Ebony and Ivy

by Craig Steven Wilder

  “In studying the art of healing we commonly begin with Anatomy,” Morgan declared in his 1765 manifesto, ranking anatomy with surgery and physic as the three pillars of medical science. In Philadelphia’s medical school anatomy was a required course. Undergraduates at Harvard organized their own Anatomical Society, which procured a skeleton, hosted lectures and discussions, and performed animal dissections before the college had a medical school. Professor John Winthrop donated medical texts and specimens.30

  Medical colleges proliferated in the colonies in the decades after the French and Indian War. Samuel Bard had feared that the power struggle between Anglicans and Presbyterians in New York and the advanced efforts of the Philadelphians were possibly insuperable barriers to opening a medical school in the city.

  I wish with all my heart they were at New York, that I might have a share amongst them, and assist in founding the first Physical Med[ical] Colledge in America; I do not want ambition to prompt me to an undertaking of this kind at New York; and I have had some conversation, with my friend Mr. Martin about it, but I am afraid that being so near the Philadelphians, who will have the start of us by several years, will be a great obsticle, and another allmost insurmountable one is the parties which exist in New York; for if such a thing was to be undertaken it ought to be in conjunction with the [King’s] colledge which alone would be sufficient, to make the Presbeterian partie our Enimys.

  In 1767 Dr. Samuel Bard became a founder of the medical course at King’s College (Columbia) in New York City, where he served as professor of the theory and practice of physic and later as a dean and trustee. One of the city’s most distinguished doctors, Bard was President George Washington’s personal physician while the national government was in New York City. In 1814 he guided the merger of the new College of Physicians and Surgeons (1807) with Columbia’s medical school.31

  The genesis of American medical science corresponded to the rise of anatomy and the ascent of race. “The Study of Anatomy, as the foundation of Medicine, is a truth so well established, and so universally acknowledged, as to leave no room for observation,” William Nisbet wrote in his compilation of the Edinburgh medical curriculum. Race governed the intellectual cultures of the Atlantic world. Nisbet’s exploration of anatomy started by asserting that racial difference, like sex, was certain:

  Nor is the difference between the species, or between the white and negro, less remarkable than the difference between the sexes. Thus, in examining the skeleton of a negro, the cranium is distinguished by its figure by the narrow and retracting forehead and hindhead; by the flat bone of the nose, by the great distance betwixt the nose and mouth, by the small retracting chin, by the great distance betwixt the ear and fore part of the mouth; by the small distance between the foramen magnum and back part of the head, by the large bony sockets which contain the eyes, by the wide meatus auditorius, and by the long and strong under jaw.32

  Anatomical dissection, in particular, promised answers to questions about the nature of humankind that had lingered in science and theology. On his return journey from a 1773 trip to South Carolina, Josiah Quincy Jr. attended a lecture from “young Dr. [William] Shippen” at the Philadelphia medical college. Quincy was highly impressed with Shippen’s knowledge but even more taken with the facilities: “The curiosities of this hospital are far beyond any thing of the kind in North America.”33

  BODIES ACADEMIC

  Shortly after the founding of Dartmouth, Dr. Joseph Lewis, a personal physician to President Eleazar Wheelock, peeled the skin from the body of a deceased black man named Cato and boiled the corpse in a kettle to free the skeleton for study. He took Cato’s skin to be tanned at the shop that served the college, then used it to dress his instrument case. Physicians, surgeons, and students on numerous campuses conducted anatomical dissections and created anatomical specimens decades before their institutions opened medical schools. Human bodies were even more of a commodity once medical programs were organized. Dartmouth’s faculty struggled with the legislature to access corpses, an issue that drove one of its founding faculty, Nathan Smith, to Yale. There were other ways to acquire bodies. In 1811 Dartmouth’s medical school moved into its own building, where the basement was soon piled with human and non-human bones. The medical students entertained themselves with this collection by using it to terrorize the campus and the town at night. A number of those skeletons were likely those of enslaved and free black people who had worked for Dartmouth. Although slavery was declining in New Hampshire, the college had been one of the largest slaveholders in the colony and the state, and its officers buried enslaved and free black laborers in the college cemetery.34

  The medical profession and medical schools in colonial North America were founded on the bodies of the poor and subjected. Harvard’s governors expected that the corpses of criminals could be transferred to the school just as John Eliot had assumed that Indians could be dismembered. However, Christians generally judged the value of science apart from the appropriateness or morality of scientific techniques. The introduction of anatomy to North American colleges was disquieting since there was little consensus about whose bodies could be breached.

