Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

by Andrew Carroll

snatchers stiff fines, corporal punishment, and imprisonment. But legislators acknowledged that corpses were necessary for anatomical study, and they granted doctors a whole new crop of bodies to dissect, including executed arsonists, murderers, and burglars.

along in the process. Then, tired of waiting for people to get sick and die, they started offing people willy-nilly. Thirteen murders later they got nabbed, and Hare testified against Burke for immunity. Burke was hanged in January 1829, and his corpse was publicly dissected before a standing-room-only crowd at the Edinburgh Medical College.

Outrage over the Burke and Hare murders prodded Massachusetts legislators in 1831 to outlaw body snatching, but they didn’t want to deprive the medical community entirely of corpses, so they permitted doctors to take, with some restrictions, the unclaimed bodies of those who would otherwise have been buried “at the public expense.” Dead paupers, transients, African Americans (enslaved or free), and anyone else considered down and out had already been plundered on a regular

guaranteed protection. When the Honorable John Scott Harrison was laid to rest in North Bend, Ohio, Harrison’s family secured his casket in a brick-lined vault buried under heavy stones and paid a night watchman to patrol the area. Incredibly, Harrison’s body was found days later—during a search for another corpse—at the Ohio Medical College. Harrison’s posthumous reappearance made a few headlines, considering that he was a former congressman and the son of U.S. president William Henry Harrison. (John Harrison’s

from scalp to toe. Within hours of dying, a thirty-eight-year-old man named Joseph Jernigan was flown to a Denver laboratory, where his still-warm corpse was dipped and frozen solid in a –100 degree Fahrenheit gel and then sliced into more than eighteen hundred sections. Each millimeter-thin sliver was photographed and scanned into a computer, creating a seamless three-dimensional image. Obese and lacking an appendix and one testicle, Jernigan wasn’t considered physically

Where each of the thirty-eight Dakotas ended up after being hanged and dissected isn’t recorded. There’s a strong possibility that some of their remains were sold or donated by the Mankato doctors to museums and other scientific institutions. Native American bones and relics had been highly sought out ever since the discovery of a Virginia burial mound in

Nose,” Bill Lass tells me as we leave the

Before Cut Nose’s corpse began to putrefy, the doctor who acquired him boiled and cleaned the bones so that he could educate his young sons about human anatomy. Far from frightening the boys, it nurtured their passion to become doctors. After attending medical school and working with their father, Charles and William Mayo helped establish a clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, that has since grown into one of the most respected and emulated health facilities in the world.

Philippines (a U.S. territory then), Army doctor Richard Strong infected thirty-four Filipino inmates with a cholera vaccine tainted with plague organisms. Thirteen died. Strong was investigated but cleared of any criminal wrongdoing. Six years later he was researching the deficiency disease beriberi and ended up killing several more Filipino inmates. Unlike Goldberger’s squad, however, Strong’s subjects were not pardoned but paid off in cigarettes. Strong returned to America in 1913 and became Harvard University’s first professor of tropical medicine.

Many of Goldberger’s skeptics still remained unconvinced and continued to denounce his theory, and they were joined by southern politicians who resented a Yankee from New York lecturing their citizens on how to adopt better eating habits. Frustrated that regional pride was undermining public welfare, Goldberger nevertheless recognized how costly it would be, with or without federal help, for southern states to overhaul their agricultural system and ensure that every individual received enough fresh milk, eggs, meat, vegetables, and bread to stave off pellagra. Finding a cheap, readily available

fact, to be the panacea Goldberger had been searching for. Just two teaspoons three times a day were necessary, and it cost only pennies to purchase and distribute. (Biochemists learned eight years after Goldberger’s death that niacin was the active nutrient, and in 1943 the War Food Administration mandated that all commercially made white bread be enriched with niacin and other vitamins.)

