A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

Michael Sappol offers a wide-ranging cultural history of anatomy in nineteenth-century America. The book is rooted in medical history and contains a great many excellent insights and intriguing facts about the early history of anatomy in the American republic, particularly in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Sappol argues more persuasively than any previous scholar that the study of human anatomy through the dissection of dead bodies was the foundation upon which the American medical profession ultimately constructed its cultural authority. Whether readers agree or disagree with Sappol's argument, its skillful presentation makes this book a significant contribution to the field.

Sappol then moves on to explore what he thinks happened when anatomical knowledge broke out of its professional preserve and pervaded a host of other areas of American culture in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The public fascination with human anatomy, he argues, helped create what he calls an embodied bourgeois identity in the United States. The American bourgeois, in turn, manipulated anatomical information and anatomical practices both to define and to challenge various social categories (principally the postmodern triad of race, class, and gender). Finally, Sappol considers the ways in which the powerful cultural salience of gross anatomy eventually gave way by the end of the nineteenth century to what might be called postanatomical enterprises.

Sappol is extremely inclusive in his definition of anatomy. At some points in the book, it is a precise medical practice and a specific body of knowledge (or specific knowledge about the body), gained through the dissection of cadavers. At other points, it morphs into somewhat vague, largely presumed, or essentially asserted metaphorical understandings of the body, of the self, or of perceived others that Sappol discovers in the words and actions of such diverse figures as antidissectionist rioters, commercial grave robbers, itinerant lecturers, mid-century novelists, medical school professors, public intellectuals, and the editors of popular and professional journals.

The inclusiveness of Sappol's approach is both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, the book is unusually rich in details, ideas, and information related in some sense to the role, the place, and the meaning of anatomy in nineteenth-century American culture. From start to finish, Sappol packs his text full of wonderful facts, heuristic turns of phrase, and a sense of excitement that is all too often lacking in scholarly books. Medical historians will find a great deal of valuable information in his extensive research. His discussions of anatomy legislation in nineteenth-century state legislatures, for example, are outstanding; A Traffic of Dead Bodies also contains, among other gems, a splendid analysis of the rise and fall of anatomical museums in nineteenth-century America. By casting such a wide net, Sappol also helps readers appreciate previously obscured quasi-medical or medicalized relationships, like that between the rise of popular anatomy and Walt Whitman's poetic explorations of the human body.

On the other hand, this all-embracing approach to anatomy as a cultural phenomenon leads to a number of discursive detours, produces apparently contradictory suggestions or conflicting hypotheses within pages of each other, tends to reify social categories as if they were self-evident and unchanging, and forces the author to belabor a repetitious theoretical jargon that does not always sustain cohesion. As Sappol puts it himself, "The anatomical self was capacious enough to contain a jumble of signifiers" (p. 307); and, "The anatomical trope was not merely available for masculinist professionalism, but also for the masculinist bourgeois self" (p. 324).