  Colonial students who studied in Europe had already experienced the social tensions caused by instructional dissection. The elder Alexander Monro moved his anatomy classes out of Surgeons’ Hall to the Edinburgh campus to hide from the public. In April 1725 a mob attacked his students for stealing corpses from the nearby Greyfriars Kirkyard. The administration paid soldiers to protect the University of Glasgow from mobs seeking to retaliate against the medical faculty. When the governors proposed relocating the anatomy labs to the new Hunterian Museum, the staff protested that such a move would make them the targets of violence. William Hunter studied and researched at Glasgow and Edinburgh before moving to London, where he took advantage of new regulations that allowed for instructional dissection in medical courses. John Hunter began his career helping his brother secure bodies for his popular anatomical lectures, which used Parisian-style interactive learning. Glasgow’s faculty and students ultimately began exploiting their proximity to Ireland to meet their needs without disturbing their city. In the 1830s a scandal involving murders to supply corpses shook Edinburgh and claimed the career of the leading anatomist Robert Knox.35

  Americans had a different solution. Located on Broadway at Duane Street, the New York Hospital—where the King’s College medical faculty rented dissection laboratories—had an ample source of cadavers at its southeast corner: the “Negros Burial Ground.” The faculty and students harvested colored corpses from the African cemetery for years, dragging cadavers across Broadway to the dissecting table. “We went from the city, following the Broadway, over the valley, or fresh water. Upon both sides of this way were many habitations of negroes, mulattoes and whites,” reads an October 1679 entry in Jasper Dankers’s travel journal. “These negroes were formerly the proper slaves of the [West India] company,” it continues, but were now laying out farms and raising houses north of the city “on this road, where they have ground enough to live on with their families.” More than a century later, African Americans’ ambitions left them easy prey for medical students. In 1807 the regents chartered the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. It was the same year that white residents began complaining about the odor from hundreds of corpses in the vault of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, or Mother Zion, which suffered from a lack of land and security. There remained few if any protections on the bodies of black people living in the city, be they enslaved or free, and white New Yorkers had even less concern about the fate of dead black people.36

  On April 20, 1773, Daniel Hewes published a notice for an anatomy class for midwives and practitioners in Providence, Rhode Island. He claimed a lengthy career in surgery and medicine, familiarity with a wealth of medical texts, and a reputation among leading physicians. For a nominal fee, Hewes offered medical instruction or consultations on medical cases. As evidence of his profe
ssional standing and accomplishment, he added that the government of Massachusetts had awarded him the body of a “Negro Malefactor,” which he wired into a skeleton for use as a teaching tool and a guide for setting bones and joints.37

  White people still had ample reason to worry about their fate after death. In 1764 the King’s College trustee John Watts promised Governor Robert Monckton that he would recommend the addition of an anatomist to the faculty, but warned that there was little hope of success given a lack of funds and a shortage of students. Popular disdain for doctors and medical training contributed to his doubts. “We have so many of the Faculty allready destroying his Majesty[’]s good Subjects,” Watts joked, that the public “had rather One half were hanged that are allready practicing, than breed up a New Swarm.” Such fears affected every level of society. Later in the century, President George Washington’s deathbed instructions to his family, friends, and personal slave, William Lee, included a reminder to “have me decently buried; and do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I am dead.”38

  Money and status provided some comfort in death, such as the security of being placed in church tombs and vaults or in fenced churchyards—practices that acquired new social meaning in the age of anatomy. Captain Jasper Farmar, the slave trader and merchant whose servant helped organize the 1741 conspiracy in Manhattan, was shot aboard the ship Charming Jenny by sailors whom he was trying to impress into service during the French and Indian War. His militia company escorted his body to Trinity Church, where it was interred next to the altar. In 1788 his wife, Maria Farmar, died. Her funeral followed “the ancient Dutch custom.” Mourners enjoyed spiced wine and tobacco pipes before accompanying her body from her home at Hanover Square to the church. The coffin was draped in black cloth with a Dutch epigraph on a copper plaque. She was entombed next to her husband at Trinity in a service presided over by Anglican and Dutch clergy.39 Slave trading had purchased the Farmars some eternal comfort.

  George Washington’s deathbed scene as painted

  by Junius Brutus Stearns

  SOURCE: Library of Congress

  Most corpses had no such protections. By 1769 Joseph Warren, a student at Harvard, had organized an underground anatomy club. His younger brother John Warren later transformed this group into a secret society, the “Spunkers,” to procure human bodies for instruction. Their adventures included sneaking about in the evening in boats, in carts, and on foot looking for new graves. John Warren did most of the demonstrations with the assistance of several Harvard students who went on to successful medical careers: Jonathan Norwood, William Eustis, David Townsend, and Samuel Adams, the son of the patriot. The American Revolution advanced the medical arts in Cambridge by generating a reliable supply of British and Hessian dead. In 1782, the year before the British surrender, Harvard’s trustees established a medical college and appointed John Warren to the first professorship in anatomy and surgery. The war had also accelerated the professionalization of medicine in New Haven, where a medical society emerged immediately after the peace.40

  Human tissue was the currency of medical science. An advertisement for an anatomy course in Philadelphia promised real human body parts. The medical faculty at Columbia organized an association to encourage the study of surgery and anatomy. Doctors at Rutgers Medical College on Duane Street in New York City lured students with assurances that its anatomy professor “teaches with THE KNIFE,” dissecting in front of the class, displaying and describing the pieces, and offering opportunities for student interaction and private instruction. In 1789 New York began formally supplying medical colleges and doctors with the cadavers of executed felons—a controversial “postmortem punishment” and extension of the power of the state. The legislature also assigned penalties for grave robbing.41

