Books by Subject
Human
Dissection
Reviews
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Many of us have heard stories about ghoulish medical students and the pranks
they play using arms, heads, or other parts "borrowed" from the cadavers in
their anatomy labs. Like most urban legends, these stories are both compelling and untrue,
telling us more about how we imagine the world to be than how it really is. First Cut
contains the observations of a humanities professor allowed to watch medical students
struggle with the challenges presented by their first anatomy class. Carter tracks, and
mirrors, the students' progress from initial nervous joking and unwillingness to touch the
bodies to familiarity and respect for their "silent instructors," culminating in
an end-of-term Service of Reflection and Gratitude.
As he sees changes "in personal feelings about death, touching,
and the wonderfully complex activities of the human body" in the young
men and women, he also puts to rest the memory of his father, who had donated
his body for medical study. Pacing the story are three inspired essays on the
nature of medical education and thirty beautiful and absorbing Renaissance anatomical
illustrations. First Cut, far from being a sensationalistic account of
young doctors run amok, is perfect for anyone who is interested in understanding
medicine and its practitioners. --Rob Lightner
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Reviews
In 1989, a cache of some 9800 dissected
and amputated human bones - more than 75 percent of them African American -
was found in the earthen basement floor of the Medical College of Georgia in
Augusta. To re-create the social context and medical practices that led to the
bones' clandestine disposal before 1910, Robert L. Blakely and Judith M. Harrington
assembled a team of archaeologists, forensic anthropologists, historians, experimental
anatomists, and ethnographers. Together they argue that the procurement of cadavers
by American medical schools was part of a racist system that viewed African
Americans as expendable not only in life but also after death. Contributors
show that notions of a separate "Negro medicine" did not prevent professors
from using African American bodies to teach their students how to treat white
patients. Other essays shed light on the importance of surgical training at
a time when amputation was a primary means of treatment. Still others examine
the bony evidence of diet and disease in a nineteenth-century urban black population.
Taking a broad approach to the study of a single, well-preserved site, Bones
in the Basement presents the work of both African American and Euro-American
researchers and includes interviews with residents of Augusta today.
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Human Dissection
for the Health Sciences
By John H. Langdon
Paperback
Little Brown & Co., Aug. 1993
ISBN: 0316513946
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