Always kind of interesting to ask people to apologize for events that happened centuries before they were born
16
The trafficking in dead bodies (certainly in Britain) had a grotesque consequence that's still powerful today: originally it was the bodies of criminals killed by the state that were used in dissections. With the growth in medical schools, more bodies were needed, which led to body snatching. To try and stamp it out, Parliament passed a law in 1832 decreeing that the bodies of people whose families couldn't afford burials could be given for dissection. With a stroke of a pen, poverty had become a crime equal to murder. See the work of historian Ruth Richardson.
5
I am an old woman but within my lifetime I have known a man, quite old back in the '70's, who had been one of three in his younger days who lay in the country church graveyard with a shotgun for three nights after every burial to protect the corpse. This church cemetery had both black and white burials. In the mid 1900's it had no grave markers but there were records of the names of those there.
11
If you're having trouble discovering historical texts documenting the 19th century cadaver trade, slavery is probably not the most central issue at this point. Anecdotally, I've heard stories of 19th century military press gangs "producing" cadavers to support the academic community. Slavery was already outlawed in Britain at the time. If you want to research cadaver economics in America that's fine. Race is obviously a component. However, again, we don't even understand the general mechanisms right now so why focus so heavily on race.
As an example: Ms. Berry highlights the price of various bodies and the going rate for campus slaves. However, she fails to mention one very critical piece of data when considering the 19th century situation of grave-robbing slaves. Did body-snatching slaves enjoy a better quality of life compared to their non-body-snatching contemporaries in the 19th century? You have to wonder how much slaves were "forced" into this trade. Typical life expectancy versus outcomes should give you an idea.
Alternatively, you might wonder whether black cadavers were sold at discount prices compared to white cadavers. That would suggest a more specifically racial component to the cadaver trade. Then again, if the scientist thinks a body is a body, the going price for a dead body would be the same regardless of the skin color. My suspicion is the immediacy of the specimen's departure was considered more valuable than the skin color.
5
The chapter in Berry's book that covers this material makes her argument more clearly and more powerfully than this short piece does. (Reader comments suggest as much.) What she's REALLY getting at is that the bodies of enslaved people continued to be commodified even after death, and that major American institutions profited from that commodification in significant ways. This is an article about slavery and its racial underpinnings. It's about figurative body snatching, NOT just literal body snatching.
I recommend the book highly. It stays with you. I assigned it to my graduate students last year, and they're still talking about it.
20
African American rights advocates commit a tactical error by focusing on slavery. Slavery ended 150 years ago. Martin Luther King didn’t focus on slavery; it ended 90 years before he organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Most young Americans don’t feel guilty about slavery. Slavery ended before their distant ancestor embarked at Ellis Islands in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Black rights advocate should focus on the failure of Reconstruction, which restored the plantation system and condemned freed slaves and their descendants to an economic bondage only slightly better than slavery. American didn’t restart Reconstruction until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
11
It is very legitimate to bring this up and teach about it. On the other hand, schools should be discussing the African slave trade, where is some instances Africans beheaded those captives who were not chosen to be slaves by the Europeans. See http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-colonial/1904
JD
2
For me, this is a big so what? I believe that the enslavement of Africans was the worst thing that happened on this continent, with the possible exception of the attempted genocide of native Americans. I also believe that what happens to our bodies once they are corpses are irrelevant, despite most people's sentimental attachment to those bodies.
1
As I was reading this I could not help but think that these very schools were educating the surgeons who would then toil in the bloody and screaming battlefields of the Civil War.
Nietzsche famously said, that one can measure the strength of one's soul by how much truth it can take. I often find myself thinking one can also formulate it as, how much history one can take.
8
IT is still considered all right to use the bodies of the poor. Why?
3
As a parent helping with the considerable tuition at Harvard MS, and seeing the incredible effort by the students and devotion of the staff, I find this request for "atonement" pretty off-putting.
This happened 7 or 8 generations ago. What purpose could possibly be served by asking busy people doing important training to take time to atone for something that occurred so long ago. Who would this help?
11
So Ivy Leaguers paid the slave owners to kill their slaves just so they could dissect them? That must be your point. I mean, otherwise a corpse is just a corpse. Honestly, I too feel more alive when I assume everything in this world is evil.
1
I'm sure there are a lot more stories about the exploitation of the living who were poor and powerless that have been lost to history. Ever read about child labor, the working conditions in the 19th Century, the exploitation of immigrants in the building of our canals and railroads? That information is there if you are willing to look for it and read it but there are no monuments to even acknowledge their existance. My point is that this wasn't the exception, it was part of an all too real reality. For a NYC example of this Google the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.
9
Should Rome atone for crucifying 6,000 slaves at one go along the Apian Way? Should Italy atone for that?
Must the Ottoman Empire atone for enslaving hundreds of thousands of Christian boys in the Janissaries? For executing thousands of them in the 1800's? Should Turkey atone for that?
