Abstract
Emphasizing the concepts of structural violence, abnormality, social marginalization, control, and consent, this chapter describes the excavation and analysis of skeletal remains from patients who were autopsied and dissected at Philadelphia’s historic Blockley Almshouse. Highly influential in the development of modern American medical education, the Blockley Almshouse was where the city’s poor were physically removed from society, transformed into anatomical specimens, exhibited in the almshouse’s Pathological Museum, used for surgical practice and experimentation, and permanently separated again through burial in the remote, unmarked almshouse cemetery further erased by an ash dump. The skeletal remains literally embody the rise of scientific medicine and changing attitudes regarding the appropriate treatment of the sick and the poor through two centuries in Philadelphia and across the nation.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the principals of Kise Straw & Kolodner and especially the many archaeologists who conducted the cemetery excavations. Gretchen Worden of the Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia was instrumental in preserving the Blockley Almshouse Skeletal Collection for analysis. Todd Hutton, Mary Lee Seibert, K. Della Ferguson, R. Barry White, and John Johnsen of Utica College secured laboratory space and have strongly supported research using the collection. Kathleen Sandone from Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll, LLP oversaw the legal aspects of the project. Elizabeth Graf of the Woodlands Cemetery Company arranged for the reburial of the remains. We are indebted to the doctoral students in the Physical Therapy Program at Utica College who have contributed so much to the analysis of the skeletal remains . Kevin Waldron from Utica College prepared the images for this chapter. The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia funded the archaeological excavations.
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Crist, T.A., Mooney, D.B., Morrell, K.A. (2017). “The Mangled Remains of What Had Been Humanity”: Evidence of Autopsy and Dissection at Philadelphia’s Blockley Almshouse, 1835–1895. In: Nystrom, K. (eds) The Bioarchaeology of Dissection and Autopsy in the United States. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26836-1_12
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