| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. By Michael Sappol. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. xiv, 430 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-691-05925-X.)

A Traffic of Dead Bodies is a major achievement. It is an empirically rich and creatively theorized book that resists easy classification. Michael Sappol offers a cultural history of anatomy, death, and the body in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America as well as a history of social identity. "My subject," he writes, "is the anatomical acquisition, dissection, and representation of bodies—and how such activities contributed to the making of professional, classed, sexed, racial, national, and speciated selves" (p. 1).

In chapter 1, Sappol outlines three "theorems" of a "cultural logic" (p. 15) that informed the rise of modern anatomy in medicine and popular culture: (1) the dead body was both powerless (in need of protection) and a powerful threat to the living; (2) anatomists and their opponents viewed these issues through a mind-body binary that privileged mind over body; and (3) death and death rituals served a powerful role in dramatizing and fixing unstable social identities.

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