Must I atone for the anti-Semitic behavior and pogroms of my fore-bearers?
Should we destroy Michelangelo's David? Michelangelo studied the human form using dead bodies. Bodies which were acquired illegally.
When modern medicine began, it was illegal to do 'research' on the dead. So bodies were stolen. This was common practice in the Western world. Of course it was gruesome, but it also advanced medicine. The bodies of disenfranchised people were preferred, you were much less likely to get in trouble by using those remains. Slaves were disenfranchised by definition.
Slavery was common practice around the world. 150 years ago, we fought a great civil war to end slavery. We are not yet a perfect nation.
Move on!
13
I am sorry. Does not sound like this trade is going on today. I see no reason to be digging this stuff up for wide distribution. It was bad, it is over and it is done.
Rehashing this does no good for healing our society and country. It is just cause more angst and division.
NYT stop. publishing this stuff. You are complicit and part of our country problem for doing so
5
H. L. Mencken noted in his memoirs that there was a lasting fear of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore among poor blacks who believed that the doctors there would cut you up like "dead meat" if you ever fell into their hands.
An entertaining movie to watch on the subject of body snatching is "Burke and Hare," (2010) which plays the ghoullish business for laughs.
2
During the construction of the Panama Canal they would pickle the dead in barrels and sell them to medical schools in the US. These were the bodies of free but poor laborers. Why focus only on the bodies of slaves? Asking medical schools of today to atone for this behavior seems trivial.
15
The institutions in question need to apologize.
Certainly no one at the school was alive when this awful chapter occurred, but that is not the point. The institutions still exist. The schools in question are not harmed by apologizing for wrongdoing in the past, nor by making an attempt to atone, perhaps by memorializing these victims in some way.
Shooting a rabid dog would not be a wrong thing to do, but not saying I was sorry to have to do it to the dog's owner would be classless and unkind. These schools did something wrong and should show they have at least that much class.
11
Why does this matter to today’s America? Slavery has been dead for over 150 years. Learning more about its reach is irrelevant. An apology to the great great grandchildren of slaves is irrelevant. Harping on things that no one alive remembers helps no one. Worry about the effects of racism that occur today. An apology by a university does absolutely nothing
12
we (all americans) should want to know our history, whether good or bad.
18
The author says American medical schools must finally "acknowledge and atone" for this. What does she mean "atone"? Does she mean that the medical schools should pay reparations? Pay to whom? To people who were born 150 years later?
15
You would think that death would free slaves from further use and abuse. Not that the use of cadavers in general does not help train physicians and, in due time, redound to benefit the understanding and treatment of actual patients. The abuse stems from the racist selection. Ought we not develop a 'lottery system' where we all are pre-selected, by stating our willingness to serve (donate our body to science?), similar to the current written 'transplant donor' in our driver's license?
4
State legislatures could alleviate any shortage at medical schools by allowing citizens to designate their willingness to donate their bodies, as many commonly donate their body parts for transplantation, to medical schools in their state. Their families would benefit by avoiding costs of burial or cremation. The medical schools, if requested, could return the individual's ashes to their families. I for one would be among the first to sign up for such a program.
9
Many medical schools already have programs like this.
4
Sorry, I don't buy this one.
Absolutely, slavery was America's great crime, and formal financial restitution is a concept that shouldn't be mocked the way it is in the US- American capitalism was built on the backs of enslaved Afro-Americans in ways that are only now becoming clear.
But the cadaver trade was not a racial issue. It was an issue of the final exploitation of bodies of the weak and powerless.
The author clearly states "Typically the supply of bodies consisted of executed criminals and unclaimed corpses from almshouses and prisons but when these sources fell short physicians and students alike looked elsewhere" Obviously most medical school cadavers were the bodies of poor whites, not Afro-Americans. But essentially all were marginalized, poor and powerless.
Sometimes its just not about race, and this issue isn't.
36
If you read Berry's book (The Price for Their Pound of Flesh), I bet you'll be convinced otherwise. I assigned the book to my graduate students, and they certainly were. Coupled with other literature on this and related topics (racially motivated incarceration that included medical experimentation, e.g.) only helps solidify the point.
34
Years ago I was an investigator for the medical examiner's office in Dallas. It wasn't white folks who came up with the term "night doctor." The phrase was still in use with the older generation of African Americans at the time, and they still feared the theft of their bodies. Discomfort about autopsies was certainly not limited to people of color, but the nature of their leeriness was more consistent. More than once I was asked if I was the night doctor, and was called upon to reassure family members that the body of their loved one would go to the funeral home of their choice once the medical examiner completed his work.
23
So the author has been studying this for years and gives us an informed opinion, but you "don't buy this one"?
Racism gets ample, continuous support from pure-hearted people who like to set themselves up in judgement and somehow believe that the proposition "Not everything is about race" is sufficient grounds to conclude "What you're telling me now cannot be about race".
