Michael Sappol

Michael "Sappol’s book “A traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in 19th Century America” was the biggest disappointment of my 2012 reading. I confess to only reading the introduction and the first two chapters before putting the book away. In researching the life and career of an early 19th century physician and medical educator I felt I needed to know the attitudes the public had about dissection and the means medical schools used to obtain the needed corpses. Cincinnati, Lexington, and Louisville were all three very small cities and the logistics of supplying raw material for medical school anatomy classes could not have gone un noticed. Public opinion of those activities would doubtless affect their opinion of all physicians associated with the schools.

Sappol stated in the introduction that he was not going to consider the competition going on between medical sects or the medical advances that dissection brought. However, soon he was cherry picking quotes from herbalists and researchers and applying his own meaning to them without, in my opinion, considering the context in which the remarks were made. I cannot discount comments by René Laennec, who developed the stethoscope and the language describing the sounds it reveals, and Samuel Thompson, the founder of the first medical sect to financially challenge allelopaths, as simply reflecting society's views of the body and anatomy. In fact, my opinion is that these two helped set public opinion.

There are other issues I have with Sappol’s interpretations of events that may have to do his postmodernism orientation and my marxist / follow the money leanings. Yes the meaning that society gives to words changes over time. Today you can find certain groups of people talking about “Irish ancestors” who are not in any way referring to the Emerald Isle. However you cannot count every use of the word “irish” as anti-AfroAmerican racism. It seems to me that Mr. Sappol was cherry picking definitions of words to support his biases. If you want to really learn something about anatomy and social identity in the nineteenth-century look at Robert Blakely’s “Bones in the Basement”.… (mehr)