For the authors, the practice was just another way of oppressing black Americans after the Civil War was over. Like lynchings, the theft and mutilation of their loved ones' remains was a deliberate signal to African Americans that they were still a lower order of being, even if abolition said otherwise. The authors note somewhat menacingly that a similar photographic trend of the day - snapshots of lynching victims that were swapped like trading cards - were sometimes the work of the same photographers handling the camera in dissection laboratories.
It took reporters in Philadelphia to bring about a beginning to the end of the resurrectionists; in 1882, they exposed the systematic robbing of the city's main African-American cemetery. That, and the occasional midnight disinterment of a child of the wealthy that caused the ruling classes to suddenly rediscover their moral compass (in 1878, the body of the son of president William Henry Harrison was found hanging by the neck from the ceiling of an Ohio medical-school dissecting room). Laws began to be passed in various states outlawing the trade in cadavers, and by 1930, legislation had all but eliminated it.
Changes in attitude about dissection itself occurred at the same time. Many doctors were appalled that "inexpert boys hack away at a cadaver until it is reduced to shreds," and they pushed for a more objective, professional and detached approach to students' first encounter with a scalpel and a body. The future doctors of the 1920s and '30s were pushed to overcome their emotional reactions and focus on the science and precision of their roles, a necessary evolution that had the downside of churning out several generations of MDs who seemed to forget they were in the business of treating people, not bodies.
Today, dissection is still a fact of life for medical students, but the cadavers come mostly from people who will their remains to science. Students are known to refer to a cadaver as the "donor" and hold "services of gratitude" at the end of their anatomy courses.
Their teachers, meanwhile, hope that the rite of passage will help them deal with, not abnegate, their human feelings about an experience they describe as "an activity that feels simultaneously wrong and very right, a taboo and yet a privilege."
Peter Scowen is Globe Books community editor.
