| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Michael Sappol. A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2002. Pp. xii, 430. Cloth $50.00, paper $19.95.
Michael Sappol's "subject is the anatomical acquisition, dissection, and representation of bodies," presented in "a series of interlinked narratives and interpretations about anatomy, death, and the body" (p. 3). Had Sappol focused only on his effort to "recast" the history of American medicine and medical education in the nineteenth century as "an anatomical narrative" (p. 48), the story would have attracted a limited audience. But he sets himself several wider goals, including showing how "the anatomical body became our body" (p. 1) and how the study of anatomy contributed to "the making of American class identity and the modern self" (p. 2). The latter effort is not entirely persuasive.	1
The author has delved deeply into various records to demonstrate the increasingly important role anatomy played in medical education. As medicine shifted from theory to empirical knowledge in the nineteenth century, giving doctors the cachet of science to bolster their status, anatomy was the first tool they had. In the second half of the century, increased use of the microscope and the germ theory added to the scientific aura of medicine but reduced the importance of anatomy to the profession. One result was the popularization of anatomy, begun by the doctors themselves, but eventually taken over by businessmen who ran museums of anatomy, often full of curiosities and freaks of nature, that were popular after the Civil War.	. . .

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