Medical students stand around an operation in a lecture theater in the United Kingdom around 1898. last June that bodies donated to Harvard Medical School were stolen and sold, it instantly became a scandal.
In fact, dissection was stigmatized, seen as something that only happened to bodies of the poor or marginalized. Berry found medical schools from Texas to Maine that sourced enslaved and otherwise marginalized bodies for their students to learn from. Some institutions would brag to prospective students that they had “great subjects for dissection.”
Dr. Berry – whose book, “The Price For Their Pound of Flesh,” chronicles the commodification of Black people from birth to death – found racism was baked into the mindset of those early doctors. Black people were considered “other” and that gave some professors a kind of perverse permission to steal or purchase those bodies.And racism affected how doctors thought about a body’s internal workings.
The stigma around body donation began to wane as trust in the medical profession grew. And medical schools began to court donors as it became harder to source unclaimed bodies. That’s in part due to the advent of aStill, it took a few more decades for the treatment of donor bodies at medical schools to change.
Over his career, Champney said, he’s seen a slow change in that attitude, with more professors focused on who the living person was. Many programs teach students to keep donor bodies covered, exposing only the part being worked on. And most schools, including Harvard, have annual memorial services to honor those who donated their bodies to science.
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