In the 18th and 19th centuries, the rapid expansion of medical education in the United States and Europe created a desperate demand for human bodies. Anatomy classes, surgical training, and medical research all depended on dissection, but legal sources were extremely limited, and typically restricted to executed criminals or unclaimed bodies. To meet this demand, a not so secret trade in human remains developed, one that would prey on the most vulnerable members of society: enslaved Africans.
In America, this trade took many forms. Resurrectionists, body snatchers, stole recently buried individuals to supply medical schools, while some doctors and slave owners actively facilitated the removal of bodies from plantations, slave hospitals, prisons, and unmarked cemeteries. Their combined efforts ensured a steady supply of bodies for laboratories and lecture halls in cities like Philadelphia and New York.
Black cemeteries were especially vulnerable to this practice. They often had no legal protection, and the families of the deceased had little power to resist or seek justice. Local authorities frequently ignored complaints or quietly condoned the theft, allowing grave robbing to continue with minimal consequences.
In New York City, this system operated almost in plain sight. One of the city’s leading medical instructors, Richard Bayley, conducted his dissections at New York Hospital. The hospital happened to sit near two major burial sites: the paupers’ cemetery and the African Burial Ground, where roughly 15,000 Black New Yorkers were buried over time. With both sites within easy reach, bodies were readily available, turning these cemeteries into a dependable pipeline for medical dissection.
Unlike graveyards in wealthier parts of the city, which employed guards and sometimes used iron cages to prevent disturbance, the African Burial Ground had virtually no post-mortem security. Bodies were often buried hastily in shallow graves, sometimes stacked together in shared pits. In many cases, the dead were placed in the ground without coffins at all. These conditions made exhumation easy, turning Black burial grounds into open targets for resurrectionists and medical practitioners alike.
Once exhumed, the bodies were used for a variety of purposes. In anatomy labs, they were dissected to teach students the structure of the human body. Dissections allowed students to learn first-hand about muscles, organs, and skeletal systems.
They were also examined for disease, injuries, and pathology. Some remains were added to scientific collections and used to justify racist theories of human hierarchy, including the notion that Africans were biologically inferior, a claim now fully discredited.
This practice also extended to individuals involved in anti-slavery resistance because they were legally classified as criminals, which made their bodies subject to state control after execution. After John Brown’s1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry, a rebellion aimed at freeing enslaved Africans, several enslaved men who participated, including Shields Green and John Copeland, were captured and executed. Their bodies were reportedly exhumed and transferred to medical institutions for study, where they were dissected and preserved as anatomical specimens.
Beyond formal education, these corpses were often sent to collectors and researchers more interested in measurement and classification. Every skull, every skeleton, became a data point. Families of the deceased had no power to intervene, and the law offered little to no protection.
One of the most well‑known figures tied to this history is Dr. Samuel George Morton, a 19th‑century Philadelphia physician and one of the founders of craniometry, the measurement of skulls. Morton amassed a collection of around 1,300 human skulls from around the world, including many from African-descended populations.
Morton’s collection was largely sourced from unprotected cemeteries, slave hospitals, prisons, and intermediaries who purchased skulls from grave robbers. He used these skulls to argue for differences in intelligence between races, claiming that white people were superior, a theory that is now recognized as pseudoscience rooted in racism. After his death, Morton’s collection became part of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, where it remained on display or in storage for decades.
Africa: The Herero and Nama Experience
The brutal exploitation of human remains was not limited to the United States alone. In the early 20th century, German colonial forces in what is now Namibia carried out a campaign of genocide against the Herero and Nama peoples. Tens of thousands were killed through warfare, starvation, forced marches, and imprisonment in concentration camps. Survivors faced medical experiments, forced labor, and relentless abuse.
For German scientists, this violence was framed as an opportunity for “scientific” study. Eugen Fischer, a physician and anthropologist, conducted extensive research on the Herero and Nama.
After people were killed or died in captivity, their skulls were systematically exhumed or removed from corpses. They were meticulously cleaned, sometimes boiled to remove flesh, and labeled before being shipped to Germany for further study. In these laboratories, Fischer and his colleagues took detailed measurements, cataloged the skulls, and used them to support racist theories of biological difference.
Fischer’s work did not remain confined to academic circles. The findings from these skulls later fed into eugenic ideologies in Germany, providing pseudo-scientific “proof” that supported policies of sterilization and racial persecution decades later.
In recent years, a growing reckoning has taken place on both sides of the Atlantic. Descendants of the Herero and Nama, alongside Namibian authorities, have worked to recover remains taken during German colonial rule, with some skulls and bones returned from Germany since 2011, though many are still held in European institutions.
Similarly, in the United States, scholars, activists, and community members have demanded the repatriation of remains taken without consent; the University of Pennsylvania has returned some skulls, and in 2024 an interfaith burial ceremony was held for 19 unidentified Black Philadelphians whose bodies had been part of Morton’s collection.
These acts of repatriation and public acknowledgment are far more than ceremonial, they restore dignity to lives violently exploited, confront the injustices that allowed such exploitation, and honor the humanity of those denied proper burials, ensuring their stories are never forgotten.
Sources:
https://histanthro.org/news/observations/medicine-racism-and-the-legacies-of-the-morton-skull-collection/
Grave Robbing, Black Cemeteries, and the American Medical School
https://kommunikation.uni-freiburg.de/pm-en/2014/pm.2014-03-04.18-en
https://www.manchesterhive.com/downloadpdf/view/journals/hrv/4/2/article-p27.pdf
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-troubling-origins-of-the-skeletons-in-a-new-york-museum
