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

Nineteenth-century Americans used anatomy to shape social identities, according to Michael Sappol. Anatomical knowledge and the practice of dissection defined the professional boundaries of medicine, the class borders of American society, and the personal identities of individual Americans.

A Traffic of Dead Bodies offers surprising new insights for both medical and cultural historians. It combines an innovative account of anatomy in American medicine with an unprecedented exploration of the dissected body in American culture, from common schools to pulp fiction and Bowery wax museums.

Sappol argues that anatomical science was the defining feature of medical professional identity from the 1760s through the 1860s. Students demanded anatomical training above all else from medical schools. Even Thomsonians and homeopaths, followers of alternative medical systems whose founders had denounced anatomy as irrelevant to practical healing, made anatomy central to their curricula as soon as they began to create formal educational institutions.

For most of the century, there were no legal means to supply the growing number of bodies demanded by the rapid proliferation of medical schools. Thus, medical education required robbing graves, a practice that provoked riots when discovered. Sappol puts even this familiar part of anatomical history in new perspective. While others have noted that the poor and powerless provided most of the bodies dissected, Sappol explains that being dissected itself lowered one's social status. He also demonstrates that anti-anatomy rioters sometimes showed as little respect for the bodies they retrieved from medical schools as grave robbers did. These rioters sought to punish the doctors, not to restore the body's lost dignity. Furthermore, Sappol documents that medical students and faculty were extensively involved in stealing bodies.

The middle chapters comprise close readings of two texts aimed at school children and two sensationalist novels: William Alcott's The House I Live In and Edward Bliss Foote's Sammy Tubbs, the Boy Doctor for children; J. H. Robinson's Marietta and George Lippard's The Quaker City for pulp fiction readers. Sappol concludes that although bodies, death, and sex created the borders of respectable middle-class identity, the emotional power of the body soon overwhelmed such boundaries. Anatomy likewise both constructed and erased social differences. To Alcott, bodies looked more alike than different "under the skin."

The sweeping breadth of this book is a major accomplishment, but it does create some problems of focus and balance. It conflates dissection of the dead with observation of the living body, and anatomy with physiology, without sufficient explanation of why many nineteenth-century writers linked these topics, nor enough attention to nineteenth-century distinctions between them.

The book's novel and fascinating source materials also blur its focus. For example, although anatomy plays a key role in the story of Sammy Tubbs, Dr. Foote also used the tale to promote a startling variety of causes, from contraception to interracial marriage. Sappol follows Foote's steps, whether or not they lead back to anatomy.

Another result of the book's ambitious scope is that the research is fuller on some topics than on others. Sappol masters subjects from medical history to cultural theory. However, topics such as common school health education are presented without reference to important work by recent historians of education, such as Jonathan Zimmerman and Jeffrey Moran, or historians of science such as Philip Pauly. Nineteenth-century health education books written by male doctors get far more attention than do the writings of education policy makers such as Horace Mann or Henry Barnard, officials who created the courses that used these books, or the many works on physical education written by women physicians and teachers.

Sappol presents numerous specific examples that link anatomy to social distinctions including race, ethnicity, age, disability, gender, and class...