  Aristocratic notions that accepted the violability of the lower classes failed to resonate in a society inching toward republicanism. In 1765, the year that Shippen became professor of anatomy at Philadelphia, a mob of sailors violently interrupted his class, destroyed his lab, confiscated severed human limbs, attacked his carriage, and vandalized his house. The tensions were not limited to the City of Brotherly Love. Wealthier people who lived near a hospital or medical college sat graveside after the burials of relatives or friends, hired watchmen to look after the deceased, and even exhumed caskets to confirm that bodies had not been resurrected.42

  In October 1787 the New-York Morning Post announced that the young surgeon Wright Post would be offering lectures on anatomy and surgery at New York Hospital. Months earlier the founders and faculty of the medical school had become trustees of the college when the New York State legislature revised and reaffirmed Columbia’s charter, appointing at least eight physicians to a board that had had only two doctors in the prior thirty years.43

  Despite that acknowledgment of the growing prestige of medicine and science, Chief Justice Richard Morris—grandson of Lewis Morris, the first lord of the Morrisania Manor in the Bronx—sympathized with the rioters who sacked the hospital the following year. The trouble began on April 13 when a group of children were frightened by a human arm that had been left in a window to dry. Three hundred people surrounded the building, roughed up doctors, held students hostage, confiscated cadavers, and took or destroyed dissection equipment. To calm the crowd and protect the hospital, city officials jailed at least four of the students. The following day the rioters returned to inspect the hospital. Then they went looking for corpses at Columbia and later conducted house-by-house searches of every physician practicing in the city. The authorities acquiesced to each of these demands. Appeals from John Jay, Governor George Clinton, Mayor James Duane, Alexander Hamilton, Chancellor Robert Livingston, and Baron Friedrich Von Steuben failed to reassure the crowd, which now numbered in the thousands. The rioters hit or beat Von Steuben, Jay, and other officials. They murdered a “Negro Boy Slave” belonging to William Livingston at the jail. Unable to defend the hospital or the medical students, the governor ordered the militia with muskets and horse. The troops killed three rioters.44

  The New York Journal complained that Manhattan had been terrorized unnecessarily because the practitioners had access to the bodies of executed felons and the unclaimed corpses of drifters and the poor. Students supplemented this allotment by “ripping open the graves of strangers and negroes, about whom there was little feeling,” Joel Tyler Headley found, but went too far when they “dug up respectable people, even young women, of whom they made an indecent exposure.”45 Grave robbers who deferred to the economic hierarchy still offended antiaristocratic beliefs about the individual value and equality of human beings, unalienable dignities that supposedly continued into death.

  Academics struggled against these moral and political limitations. “You have doubtless been informed of the great disturbance lately excited at this Institution by the base and unjustifiable conduct of some individuals who in a secret and clandestine manner opened a recess of the dead, and taking there from a body, exposed the same (instead of a subject regularly and lawfully procured without wounding the feelings of humanity) in the medical department for anatomical dissection,” President John Wheelock of Dartmouth confessed to the Hanover attorney and official Benjamin Gilbert on December 18, 1809. That day, Wheelock’s administration promised to prevent the repetition of this “criminal act” and assured Gilbert of the full cooperation of the faculty and governors in any investigations of any member of the college participating in body snatching or illegal dissections. They unilaterally selected officials from all the surrounding towns to form a visiting committee with the right to examine the medical department’s labs and lecture rooms and the rooms of the medical or science students to pursue any rumors or reports of grave robbing. The medical students elected a committee of five who made a formal admission and apology to President Wheelock and the faculty. Their actions were “nothing short of sacrilege” and had unfairly damaged Professor Smith’s reputation.46

  “Whereas rumors o
f an unpleasant nature are circulated purporting that Bodies from the Cemeteries of the City have been brought to this College for dissection,” the trustees of Physicians and Surgeons began apologetically in 1814, before condemning such extralegal practices. It was the year of their union with Columbia College. The board mandated that the anatomy professor inspect all corpses to guarantee that they had been obtained legally and were treated “in a decorous and proper manner.” Such declarations were typically made with a wink. Just a few years later, the trustees aggressively bargained for a lot neighboring the medical school to enhance “safety and convenience” and “answer for the purposes of a stable.” The anatomist Wright Post put up the money. The new lot provided a more private and secure way to receive corpses stolen during the students’ “nocturnal expeditions.” A contemporary Columbia medical student, Moses Champion, assured his brother, Dr. Reuben Champion Jr., that the school’s “anatomical museum is very extensive” and that the medical classes were already dissecting in rotation: six classes to a cycle, with four students in each class. In 1819 Governor DeWitt Clinton ordered a watch for Potter’s Field and placed a $100 bounty on grave robbers—“no doubt to appease the people,” Champion complained, while admitting that the college had received more than thirty corpses that term.47