YSM students and staff stole the bodies of vulnerable community members for dissection.
- Dissection was an important part of medical education before cadavers were widely available.
- YSM students and staff stole bodies to dissect.
- Stealing the bodies of powerful community members and their families led to punishments, so YSM students and staff took the bodies of those without power, including prisoners, sailors, and people of color.
Continue Reading to Learn More
Scroll down in the panel below to learn about two bodysnatchings involving Yale medical students and about how the taking of a white woman’s body triggered outrage, a court case, and new laws, while the taking of a Black sailor’s body went unremarked by the New Haven community.
Further reading
- Robert Murray, “Bodies in Motion: Liberian Settlers, Medicine, and Mobility in the Atlantic World,” Journal of the Early Republic 39, no. 4 (2019): 615–46.
- Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
- Christopher D. E. Willoughby, Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2022).
