Collections & Cadavers

The Morton Collection | The Wistar & Horner Collection | The Anatomy Act & Cadaver Trade

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The Morton Collection

Of the 867 human crania Samuel Morton collected during his lifetime, 53 crania belonged to enslaved people from Havana, Cuba. 2 other crania likely belonged to enslaved Americans. These two are labeled Crania 1310 and Crania 1975.

Crania 1310 likely belonged to an enslaved woman from North Carolina. Moron received her cranium from Dr. J Hardy. 

Crania 1975 likely belonged to an enslaved man held in Delaware. He was hanged in Virginia, allegedly for rape, in 1839. This cranium was likely given to James Atkins Meigs, Morton's successor, after his death. He was likely named Jeff or Frank James. 

Both crania remain in Penn's collection at the Penn Museum.

~Research conducted by Carson Eckhard

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The Wistar & Hornor Collection

Before the collection was an official Wistar & Horner Museum it was an exhaustive collection of wet and dry human samples. This was a major draw for medical students when hands-on anatomical training was quickly becoming a staple of medical education. For most of the nineteenth century the field of “women’s health” was the only medically specialized professorship at the university. As Deirdre Cooper Owens (a guest at the Spring 2019 Symposium) discusses in Medical Bondage, reproductive medicine was developed in the South to maintain enslaved populations, and most of the major techniques and operations in gynecology came out of operations and experiments on enslaved women. Obstetrics courses, and thus the professorship, was likely in high demand by Penn’s large amount of Southern students, which made up about two-thirds of the total student body. The collection was an important part of medical students' education, but questions still remained about the origins of the specimens and cadavers. An examination of select university professors provide answers to these questions:

Hodge was just a small part of an extensive 'specimen obtaining' network of Penn medical professors and Southern alumni, who operated on enslaved people or were enslavers themselves. The North American Medical and Surgical Journal, was edited and printed in Philadelphia by Dr. Hodge, two additional Penn professors, and Penn alumnus Dr. Charles D. Meigs. 

Hodge's submissions to other medical journals give an idea of the main focus of his medical practice:

The subsequent correspondence between Drs. Yardley, Sansbury, and James about the case of extra-uterine pregnancy resulted in the donation of a fetus to the collection of Wistar and Horner specimen. 

This and other cases managed by Penn alumni (such as Dr. Meigs) detail the history of requesting and receiving specimens from Southern doctors. It is likely that additional cases helped add to the Wistar and Horner collection of specimens. Samples of the other submissions to the journal indicate that many of the cases involved bodies of enslaved people.

This journal was edited by professors and alumni of the University of Pennsylvania and printed in Philadelphia. The submissions and subsequent correspondence provide evidence of the extensive connections between Penn and its Southern alumni. These Penn professors express, multiple times throughout the journal that they are indebted to those doctors. Penn, in turn, benefited from the success of its Southern medical alumni who operated and experimented on enslaved people. The alumni did see themselves as members of an intellectual and physical network centered at the University. Some of these alumni went on to conduct experiments on enslaved women to further a field that helped make Penn medicine successful in its early period.

~Research conducted by Archana Upadhyay

The Anatomy Act & Cadaver Trade

In the Post-Civil War era, there was a change in the dynamics of race in Ameria. The manifestations of these changes can be seen in the medical career of Dr. William Smith Forbes, and his fight against the tradition of grave robbing that supported a nationwide cadaver trade. Studying these subjects provides a better understanding of a general shift in race politics of the second half of the 19th Century.

William Smith Forbes was born in Falmouth, Stafford Co. Virginia in 1831. He moved to Philadelphia to study medicine and eventually served as a resident physician at the Pennsylvania Hospital from 1853-1855. During the year after completing his residency, he served as a volunteer military surgeon. After returning to Philadelphia, he completed his medicinal studies at Penn and wrote his thesis about his time as a military Doctor during the Civil War. He stayed in medical academia, opening a private school of anatomy on Philadelphia's College Avenue and served as an Anatomy Teacher at Jefferson University. His medical career earned him a reputation as a prominent doctor in the city of Philadelphia. 

Forbes's most notable accomplishment was his authorship of the Anatomy Act of Pennsylvania. Forbes penned the Anatomy Act in 1867, and after many amendments, it was finally passed in 1883. The act required the bodies of dying people in prison, almshouses, and other institutions, to be buried at the expense of the public. While many legislators and members of the public opposed the act, calling it 'Ghastly,' medical professionals, who presumably collected cadavers legally, lauded the proposed legislation.

This was in direct opposition to the normal tradition of shipping cadavers to medical facilities where they would be used for dissection. Many doctors and professors satisfied their great need for cadavers through illegal means. In 1881, the university where Forbes served as an instructor, Jefferson University, took the steps to legally acquire 130 cadavers. However, students claimed to have used at least 200 cadavers in the same year. Documentation about Jefferson's methods to collect the approximately 70 additional cadavers remains to be found. 

A common method of cadaver acquisition was graverobbing. Forbes was most notably associated with the Graverobbing Incident at Lebanon Cemetery. Lebanon Cemetery, founded in 1849 on Passyunk Road, was a Philadelphia cemetery designated for black individuals. The cemetery had been a popular graverobbing site for many years. On December 4, 1882, 3 men stole the bodies of 6 black people from graves at Lebanon. They were identified shortly after as Frank McNamee, Henry Pillet, and Levi Chew. McNamee and Pillet were white men, and Chew was black. Eventually, Levi's brother, Robert Chew was arrested for his involvement. 

The Philadelphia Press reported: "In the slums and alleyways, where some of the worst phases in the lives of the colored population are daily visible to those who traverse those tortuous and filthy thoroughfares, the desire for revenge was intensified and found vent in blatant blasphemy from the throats of rum-sodden men and unsexed women."

McNamee implicated Forbes, claiming Forbes had been paying him for his services for three years. Forbes admitted that he had paid McNamee to haul between 110-150 bodies per year. However, he also testified that since his assistants dealt with McNamee directly, he never knew, or asked, where the bodies originated. Forbes essentially operated on an informal 'don't ask, don't tell' policy. After credible Philadelphians defended Forbes, he was declared not guilty on all charges. The other 4 thieves were arrested, and the Chew brothers received much more severe sentences. It is all but impossible to imagine the judge did not deliver a harsher punishment to the Chew bothers because of their race. 

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Observing the ways the justice system and the press interacted with the incident, it is possible to draw a few conclusions. Slavery ended in Philadelphia officially in 1780, 80-100 years before the Graverobbing Incident at Lebanon Cemetery. However, the treatment of black Philadelphians, both in life and death, shows the social cleavages between races that persisted beyond the formal abolishment of slavery. The language of the Philadelphia Press reveals the racism of people and institutions. Penn & Slavery Project has shown that racist curricula at Penn fostered pseudo-scientific racial theories, and Forbes' likely involvement in the cadaver trade, demonstrates directly how these teachings fueled racist and exploitative action in Penn graduates.

~Research conducted by Anna Lisa Lowenstien