eradication of pellagra. In addition to this immediately practical outcome of his investigations, there has come a broader understanding of human nutrition and diet by the definite establishment of pellagra as one of the deficiency diseases.” Christiaan Eijkman, the Dutch doctor who discovered what caused beriberi, and Sir Frederick Hopkins, a pioneer in vitamin research, ultimately received the 1929 Nobel award. But even if Goldberger had won, he wouldn’t have been alive to accept the prize; a malignant kidney tumor had metastasized throughout his body in December, and he passed away on January 17, 1929. Before he died, Goldberger offered up his body for scientific study. Goldberger had also instructed that his memorial service be a simple affair. Having dedicated his entire career to public service and raising four sons, he had no life savings to leave his wife, and an elaborate funeral would have been one more financial burden Mary couldn’t afford. After his death, Goldberger’s friends and admirers—including the Mayo brothers—successfully lobbied Congress to provide Mary with a pension. She would have been destitute otherwise.

Ironically, experimentation on human subjects in the United States only got worse after Nuremberg. Cold War hysteria prompted an almost “anything goes” mentality among government scientists, and thousands of ghastly tests were performed on inmates and unsuspecting members of the general public. In 1946 scientists with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission collaborated with Quaker Oats and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to feed breakfast oatmeal spiked with radioactive calcium to mentally retarded children and teenagers at the Walter E. Fernald State School outside of Boston. (MIT and Quaker Oats paid a $1.85 million settlement to the test’s adult victims in 1998.) And when the arms race escalated in 1949 after the Soviets set off their first nuclear bomb, U.S. troops bore the brunt of early, large-scale radiation experiments. On November 1, 1951, some three thousand military personnel were trucked to the Frenchman Flat basin in the Nevada desert, and a bomb more powerful than “Fat Man,” which wiped out Nagasaki, was detonated seven miles away. Given no shelter or protective gear, the men were exposed to the shock waves, intense heat, and radioactive fallout. During a similar exercise the next year, troops were positioned four miles from a nuclear blast, and in 1953 they were placed a mere seven thousand feet away. Sailors aboard U.S. warships were also anchored downwind of nuclear explosions in the Pacific, and the Veterans Administration has since designated 210,00...

agents such as sarin gas to better understand how various toxins affected the immune system. (Not well, they discovered.) President Bill Clinton offered a formal apology on October 3, 1995, for the government’s radiation experiments after a Department of Energy report laid bare the agency’s earlier transgressions. Both his statement and the DOE exposé on its past actions were unprecedented, and they would have been major news if both the media and the American public hadn’t been distracted by a more pressing story that broke just hours later: football legend O. J. Simpson was found not guilty following an eight-month murder trial.

they became immunized. From this research Pasteur invented several lifesaving vaccines.

Some small towns warned would-be visitors to keep their distance. In Meadow, Utah, the lone public health officer drove out to the borderline and erected a makeshift sign that declared THIS TOWN IS QUARANTINED—DO NOT STOP. But ultimately his efforts were futile; the postman had already been infected and unknowingly spread the virus throughout Meadow. With the threat of death ever present, people went insane with grief. A Chicago man who could no longer bear the sight of his wife and four children suffering from influenza was overheard raving, “I’ll cure them my own way!” before slitting their necks. Throughout it all President Wilson remained silent. On October 12 he personally led a war-bond parade in Manhattan, attracting a cheering throng of twenty-five thousand. Within a week, an additional two thousand New Yorkers were dead. After cresting in October, infections began to dip nationwide in November and then rise again one month later. Another, less punishing wave swept the country in March 1919, and then, as suddenly as the disease had appeared almost a year earlier, it was gone. Determining with absolute certitude where, down to the square foot, influenza attacked its first victim isn’t possible. Nor is it likely that the real patient zero will ever be identified, though in all probability it was a local farmer infected by a sick bird. But what strikes me while standing in the middle of South Inman Street and looking at this small oasis of homes surrounded by corn, mi...

away. Spanish flu went on to kill 675,000 Americans and at least 50 million people overseas. Other estimates put the global tally at twice that, but the final number won’t ever be known because the doctors, nurses, and coroners who normally recorded fatalities were either overworked to the point of exhaustion or dead themselves.

