Slice and Dice
Stolen Black Bodies
“That Addie Mae’s fate is far from unique was driven home by a grisly 1989 discovery during a breathlessly hot August in Augusta, Georgia. Construction workers renovating a stately 154-year-old Greek Revival structure that once housed the Medical College of Georgia (MCG) stumbled upon a nightmare cached beneath the building. Strewn beneath its concrete floor lay a chaos of desiccated body parts and nearly ten thousand human bones and skulls, many bearing the marks of nineteenth-century anatomy tools or numbered with India ink.
The cool sunless basement had preserved the remains remarkably well. Bones and human “dissected material” littered the floors, metal tubs, and even latrines. Ossified human remains spilled from broken vats that had once held cadavers preserved in alcohol. jars held fetal organs in vanishing lakes of whiskey—an indication that scientists had displayed the purloined bodies, using alcohol as a preservative, in addition to dissecting them. Because not only grave robbing but also anatomical dissection were illegal in Georgia in 1887, there was no legal source of such bodies: They were stolen, and in a manner that outraged decency and violated the law.
This disarticulated nightmare was all that remained of faceless people whose bodies had been dissected, then unceremoniously scattered in the basement amid a jumble of broken syringes, microscope slides, scalpels, old pill bottles, and other medical detritus. As years passed, medical personnel covered each stratum of human refuse with quicklime to quell the stench, and later the basement was cemented over. Scientists determined that most of the remains dated from the nineteenth century, and detailed analyses of the bones and surrounding materials revealed that 75 percent of the bones in the basement were those of African Americans, although blacks constituted only 42 percent of the area’s population.”
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“The basement was filled with mostly black bodies not by accident, but by design. As the nineteenth century progressed, doctors’ needs for cadavers for medical education and training surged, but dissection was abhorrent, a shameful fate reserved for the most heinous criminals, who received a double sentence of execution and dissection. As a result, physicians appropriated the bodies of enslaved persons with no legal rights or those of free blacks with no rights that a white man was obligated to respect.
The bodies in the basement had been spirited by night from the graveyard—but not from just any graveyard: Most were taken from Cedar Grove Cemetery, an African American burial ground…”
| Harriet A. Washington
jesus. my people.