"Jeff College Boys": Thomas Eakins, Dr. Forbes, and Anatomical Fraternity in Postbellum Philadelphia

Recent sensational news reports about the illegal sale of cadavers and human body parts from the UCLA Medical School provide a stark reminder of the formidable socioeconomic, juridical, and psychological forces invested in anatomical material.¹ Inanimate though they are, dead bodies donated for scientific research make powerful claims upon the living, not just legally or ethically regarding specific conditions of use and modes of conduct in their presence. Such claims also resonate on a more fundamental level, at the intersection of body and psyche, where notions of identity and selfhood reside. When human anatomical specimens are misused in spectacular fashion, something beyond a legal trust between donor and recipient is violated. The broader public responds with abhorrence and condemnation, as if exploitation of the anatomical body betokened all the disquieting effects of modernity.²

While rare today, incidents like those at UCLA have a long, sordid, and complex history. As told in a 2002 book by historian Michael Sappol titled A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America, human anatomical material often has been a pawn in struggles for personal gain, professional status, and institutional power in the United States, primarily in medical education but touching virtually every other sphere of American society.³ Highlighting the period of medicine's rise as a modern profession, Sappol explores how anatomy operated as a cultural discourse differentiating those possessing scientific knowledge of the body from those who did not, establishing power relations, and distinguishing self from other. As Sappol observes, "Anatomists crossed and mastered the boundary between life and death, cut into the cadaver, reduced it to constituent parts, and framed it with moral commentary," whereby "the dissector claimed the status of an epistemologically privileged cultural arbiter."⁴ It goes without saying that physician-anatomists, then and now, have enjoyed a position of power over their living and dissected specimens, even under ethically scrupulous circumstances. During the nineteenth century, academic realism placed a premium on anatomical knowledge among professional artists as well.

This essay explores the cultural politics of anatomy in both of those disciplinary contexts—art and medicine—in late-nineteenth-century Philadelphia, a city whose rich postbellum history receives relatively little attention in Sappol's otherwise superb account. Through case studies of leading historical figures in each discipline, this essay reveals a broader fraternal discourse relating those fields and their respective members in an anatomical brotherhood of sorts. The careers of realist painter Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) and anatomy professor William Smith Forbes (1831–1905) illustrate the ways in which white male professionals in different disciplines constructed that fraternal discourse through the bodies of anatomical specimens, most of which came from proletarian and ethnic minority populations otherwise largely excluded from their milieu. Although professional contemporaries of Eakins and Forbes occasionally conducted anatomical studies on selected exceptional members of their own social class—the poet Walt Whitman and scientist John Wesley Powell, for example—the vast majority of living and dead specimens used for educational purposes were bodies of poor, anonymous others.⁵

For Eakins and Forbes, a common institutional affiliation catalyzed the fraternal anatomical discourse to which each man contributed in his own way. The institution in question was Jefferson Medical College, one of Philadelphia's preeminent medical schools, where both men had studied anatomy, though at different times. To borrow the words of a contemporary medical student celebrating solidarity among his peers at the college, Eakins and Forbes could be called "Jeff College Boys."⁶ One of the many discursive links between art and medicine to be explored here is a monumental commemorative portrait of Forbes that Eakins painted in 1905 (fig. 1), a work that has received little critical attention, despite its august location today adjacent to the artist's most famous painting The Gross Clinic (Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross) of 1875 in Jefferson's shrinelike Eakins Gallery.^7...