000			03084nam a22002417a 4500
005			20260202135428.0
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020			_a9780691118758
028			_a: International Book Distributors _b: Flat No. 17, Prakash Apartment, 4405/2, 5 Ansari Road, Daryaganj. _c: 121707 _d: 06/05/2025
028			_a: Zafaa Books & Distributors _b: 313/103A, H.No.-15, Tulsi Nagar, Inderlok, Delhi. _c: ZBD0399 _d: 24/01/2026
082			_a364.1 SAP
100			_aSappol, Michael.
245			_aA Traffic of Dead Bodies _b: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth–Century America. _c/ Michael Sappol.
260			_a, New Jersey _b: Princeton University Press _c, 2002.
300			_axii, 430p. _c: 24cm.
365			_b2790
520			_aA Traffic of Dead Bodies enters the sphere of bodysnatching medical students, dissection-room pranks, and anatomical fantasy. It shows how nineteenth-century American physicians used anatomy to develop a vital professional identity, while claiming authority over the living and the dead. It also introduces the middle-class women and men, working people, unorthodox healers, cultural radicals, entrepreneurs, and health reformers who resisted and exploited anatomy to articulate their own social identities and visions. The nineteenth century saw the rise of the American medical profession: a proliferation of practitioners, journals, organizations, sects, and schools. Anatomy lay at the heart of the medical curriculum, allowing American medicine to invest itself with the authority of European science. Anatomists crossed the boundary between life and death, cut into the body, reduced it to its parts, framed it with moral commentary, and represented it theatrically, visually, and textually. Only initiates of the dissecting room could claim the privileged healing status that came with direct knowledge of the body. But anatomy depended on confiscation of the dead--mainly the plundered bodies of African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, and the poor. As black markets in cadavers flourished, so did a cultural obsession with anatomy, an obsession that gave rise to clashes over the legal, social, and moral status of the dead. Ministers praised or denounced anatomy from the pulpit; rioters sacked medical schools; and legislatures passed or repealed laws permitting medical schools to take the bodies of the destitute. Dissection narratives and representations of the anatomical body circulated in new places: schools, dime museums, popular lectures, minstrel shows, and sensationalist novels. Michael Sappol resurrects this world of graverobbers and anatomical healers, discerning new ligatures among race and gender relations, funerary practices, the formation of the middle-class, and medical professionalization. In the process, he offers an engrossing and surprisingly rich cultural history of nineteenth-century America.
650			_aAnatomy and Embodied Social Identity
650			_aSocial Identity
650			_a19 Century America
700			_aMichael Sappol.
942			_cBOOK
999			_c63169 _d63169