Abstract
In the nineteenth century, two processes merged that resulted in the structural inequality of the poor and institutionalized: the reformation of social welfare and the passing of anatomy acts. In the increasingly industrialized United States, escalating unemployment rates and poverty fostered the widespread establishment of poorhouses. While developed as a means of helping the poor, poorhouses were also used as a means of social control and reinforced social and health inequalities. At the same time, in an effort to secure a steady supply of anatomical specimens to a rapidly expanding medical education system, and to alleviate the public anxiety associated with grave robbing, anatomy laws were passed that granted medical schools the right to dissect unclaimed bodies. In 2012, the skeletal remains of 20 individuals, recovered from the Erie County Poorhouse cemetery, exhibited evidence of either dissection or autopsy. The focus of this chapter is the inequality inherent in the formulation and realization of anatomy legislation that made it legal to dissect unclaimed bodies of poorhouse inmates. It is argued that these processes reflect the institutionalization of inequality and manifestations of structural violence.
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Notes
- 1.
Here are two examples of such legislation (Sappol 2002): A 1752 act of Parliament required either the gibbeting or dissection of executed criminals, a law that remained in effect until 1832. In 1874, Massachusetts passed a law in which men either killed in duels or that were executed for killing during a duel would be dissected.
- 2.
A short list of measures meant to stop grave robbing (Sappol 2002): New Hampshire (1796) punishment for the unauthorized exhumation of bodies included a fine of no more than $1000, no more than 1-year jail time, and a public whipping; Vermont passed similar legislation in 1804; Massachusetts (1815) $1000 fine and a year in jail; Ohio (1831) $1000 fine or 30 days in jail with just bread and water.
- 3.
While it may be possible that individuals who were not inmates or patients of the Poorhouse complex found their way into the cemetery , it is important to note that both the City of Buffalo and the County of Erie utilized distinct cemeteries for the burial of their other unclaimed dead.
- 4.
The Medical Department of Niagara University was absorbed by the Medical Department of the University at Buffalo on June 21, 1898.
- 5.
- 6.
Hodge et al. (Chap. 6) discuss an example in which John C. Warren, founding professor of Anatomy and Surgery at Harvard Medical School , donated his skeletal, noting that “As a successful, white, male, educated, politically connected medical professional, Warren was empowered within the structural systems of his period. He extended his personhood by controlling his body beyond death.”
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Acknowledgements
The first author thanks Joyce Sirianni, Jennifer Muller, Jennifer Byrnes, Rosanne Higgins, Doug Perrelli, and the rest of the research team for giving him the opportunity to examine the Erie County Poorhouse collection. Preliminary reporting of the data was presented at the symposium Forgotten People in Forgotten Places: The Archaeology, History, and Biology of the Erie County Poorhouse in Buffalo, NY at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Additionally, aspects of the discussion of structural violence were presented by the first author at the symposium The Embodied Politics of Inequality and Pain: Case Studies from Bioarchaeology at the 2014 Society for American Archaeology meetings. Lastly, the authors thank Debra Martin and the anonymous reviewers for providing very useful advice and comments.
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Nystrom, K.C., Sirianni, J., Higgins, R., Perrelli, D., Liber Raines, J.L. (2017). Structural Inequality and Postmortem Examination at the Erie County Poorhouse. 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_13
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