archaeology, 2023
In death, bodies that were autopsied or used for medical dissection or experimentation are transformed from individuals into specimens, their identities and personhood removed. This destructive act was commonplace across the United States dur- ing the 19th century for the sake of medical advance- ment. Becoming a cadaver (anatomization) was typi- cally reserved for the poorest individuals who passed away in almshouses and indigent hospitals. Charity Hospital, which operated from the 18th century until Hurricane Katrina in 2005, served New Orleans’s indigent population. The remains of many individu- als who died at the hospital during the 19th century were used for medical dissection, experimentation, and autopsy. From two collections of skeletal remains associated with Charity Hospital’s second cemetery, this study explores the skeletal indicators of anatomi- zation and how these individuals’ treatment in death speaks to larger trends of marginalization of the poor during this time.
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Michael Sappol, A traffic of dead bodies: anatomy and embodied social identity in nineteenth-century America, Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. xiv, 430, illus., US$35.00 (hardback 0-691-05925-X)
Ian Burney
Medical History, 2005
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Speaking for the dead: the human body in biology and medicine
Maja I Whitaker
Choice Reviews Online, 2009
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From Empty Tomb Toward Transfigured Bodies: Pondering Resurrection with Wit
Kristine Suna-Koro
Spiritus, 2013
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Non-bodies of knowledge: Anatomized remains from the Holden Chapel collection, Harvard University (2013)
Christina J. Hodge
Journal of Social Archaeology 13(1):122–149, 2013
In response to the violence of the Revolutionary War and affirming Enlightened philosophies, Harvard University founded its Medical School in 1783. Excavated materials from a trash feature at Holden Chapel, site of Harvard’s early medical lectures, include anatomized human remains. There, new regimes of medical authority were created through the manipulation of bodies via transgressive practices of dissection, display, and disposal. Existing studies of nineteenth-century cadavers strongly focus on their emotional and evidentiary qualities. Close attention should also be paid to instructional bodies. Instructional human remains, uncannily both subject and object, person and specimen, were distinct from other kinds of bodies – and distinctly troubling. The Holden collection historicizes concepts of the body, permits an archaeology of early medical authority, and destabilizes archaeologists’ usual approaches to human remains, corporeality, and the individual.
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Review of Helen MacDonald's Possessing the Dead: the Artful Science of Anatomy
Angeline Brasier
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The Moment of Embalming
Hannah Sullivan
Times Literary Supplement, 2020
TLS piece on the Eliot-Hale letters, written after a one-day visit in January 2020.
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The Corpse Gives Life
Francesca Matteoni
Executing Magic in the Modern Era, 2017
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Modern embalming, circulation of fluids, and the voyage through the human arterial system: Carl L. Barnes and the culture of immortality in America
Irina Podgorny
Nuncius / Istituto e museo di storia della scienza, 2011
By considering the work of American embalmer, lawyer, and physician Carl Lewis Barnes (1872-1927), this paper analyzes the emergence of modern embalming in America. Barnes experimented with and exhibited the techniques by which embalming fluids travelled into the most remote cavities of the human body. In this sense, modern embalmers based their skills and methods on experimental medicine, turning the anatomy of blood vessels, physiology of circulation, and composition of blood into a circuit that allowed embalming fluids to move throughout the corpse. Embalmers in the late 19th century took ownership of the laws of hydrodynamics and the physiology of blood circulation to market their fluids and equipment, thus playing the role of physiologists of death, performing and demonstrating physiological experiments with dead bodies.
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