Grave Robbing, Black Cemeteries, and the American Medical School

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American medical education widely expanded in the nineteenth century, and with it came a demand for cadavers that exceeded availability. In the eighteenth century, dissection was a punishment for executed criminals, and the associated stigma meant few were donating their bodies to science. So medical students, and the people who supplied them, turned to grave robbing. And those burial grounds most often victimized were for the poor and marginalized.

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