This is why many people of color make a policy of not talking about their experiences outside a small, safe circle of solidarity. We have found that the indignity of being publicly treated as prima facie liars or fantasists just compounds our sense of injustice, futility and loneliness.
21
At the Dutch Caribbean island Curacao as recent as 1960 "Peter Stuyvesant" high school still used such a body (skeleton) for various biology classes - where that body came from nobody knew but the teachers told us to treat it with respect. That island for some 300 years long was the main entry for African slaves then sold to the Americas for good money. The leader of the slave trade early on there was Peter Stuyvesant who then was promoted to Mayor of New Amsterdam.
13
The unknown atrocities of Western enslavement stories does, indeed, add to the bodies of knowledge we need to know. And, yes, atonement must occur, just as it has with every other major human atrocity in the world. Enslaved Africans memories deserve the same treatment and without it reconciliation will never happen. Only the progenitors of enslaved Africans are asked to relegate this to history and move on. No one else is asked to carry this type of burden. A significant or salient reason for this information is that the legacies of enslavement continues to impact the lives of the formerly enslaved. Clearly this article highlights an area with little historical investigation and it should continue. Thank you.
26
We can add the adoption market to this discussion. In this national marketplace babies are sold according to age, race, sex and health status in a de facto exchange run by lawyers masquerading as non-profits. It's a sham and a shame
There is another channel to adoptions that is removed in most from this bourse of available infants, and that's the county run adoption services. Many of those are more or less clear of this crass market.
I think we are well aware of the overseas adoption "trade" but the domestic version is cloaked in a veneer of "do good" organizations that are anything but.
We should see cadaver trade as another iteration of the Marxist idea of extracting "surplus value" from human bodies. Just as the mercantile basis of the actual slave trade enabled the beginning of industrial capital via the plantation system, the trade in adoptable infants is also a step in the devaluing of human bodies into marketable categories. We can see this extending into Big Data, incarceration systems, medical research schemes, and other targeted systems of denigration based on dubious distinctions between human bodies.
12
Body snatching is still going on. Michael Mastromarino, a dentist, was convicted of trafficking in body parts, without the survivors' permission. This became an even bigger story when it was announced that the body of Alistair Cooke, of “Masterpiece Theater" was a victim. His arm and leg bones were taken even though he had had cancer.
This does not demean that slaves were "enslaved" after death also, but that people don't realize that their loved ones are being robbed after death. In Britain, there was a scandal that they performed autopsies on dead babies and stole their brains and other internal organs without asking their parents. Companies that peddle medical equipment frequently need hundreds of certain body parts so they can teach the doctors who are future users at large seminars. It is scary to have to say this, but you don't know what happens to your loved one's corpse when it is taken to the morgue. Medical schools still need bodies.
14
Body snatching, while not admirable, is hardly the same as slavery. One can find injustices everywhere by looking back in history. A quick look at newspapers from the 1890's will show you how Irish and Italians were treated when looking for housing and jobs. Yes I know Irish and Italians did not remotely have the same experiences as black Americans but there comes a time when we can't "atone" for all injustices.
21
I agree, we shouldn't have to atone for all injustices. So let's just atone for the very worst cases -- like the atrocities inflicted by Whites upon African Americans.
2
In all due respect for the author and the opinion held, I would wholeheartedly disagree with the comment that medical schools must fully acknowledge AND ATONE for this behavior.
This may have happened, but was done under vastly different times and with vastly different leadership. Admitting it happened, and showing records of what each medical school may have done rightly deserves acknowledgement in light of the events if proven, and as uncomfortable history.
But to atone requires currently living management and graduates from programs (of which in my medical school there were no cadavers from black donors that year) to have wronged someone. That wrongdoing does not belong to those currently leading and studying at our nation's medical schools.
51
I'm not so sure about your take on atonement. Past abuses still have to be addressed. Institutions with a history cannot expect to brush callous practices under the carpet by using current personnel as the get out of jail free card.
Bodysnatchers were common in the day. However, exhuming and moving the deceased without consent has always been sacrilege and not the domain of any Tom, Dick or Harry. Engineering this practice to ensure a steady supply of poor, black enslaved people was wrong. If it was my mother or father whisked off in the dead of night to be experimented on, I'd certainly have something to say. We all would.
9
But how many people are living a high quality of life as an extension of those actions? Also, you have GOT to be white to consider those times 'vastly different' from social conditions today.
10
I gotta say, despite your use of the phrase “uncomfortable history,” you seem pretty comfortable questioning the claims made by Prof. Berry.
Why so quick to put distance between your school and these events? Don’t schools often tout proudly their own long histories? Why mention zero Black cadavers used last year? Guilty conscience?
No one is claiming Reid did anything wrong. But the same institutions that robbed graves persist today. Just like the insurance companies that sold policies on slaves. Is delayed justice not worth pursuing? Even if it is difficult to establish who in the present owes what to who.
What would atonement look like? Why so reluctant even to have that discussion?
7