Abstract
In 1990, excavation of an area known as Dunning, on the northwest side of Chicago, revealed human skeletal remains from what is believed to be the first cemetery for the Cook County Poor Farm and Insane Asylum (1851–1869). 114 burial features (yielding 120 individuals) were recovered, including five anatomical elements displaying postmortem examination. The goal of this research is to determine why postmortem examination is found amidst the burials in the Dunning Cemetery, and to explore what these five instances tell us about nineteenth century medicine and cultural attitudes towards the indigent.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
Bell, C. (1814). A system of operative surgery, founded on the basis of anatomy (Vol. 1). London: Longman.
Bonner, T. N. (1991). Medicine in Chicago, 1850–1950: A chapter in the social and scientific development of a city. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Chamberlain, A. T. (2013). Morbid osteology: Evidence for autopsies, dissection and surgical training from the Newcastle Infirmary Burial Ground (1753-1845). In P. Mitchell (Ed.), Anatomical dissection in enlightenment England and beyond (pp. 11–22). Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing.
Corson, E. R. (1885). A case of compound comminuted fracture of the frontal bone—Trephining—Recovery. The New York Medical Times, XIII(4), 104–106.
Csordas, T. J. (1990). Embodiment as a paradigm for anthropology. Ethos, 18(1), 5–47.
Davis, D. (1955). History of medical practice in Illinois (Vol. 2, pp. 1850–1900). Chicago: The Illinois State Medical Society. Retrieved December 15, 2014, from http://archive.org/stream/historyofmedical02illi/historyofmedical02illi.
Duis, P. R. (1998). Challenging Chicago: Coping with everyday life, 1837–1920. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois.
Echols, M. (2014). Examples of trepanning during the Civil War. Retrieved December 15, 2014, from http://www.medicalantiques.com/civilwar/Civil_War_Articles/Trephining_during_Civil_War.htm
Grauer, A., & McNamara, E. (1995). A piece of Chicago’s past: Exploring childhood mortality in the Dunning Poorhouse Cemetery. In A. L. Grauer (Ed.), Bodies of evidence: Reconstructing history through skeletal analysis (pp. 91–103). New York: Wiley-Liss.
Grauer, A., McNamara, E., & Hanson, S. (2000). Poverty and immigration in a city of change: Archival and skeletal analyses of the Dunning Poorhouse, Chicago (Abstract). American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 30(Suppl), 165.
Grauer, A., McNamara, E., & Houdek, D. (1998). A history of their own: Patterns of death in a nineteenth-century poorhouse. In A. L. Grauer & P. Stuart-Macadam (Eds.), Sex and gender in paleopathological perspective (pp. 149–164). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harrington, J. M., & Blakely, R. L. (1995a). Bones in the basement: Bioarchaeology of historic remains in nonmortuary contexts. In A. L. Grauer (Ed.), Bodies of evidence: Reconstructing history through skeletal analysis (pp. 105–119). New York: Wiley-Liss.
Harrington, J. M., & Blakely, R. L. (1995b). Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief: The selectivity exercised by graverobbers at the Medical college of Georgia, 1837-1887. In S. R. Saunders & A. Herring (Eds.), Grave reflections: Portraying the past through Cemetery studies (pp. 154–178). Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars Press.
Hurd, H. M. (1915). Chicago State Hospital, Dunning, IL. Unpublished manuscript.
Katz, M. B. (1986). In the shadow of the poorhouse: A social history of welfare in America. New York: Basic Books.
Keene, D. (1989). Final report-archaeological investigations: Dunning cemetery site. Report submitted to the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. Chicago: Archaeological Research Lab. Loyola University of Chicago.
Keene, D. (1990). Dunning site-archaeological investigations: Report 3. Report submitted to the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency Loyola University of Chicago. Chicago: Archaeological Research Lab.
Keene, D., & Grauer, A. (1993). Dunning site archaeological investigations. Report 4. Report submitted to the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. HSRPA 1990-29. Chicago: Archaeological Research.
Klebaner, B. J. (1964). Poverty and its relief in American thought, 1815–61. Social Service Review, 38(4), 382–399.
Mitchell, P. (2013). Anatomical dissection in enlightenment England and beyond. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing.
Nystrom, K. (2011). Postmortem examinations and the embodiment of inequality in 19th century United States. International Journal of Paleopathology, 1(3-4), 164–172.
Owsley, D. (1995). Contributions of bioarchaeological research to knowledge of nineteenth-century surgery. In S. R. Saunders & A. Herring (Eds.), Grave reflections: Portraying the past through cemetery studies (pp. 119–151). Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars’ Press.
Preul, M. (1997). A history of neuroscience from Galen to Gall. In S. Greenblatt, T. F. Dagi, & M. H. Epstein (Eds.), A history of neurosurgery: In its scientific and professional contexts (pp. 99–130). Park Ridge, IL: American Association of Neurological Surgeons.
Sappol, M. (2002). A traffic of dead bodies: Anatomy and embodied social identity in nineteenth-century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Schultz, S. M. (1992). Body snatching: The robbing of graves for the education of physicians in early Nineteenth Century America. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Walker, F. A. (1872). Ninth census—Volume I. The statistics of the population of the United States, embracing the tables of race, nationality, sex, selected ages, and occupations. Washington, DC: GPO.
Zeuch, L. H. (1927). History of medical practice in Illinois. Vol 1: Preceding 1850. The Illinois State Medical Society. Chicago: The Book Press.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks are due to the students of the Loyola University Chicago Bioanthropology Laboratory for assisting with data collection, to Dr. Dawn Cobb and Anne Haaker at the Illinois State Museum for assistance in acquiring documents and reports, and to the anonymous reviewers who helped strengthen this chapter.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Grauer, A.L., Lathrop, V., Timoteo, T. (2017). Exploring Evidence of Nineteenth Century Dissection in the Dunning Poorhouse Cemetery. In: Nystrom, K. (eds) The Bioarchaeology of Dissection and Autopsy in the United States. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26836-1_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26836-1_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-26834-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-26836-1
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)