Bring Up the Bodies: The Resurrectionists and the Rise of the American Cadaver Trade

This thesis deals with the cadaver trade, for purposes of medical education, and its pedagogical origins in North America. Historians have extensively studied the reorientation of medical training around anatomy in Western Europe and North American in the eighteenth century as the foundation for much of modern medicine and medical training. Rapidly increasing interest in providing for anatomy subsequently created black market demand for cadavers. This thesis argues that the cadaver trade in Philadelphia was never an organic outgrowth of anatomical medicine, but a formal pedagogical tool that American medical students were educated in. The cadaver trade in Philadelphia was broadly transplanted from Great Britain and the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, where American students were taught that anatomical medicine was the new frontier of science, and witnessed early arguments about anatomical medicine through the lens of class and power. The cadaver trade was not just positioned as a necessity, but as an exercise in wielding and enjoying institutional and didactic power over the human cadavers–and ultimately living humans. When those students returned home to Philadelphia, they adapted these ideas about the cadaver and cadaver trade to their home. Particularly, it was the delineation between which bodies were acceptable as fodder for medical progress, and which were not that helped define the medical establishment’s goals and preoccupations, helping mold the cadaver trade into a central source of pedagogical authority.

Author dc:creator

• Catherine Sorrentino

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Kathleen Brown

• History

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/62458

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.upenn.edu:20.500.14332/62458