Bones in the Basement

Dissection was the preferred teaching method in nineteenth-century American medical schools even though, until the final decades of the century, the practice was illegal in most states. In 1989, a cache of some 9800 dissected and amputated human bones--more than 75% of them African American--were found in the earthen basement floor of the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta. The authors argue that the procurement of cadavers by American medical schools was part of a racist system that viewed African Americans as expendable not only in life but also after death. They also shed light on the importance of surgical training at a time when amputation was the primary means of treatment, and examine the evidence of diet and disease in a nineteenth-century urban black population.