Grave-robbing Black cemeteries for dissection
Nineteenth-century medical schools relied on bodies stolen from Black cemeteries for dissection — at the Medical College of Georgia, the work was done by an enslaved man, Grandison Harris.
Anatomy classes needed cadavers, and American medical schools disproportionately took them from Black graves, where the theft was least likely to be punished. At the Medical College of Georgia, the school purchased an enslaved man, Grandison Harris, in 1852 specifically to rob the nearby Cedar Grove Cemetery and supply bodies for dissection. Remains of those Black men, women, and children were rediscovered in the college basement in 1989. The episode captures a recurring pattern in Medical Apartheid: Black bodies were used by the very medical system that denied Black people care.
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Black graves robbed to supply medical-school dissection.