American Cadavers

Long before “donating your body to science” became respectable, US medical students had been dissecting cadavers. Early Americans saw dissection as abhorrent and shocking—and anatomists relied on body-snatching to obtain cadavers. Starting in the nineteenth century, states with medical schools began passing anatomy acts prohibiting grave-robbing, instead offering unclaimed bodies of the indigent for medical education.

Yet, from the early 1800s, a few Americans rejected traditional deathways and requested that their bodies be studied for science. American Cadavers resurrects this history of body donation and traces how twentieth-century cultural, religious, and medical changes made it not only commonplace, but admirable.