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

By Michael Sappol

A Traffic of Dead Bodies enters the sphere of bodysnatching medical students, dissection-room pranks, and anatomical fantasy. It shows how nineteenth-century American physicians used anatomy to develop a vital professional identity, while claiming authority over the living and the dead. It also introduces the middle-class women and men, working people, unorthodox healers, cultural radicals, entrepreneurs, and health reformers who resisted and exploited anatomy to articulate their own social identities and visions.


The nineteenth century saw the rise of the American medical profession: a proliferation of practitioners, journals, organizations, sects, and schools. Anatomy lay at the heart of the medical curriculum, allowing American medicine to invest itself with the authority of European science. Anatomists crossed the boundary between life and death, cut into the body, reduced it to its parts, framed it with moral commentary, and represented it theatrically, visually, and textually. Only initiates of the dissecting room could claim the privileged healing status that came with direct knowledge of the body. But anatomy depended on confiscation of the dead--mainly the plundered bodies of African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, and the poor. As black markets in cadavers flourished, so did a cultural obsession with anatomy, an obsession that gave rise to clashes over the legal, social, and moral status of the dead. Ministers praised or denounced anatomy from the pulpit; rioters sacked medical schools; and legislatures passed or repealed laws permitting medical schools to take the bodies of the destitute. Dissection narratives and representations of the anatomical body circulated in new places: schools, dime museums, popular lectures, minstrel shows, and sensationalist novels.


Michael Sappol resurrects this world of graverobbers and anatomical healers, discerning new ligatures among race and gender relations, funerary practices, the formation of the middle-class, and medical professionalization. In the process, he offers an engrossing and surprisingly rich cultural history of nineteenth-century America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Jun 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9780691186146

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Reviews for A Traffic of Dead Bodies

[tlcrawford · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Michael "Sappol’s book “A traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in 19th Century America” was the biggest disappointment of my 2012 reading. I confess to only reading the introduction and the first two chapters before putting the book away. In researching the life and career of an early 19th century physician and medical educator I felt I needed to know the attitudes the public had about dissection and the means medical schools used to obtain the needed corpses. Cincinnati, Lexington, and Louisville were all three very small cities and the logistics of supplying raw material for medical school anatomy classes could not have gone un noticed. Public opinion of those activities would doubtless affect their opinion of all physicians associated with the schools. Sappol stated in the introduction that he was not going to consider the competition going on between medical sects or the medical advances that dissection brought. However, soon he was cherry picking quotes from herbalists and researchers and applying his own meaning to them without, in my opinion, considering the context in which the remarks were made. I cannot discount comments by René Laennec, who developed the stethoscope and the language describing the sounds it reveals, and Samuel Thompson, the founder of the first medical sect to financially challenge allelopaths, as simply reflecting society's views of the body and anatomy. In fact, my opinion is that these two helped set public opinion. There are other issues I have with Sappol’s interpretations of events that may have to do his postmodernism orientation and my marxist / follow the money leanings. Yes the meaning that society gives to words changes over time. Today you can find certain groups of people talking about “Irish ancestors” who are not in any way referring to the Emerald Isle. However you cannot count every use of the word “irish” as anti-AfroAmerican racism. It seems to me that Mr. Sappol was cherry picking definitions of words to support his biases. If you want to really learn something about anatomy and social identity in the nineteenth-century look at Robert Blakely’s “Bones in the Basement”.