Secrets of the Dead: Ben Franklin’s Bones reveals some questionable practices in medicine. In the 18th century, private anatomy schools were set up across London to give medical students the opportunity to learn anatomy by dissecting human cadavers. But supply lagged behind demand. Anatomists needed many more bodies than the ones of hanged murderers, which were the only bodies legally available at that time for their study. This created a business for body snatchers, also known as “resurrectionists,” who exhumed corpses from graves to sell to the anatomists.
This Secrets-of-the-Dead episode was published back in 2015, but I recently saw it on Wisconsin Public Television. I had no idea that Ben Franklin had so many friends and acquaintances in the medical / anatomy world.
We owe a huge debt to the people who were body-snatched from their graves in the name of furthering medicine, science and our understanding of human anatomy. Now people have the option to donate their bodies to science after death as a personal choice. That was not the case in the 18th century when this mode of inquiry was at it's peak.
The Surgeon's Hall Anatomy Museum in Edinburgh and The Hunterian Museum in Glasgow are some of my favorite museums, and The Mutter Museum is on my bucket list of places to see someday. But I have a new consciousness about the specimens on display now.
How do we let them finally rest in peace? Do we honor them for the educational purposes they took on in being displayed in perpetual preservation? What about the medical curiosities with less of an educational slant?
A recent NNLM Webinar got me thinking about all this in a new light. If you want to know more, please see:
Holding Space to Discuss a Complicated Past: Exploring Medical Libraries’ Role in Perpetuating Racial Science, An NNLM Region 6 Spotlight Speaker Webinar
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