University Forum Lecture: Motley Crews and Medical Men: Fighting Corpse Theft in the American Revolution and Early Republic
When
Office/Remote Location
Description
Chris Willoughby, Ph.D, assistant professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
In 1765, a multi-racial “sailors mob” attacked the home of Philadelphia Medical Professor William Shippen, Jr. Rocks shattered his windows, and a bullet tore through his fleeing carriage. While this attack coincided with the passage of the Stamp Act that sparked the American Revolution (which marks its 250th anniversary this year), this motley crew had another agenda. They hoped to reclaim a corpse stolen by physicians from a local graveyard, the first of many such uprisings.
Spanning from the Revolution to the Civil War, this lecture examines how the concentration of disenfranchised people on plantations and urban slums shaped the practice of dissection and anatomical study in medical schools. In contrast to studies emphasizing the evolution of medicine and anatomy, this lecture elucidates the structures that made people vulnerable to body snatchers and the rowdy activism that the enslaved and common poor took to preserve their graveyards and dignity.
Admission Information
Open to students, staff, faculty, and the public.