“That’s essentially our tomb of the unknown soldiers,” my guide says. “And see those bushes at the base? Under those are the amputated limbs of veterans. But that’s not what I wanted to show you.”

“Under here,” he tells me, “are the remains of thirteen people who were definitely killed by the influenza. They all worked at the local sugar beet factory, and nine of them died in a single day.” “And there’s no marker or anything for them?” “Nothing. That’s a lot of folks for a small community to lose so quickly, and the townsfolk were probably overwhelmed and buried them as fast as they could.”

This is what’s so bewildering to me. No war or disaster has killed as many Americans, and yet the pandemic’s imprint on our national psyche is so faint as to be nearly imperceptible. College and high school history textbooks give it short shrift, at best tacking on a sentence or two about it at the end of their chapters on World War I, and relatively few works of literature have focused on it either. This is especially remarkable

One reason the plague has mostly been forgotten, I assume, is—despite claiming more lives than the Civil War (and in considerably less time)—there wasn’t a larger cause at stake. Societies understandably glorify their wartime dead, even on the losing side, by memorializing their courage and sacrifice in context of a greater struggle. Tragically, but to be perfectly blunt, victims of the Spanish flu died for nothing.

Nor was there any great medical breakthrough that would lend the story a climactic moment of triumph. Doctors frantically tried to produce a vaccine, but their efforts were doomed from the start because they mistakenly believed that Spanish flu was caused by a bacterium. In actuality the culprit was a virus, which is much smaller and attacks the body differently, and scientists weren’t able to examine and categorize different viruses until the invention of the electron microscope in the 1930s. Even then,

Bordering the southwest perimeter of the cemetery and demarcated by two large white crosses is a patch of land about thirty feet long. Buried under here are the seventy-two Brevig Mission residents killed in late November 1918 by Spanish influenza. Despite quarantines and travel restrictions into Alaska, somehow the virus reached this secluded outpost and wiped out 90 percent of the local population within five days, leaving alive only eight children and teenagers. In the summer of 1951, Johan Hultin traveled to this exact spot next

When the National Institutes of Health rejected his funding appeal, Hultin was able to secure a $10,000 grant from the University of Iowa. (Hultin later learned that the NIH had decided to organize its own search, a $300,000 expedition to Nome led by scientists and doctors from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. A principal participant in the classified and ultimately unsuccessful venture was a young Dr. Maurice Hilleman.)

Hope emerged four decades later in the form of a self-described LSD enthusiast and California surfer dude named Kary Mullis, who also happened to be (and still is) a brilliant biochemist. In 1993, Mullis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a technique that enables scientists to replicate DNA sequences ad infinitum and with perfect consistency. This means that even if they have only a single droplet of blood, strand of hair, or cell to work with, they can make limitless copies

respect to the more explicit descriptions, there must be something cathartic about getting images like those out of one’s head and down on paper. It’s a coping mechanism, especially in the aftermath of such an immense tragedy. I also wonder if, maybe subconsciously, Ashton hoped that his letter would be passed down over the years—which, in the end, it was—as evidence of how horrific a disaster like this truly can be. Societies are forgetful, and with forgetting comes complacency. Ashton’s recollections are a warning to anyone who might question, at the outset of a potentially similar epidemic, whether all the government alerts and preventive measures are worth the time, expense, and effort. Yes, the letter says, emphatically. More so than we could ever imagine.

Lord Cornwallis. When Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in 1781, the man he handed his sword to was Lieutenant Colonel John Laurens, Henry’s son. Cornwallis was swapped for Laurens in a prisoner-of-war exchange, and he came back to Mepkin in 1784 after spending some time in Paris.” “Laurens led quite

Thompson’s 1874 essay garnered international attention and helped kick-start the

cremationist movement in England and America. Among those influenced in the States was a Washington,

Pennsylvania, philanthropist and doctor named Francis Julius LeMoyne, who shar...

that rotting corpses caused “the graveyard pollution of air and water.” Wealthy but fru...

funerals and their accompanying expenses (coffins, flowers, undertaker’s fees, ...

unnecessarily extravagant and wasteful, and he was drawn to cremation’s simplicit...

