Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1. "The Mysteries of the Dead Body": Death, Embodiment, and Social Identity 13 2. "A Genuine Zeal": The Anatomical Era in American Medicine 44 3. "Anatomy Is the Charm": Dissection and Medical Identity in Nineteenth-Century America 74 4. "A Traffic of Dead Bodies": The Contested Bioethics of Anatomy in Antebellum America 98 5. "Indebted to the Dissecting Knife": Alternative Medicine and Anatomical Consensus in Antebellum America 136 6. "The House I Live In": Popular Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Antebellum America 168 7. "The Foul Altar of a Dissecting Table": Anatomy, Sex, and Sensationalist Fiction at Mid-Century 212 8. The Education of Sammy Tubbs: Anatomical Dissection, Minstrelsy, and the Technology of Self-Making in Postbellum America 238 9. "Anatomy Out of Gear": Popular Anatomy at the Margins in Late Nineteenth-Century America 274 Conclusion 313 Notes 329 Bibliography 385 Index 423
This is a wonderful book--original, ambitious, fascinating, detailed--offering an important new approach to the history of scientific medicine as based on anatomical knowledge and a richly textured argument about the centrality of the anatomical body to the bourgeois American sense-of-oneself. -- Elizabeth Fee, author of "Disease and Discovery" and "Making Medical History" This marvelous book exhibits the kind of intelligence and conceptual innovation that should attract a wide range of readers. Creative, cleverly written, and finely argued. Sappol's very smart cultural history of anatomy as both activity and ideology sketches an illuminating picture of nineteenth-century American aspiration and self-understanding. -- Regina Morantz-Sanchez, University of Michigan This is a well-crafted, extensively researched, fascinating study of the cultural politics of anatomy in nineteenth-century America. It explores an impressive range of cultural expressions, pulling together a disparate array of phenomena that no one has linked before. This book will be of great value to cultural and social historians as well as to historians of medicine. -- Karen Halttunen, University of California, Davis
Michael Sappol holds a Ph.D. in American history from Columbia University, where he was a finalist for the Bancroft Dissertation Award and a winner of the Whiting Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Award. He is Curator at the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health.
A groundbreaking new book... One of Sappol's great accomplishments in this dazzling book is his creation of a new lens to view ... well-known--and some lesser-known--episodes [in medical history]... With considerable verve and penetration, he explores orthodox anatomy in American medical education... Sappol reminds us that we continue to pursue the construction and negotiation of the boundaries of our bodies and our selves... We can understand this process better in the light of Sappol's extraordinary evocation of 19th-century anatomy and American culture. -- Susan E. Lederer New England Journal of Medicine A powerful and thought-provoking interpretation that enriches our understanding of 19th-century society not simply in America but across the West. -- Anne Hardy Times Higher Education Supplement [The] achievement of this book [is its] laying out the importance, scope, structure, and sloughs of the anatomical metropolis in which American medicine developed. -- Phillip J. Pauly Journal of the American Medical Association A Traffic of Dead Bodies is a major achievement. It is an empirically rich and creatively theorized book that resists easy classification. -- Thomas R. Cole Journal of American History A Traffic of Dead Bodies offers surprising new insights for both medical and cultural historians. It combines an innovative account of anatomy in American medicine with an unprecedented exploration of the dissected body in American culture, from common schools to pulp fiction and Bowery wax museums. -- Martin S. Pernick Journal of the History of Medicine In his well-crafted and superbly researched book, Sappol takes us on a fascinating and morbid journey through the powerful and expansive world of anatomical medicine, foregrounding its centrality to the making of modernity... It is an impressive and engaging work of cultural history that greatly enhances our understanding of society and medicine in America's long nineteenth century. -- Alexandra Minna Stern The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
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