Yesterday’s New York Times had an oped by Daina Ramey Berry, in which she describes the use of black cadavers at American medical schools in the years before the Civil War. Here is the gist:
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.
This reminded me of the execution of John Anthony Copeland and Shields Green for their participation in John Brown's attempt to free the slaves of Virginia in 1859. Copeland was from a free black family in the abolitionist town of Oberlin, Ohio. Green had been introduced to John Brown by Frederick Douglass. The two men were taken prisoner following the collapse of the raid, brought to trial, and hanged on December 16, 1859. Within hours of the execution, the two bodies were exhumed by a band of medical students and taken to nearby Winchester College for dissection. Copeland's family tried mightily to retrieve his body for religious burial in Oberlin, as I describe in The "Colored Hero" of Harper's Ferry. A slightly edited excerpt follows after the jump.
This time Wise replied, though sharply and dismissively. “Yes: to your order to some white citizen. You cannot come to this state yourself.” With little time to spare, the Copelands attempted to arrange for the body to be shipped to the custody of A.N. Beecher, the mayor of Oberlin. Wise instructed his staff to make “no reply” to Beecher’s telegram; instead he passed the appeal along to General Taliaferro, who was in charge of the execution. Taliaferro then simply ignored request. With no one present to take custody of the corpses, he ordered them to be buried immediately on the hanging ground.
With the tacit permission of the Virginia authorities, Green and Copeland were allowed to “remain in the ground but a few moments, before they were taken up and conveyed to Winchester for dissection.” The dean of the medical school would later ask Wise for permission to place the skeletons on display in the college’s anatomy museum, which was apparently necessary because legally available skeletons were scarce and none of the hospital’s indigent patients were reliably close to death. Wise gave his assent, on the premise that the bodies had not been “demanded by their proper relatives.”
But John Copeland’s “proper relatives” had never given up, telling their friends that the inability to bury their son was “the last drop in the cup of agony.” On the day after the execution, John and Delilah Copeland sought the assistance of James Monroe, an Oberlin professor and a member of the Ohio state senate. News had by then reached Ohio that the bodies of the black prisoners had been turned over the medical school for dissection, and the Copelands implored Monroe to “go promptly to Winchester [to] endeavor to recover the body of their son.” Monroe departed Oberlin by rail on Wednesday, December 19, reaching Winchester on late Friday evening. Although more than two months had passed since Brown’s raid, northerners were still treated with suspicion in Virginia, and Monroe was interrogated by both railroad officials and fellow passengers. Still, he arrived in Winchester without incident and he headed directly to the Taylor House for lodging.
Monroe’s first stop the following day was at the home of Judge Richard Parker, where he presented his letter of introduction. Parker received Monroe with great courtesy, and expressed sincere sympathy for Copeland’s “afflicted father and mother.” The judge offered to arrange a meeting between Monroe and the medical school faculty, to be held that day following afternoon tea.
Prof. Monroe was no stranger to faculty meetings, and he was evidently quite persuasive in such familiar environs. The Winchester medical faculty “unanimously agreed that the body of Copeland should be . . . returned to the home of his parents,” and the college undertaker volunteered to work through the night in order to prepare the corpse, now six days post mortem, so that the “sorrowful freight should be decently prepared for delivery at the express office the next morning.” The only discouraging note was sounded by one of the medical school professors, who cautioned Monroe not to mention their meeting when he returned to his hotel. Already wary of disclosing his mission, Monroe assured the physician that he would keep mum, and he returned to the Taylor House quite satisfied that his sad duties would soon be successfully completed.
Monroe was therefore stunned when a committee of medical students arrived at the hotel early the next morning. He was accustomed to deference from his own students, many of whom were seminarians, but this group was highly agitated and disrespectful. Their leader was a tall red-haired young man from Georgia who refused Monroe’s invitation to sit down. Instead, he insisted on standing while delivering an ultimatum in a pronounced southern drawl:
Sah, this [body] that you are trying to get don’t belong to the Faculty. He isn’t theirs to give away. They had no right to promise him to you. He belongs to us students, sah . . . . [F]or the faculty to attempt to take him from us, is mo’ ‘an we can b’ar.
If the cadaver belonged to anyone – other than John and Delilah Copeland – it could only have been the Commonwealth of Virginia, and Monroe was holding unquestionable legal authorization from the governor to take the corpse to Ohio. The medical students, however, had no interest in legal niceties. Although aware that Monroe carried Wise’s authorization “to come into this State" and retrieve Copeland's body, they denied the governor’s “authority over the affairs of our college [and repudiated] any interference on his part.” In case the implicit threat was not sufficiently clear, the students’ leader warned Monroe,
You must see, sah, and the Faculty must see, that if you persist in trying to carry out the arrangement you have made, it will open the do’ for all sorts of trouble . . . . Now, sah, that the facts are befo’ you, we trust that we can go away with your assurance that you will abandon the enterprise on which you came to our town. Such an assurance is necessary to give quiet to our people.
To his great credit, Monroe did not give up. He sought out the assistance of a medical school professor, in the hope that he might still be able to claim Copeland’s body. Although ostensibly willing to help, the professor informed Monroe that his quest had become “impractible.” The students had already broken into the college dissecting room and removed the cadaver, hiding it “at some place in the country.” Any further effort to recover the body would only lead to violence, and Monroe was forced to return home empty handed.
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