So, during the summer and fall of 1876, LeMoyne spent $1,500 of his own money to construct America’s first crematorium. He originally wanted to place the thirty-by-twent...

main graveyard, but town trustees dismissed the idea out of hand, leaving him wit...

build it on his personal estate. An article about LeMoyne caught the attention of Henry ...

Incorporated in 1844, the cemetery was proposed by a local judge named Mason Brown who had visited Mount Auburn Cemetery in Massachusetts, returned home, and encouraged his fellow Kentuckians to create a burial ground equally as picturesque. I’d say they succeeded. Overlooking the Kentucky River, Frankfort Cemetery is one hundred acres of beautifully landscaped hills and gardens connected by winding paths and walkways. More than twenty thousand people are buried here, including an impressive assembly of statesmen, artists, writers, and war heroes. On our way up a sloping macadamized road, Steve and I pass the marker for Presley O’Bannon, the young Marine lieutenant who was the first American to raise a U.S. flag on captured foreign soil. This happened during the April 1805 Battle of Derne at Tripoli and inspired the lyrics in the Marines’ Hymn: From the halls of Montezuma, To the shores of Tripoli; We fight our country’s battles In the air, on land, and sea. Farther up the rolling lane, Steve points to a fifteen-foot-high obelisk on our right surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence. “That’s Boone’s grave.” Once we get closer, I can make out carvings on each side of the memorial that appear to be scenes from Daniel Boone’s life. “He never would have worn that,” Steve says, shaking his head, as he sees me examine one panel featuring Boone in his famed coonskin cap. “Daniel was originally raised a Quaker, and like other long hunters he wore a Quaker-style felt hat.” This is ...

1794 and ’95, Paine released a withering two-volume critique of organized religion titled The Age of Reason. “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish [i.e., Muslim],” Paine wrote, “appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” Whatever goodwill Paine had earned during the Revolution evaporated instantly. Congress refused to fund his pension, he was denied the right to vote, and former allies ostracized him entirely. During a visit to the States, William Cobbett made a pilgrimage to Paine’s grave in New Rochelle and couldn’t believe what he found. “Paine lies in a little hole under the grass and weeds of an obscure farm in America,” he reported in his journal. “There, however, he shall not lie, unnoticed, much longer. He belongs to England. His fame is the property of England; and if no other people will show that they value that fame, the people of England will.” So, in October 1819, William Cobbett dug up Thomas Paine’s remains, packed them in a crate, and shipped them to Great Britain. He hadn’t even bothered to backfill the grave, apparently figuring no one would care. He was right. Local authorities noticed the mound of dirt, launched a halfhearted search, and then dropped the investigation altogether.

improved living conditions for prisoners. Nicknamed “Lenient Luke,” Blackburn issued more than a thousand pardons and was literally booed off the political stage at the end of his term for being too compassionate. That was Luke Blackburn, the humanitarian. Then there’s Luke Blackburn, the terrorist. During the Civil War, Blackburn was the Confederate sympathizer who gathered up contaminated bedsheets and garments from yellow-fever victims in Bermuda and tried using them to spread an epidemic throughout Northern cities. He failed solely because the disease is not, as he’d assumed, contagious (again, mosquitoes are the vectors), a blunder that doesn’t negate his desire to kill thousands of innocent civilians. How do we remember such a man? In all of Kentucky there’s only one major public tribute to Blackburn I’m aware of, and it’s a prison outside of Lexington called the Blackburn Correctional Complex. Considering his record, that seems rather fitting. Steve and I meet up at his truck, and after we drive out of the cemetery I realize I’ve yet to get his personal verdict on where Daniel Boone is buried. When I ask him, he smiles at first. “That’s a tricky question,” he says. “I have to be careful because I’m friends with Boone’s ancestors and there’s disagreement among the family members.” Steve considers his reply carefully and finally says to me, “Well, it’s not an answer

