A heads up, this episode could get graphic, at times. We're talking about dead bodies here. Take care while listening.I'm in a bright white windowless room at Quinnipiac University's Netter School of Medicine. And in front of me, on a stainless steel table, is a dead body.
Like we put the donors on the table, and we kind of give a little thank you before the students come in. Right. And, you know, we might say a little prayer. We do what's in our heart as we prepare our donor for the class that's coming.This is the way people expect to be treated after death, right? With respect and dignity. This is the treatment those who donated their bodies to Harvard Medical School hoped for.They were allegedly chopped up, packaged and sold to collectors. Horrifying.
In some cases, you might even finance your medical studies by stealing bodies for the other students and the professors.Voluntary body donations like we see at medical schools now didn't exist in the 1800s. In fact, there was a stigma around ending up in an anatomy lab. Only the poor or marginalized were subject to the indignity of dissection.
Dr. Berry thought the last chapter of her book would focus on enslaved people's burial practices. How they honored their dead. But then she discovered that even after death, Black people's bodies were not safe.Their bodies were used for medical education. Their bodies were the foundation for our early medical schools across the United States and some of the largest medical programs.It was all across the United States.
And racism affected white doctors' reaction to what they found inside, what they wrote down in their notes that Dr. Berry read almost 200 years laterWhen they dissected a Black body, they were surprised to find that the insides looked the same. So there was a perception that the skin color meant that there was difference everywhere. Not just difference in the flesh, but difference on the inside. And I think that really brought that home for me.
But that wasn't something he was ever taught. He remembers his early days of learning anatomy and the crass detachment most had.The attitude we were given is that this is something dead. You can work on it. You can do things to it. It doesn't really matter because the living thing that was in there is gone, right? So this is a piece of meat or, you know, an old piece of equipment or whatever, and you're just trying to learn from that.
Source: Healthcare Press (healthcarepress.net)
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