Beyond the Slave Trade, the Cadaver Trade

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The topic of slavery features prominently in each February’s reflections on African-American history. But when it comes to this darkest time in our country’s past, experts are still discovering horrors that have not yet made their way into history books.

One shocking fact that’s recently come to light: Major medical schools used slave corpses, acquired through an underground market in dead bodies, for education and research.

Yes, there was a robust body-snatching industry in which cadavers — mostly the bodies of black people, many of whom had been enslaved when they were alive — were used at Harvard, the Universities of Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia, and other institutions.

It is time to acknowledge this dark truth behind our understanding of human anatomy and modern medicine.

Over several years, I’ve studied what I call the domestic cadaver trade and its connection to 19th-century medical education. The body trade was as elaborate as the trans-Atlantic and domestic slave trade that transported Africans to the New World and resold African-Americans on our soil. But when enslaved people died, some were sold again and trafficked along the same roads and waterways they traveled while alive.

The domestic cadaver trade was active, functional and profitable for much of the 19th century. Fueled by demand from medical schools’ need for specimens for anatomy classes, it was a booming business. Typically, the supply of bodies consisted of executed criminals and unclaimed corpses from almshouses and prisons.

But when these sources fell short, physicians and students alike looked elsewhere. Some anatomy professors personally sent agents to work with professional body snatchers who stole bodies from pauper cemeteries.

Body snatchers like Grandison Harris of Georgia and Chris Baker of Virginia collected specimens for dissection for the benefit of medical colleges. While they received room, board and modest wages for the bodies they collected, they were also enslaved African-American men themselves, listed as “janitors” or “porters” in the medical schools’ records.

According to faculty minutes of the Medical College of Georgia from an 1852 meeting, the dean of the college purchased Harris at a Charleston, S.C., auction for $700, equivalent to about $22,000 today.

Baker was born at the Medical College of Virginia (Virginia Commonwealth University today) to enslaved parents who worked at the college. Thus the school did not need to purchase him — being born to an enslaved woman meant he, too, was enslaved. Both men were central in acquiring cadavers used for dissection.

Having the two body snatchers in the building where anatomy professors taught and performed dissections gave the schools an advantage in recruiting. The medical colleges boasted about their ample supplies of subjects for dissection, a necessary component for training in human anatomy.

Enslaved people like Harris and Baker who were forced to rob graves were complicated and important historical figures, and their stories remind us we have much to learn from the legacy of slavery in the United States.

It’s well known that the effects of this chapter of American history, during which human beings were bought and sold, still reverberate today. As President Barack Obama emphasized last year in an interview with Trevor Noah of “The Daily Show,” America “has by no means overcome the legacy of slavery.”

I would add that we are still discovering it.

It’s nearly impossible to find history textbooks that discuss the cadaver trade or the role enslaved people like Harris and Baker played in it. Aside from Craig S. Wilder and Michael Sappol, until recently, few scholars have considered what I refer to as the “ghost value” of the bodies of deceased enslaved people traded throughout the United States for medical education.

Medical schools regularly purchased bodies from men like Harris and Baker. In Richmond, Va., where Baker brought the bodies he acquired, adult cadavers cost $12, mothers and their infants cost $15, and children from ages 4 to 10 were worth $8.

That schools had payment schedules for this expense speaks volumes about the routine nature of the trade.

American medical schools must finally acknowledge and atone for this.

In the same way that Georgetown University and schools such as Brown, Yale, Harvard, the University of Virginia and the College of William and Mary have come clean about the role of enslaved people in their founding, other schools should open their records and confirm their involvement in the domestic cadaver trade.

We will be a more informed nation because of it.