went, but in a lot of cases it seems that there’s

B1, 1985. That’s it. Underneath lies New York’s first infant victim of AIDS. Its placement is unintentionally symbolic of the disease’s early years, when sufferers were feared and ostracized. I can’t imagine a more friendless grave than this one, hidden away on an island that is itself all but unknown and out of sight.

Ultimately, though, I’m content and ready to call it a day. I scan the island’s length one last time, still overwhelmed by the knowledge that within this rustic, unremarkable patch of land, upward of one million men, women, and children are entombed.

boggling. Plymouth Rock suffered three centuries of abuse from hammer-happy souvenir hunters before it was finally enshrined in its current memorial at Plymouth Harbor; cartloads of letters written by Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and John Hancock were hauled out of government buildings in Washington, D.C., and dumped into the Potomac River to make room for Union Army munitions during the Civil War; and more recently, NASA administrators sheepishly announced in 2006 that they had lost the original video footage of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s Apollo 11 landing, images shot with a special camera on the moon that were much crisper and more detailed than anything broadcast live on television. A NASA spokesman later conceded that they might have accidentally taped over it. Not even original copies of the Declaration of Independence have been spared mistreatment. After Second Continental Congress delegates approved the final wording on July 4, 1776, the handwritten manuscript was rushed to John Dunlap’s print shop on Second and Market Streets here in Philadelphia. Dunlap, a twenty-nine-year-old Irish immigrant, labored into the wee hours of July 5 to roll out an estimated two hundred copies, which were then carried by messengers throughout the colonies to be reprinted in local newspapers, distributed to state assemblies, and read aloud in taverns, churches, and town squares. Only about two dozen of these first, official versions of the Declaration—known as “the Dunla...

original video footage of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s Apollo 11 landing, images shot with a special camera

on the moon that were much crisper and more detailed than anything broadcast li...

spokesman later conceded that they might have accidentally taped over it. N...

who was president of Russia at the time and theoretically in control of all their nuclear weapons, got hammered, slipped past his security detail, and wandered out of Blair House in his underwear. He was found by our Secret Service agents stumbling around Pennsylvania Avenue half naked trying to hail a cab. When the agents started escorting him back inside to, among other things, avert an international scandal, Yeltsin apparently threw a small tantrum, claiming he just wanted to find some pizza. Taylor Branch asked Clinton how the situation resolved itself, and the president shrugged and said, ‘We got him a pizza.’ ” We reach the Capitol, and I tell Megan and Stacy I’ve been quizzing friends who are longtime Washingtonians about their knowledge of the Statue of Freedom, the highest, most visible statue in our nation’s capital and an iconic image of American independence. “Overall the consensus is that it’s either some Roman goddess or a Native American princess—possibly Sacagawea. I didn’t know myself until I read the Architect of the Capitol’s website, which said the model was just an anonymous ‘classical female figure.’ ” “Well, it’s got a Roman soldier’s helmet crowned with Native American feathers, so the confusion is understandable,” Megan says. “The original design actually called for a ‘liberty cap,’ but Jefferson Davis, who was secretary of war at the time, vehemently opposed the idea because it was associated with the antislavery movement.” Sculpted in Rome by an ...

Megan shares with me a file containing Reed’s biographical information, including an 1870 census report that proves his D.C. residency and Clark Mills’s own handwritten records detailing how much he initially paid for him. Reed—one of the individuals most responsible for crowning the U.S. Capitol with the Statue of Freedom—was a slave. In 1862, Mills wrote that he had purchased Reed for $1,200 “many years ago when he was quite a youth” and described him as “mulatto color, short in stature, in good health, not prepossessing in appearance, but smart in mind, [and] a good workman.”