How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

In her book The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, historian Daina Ramey Berry writes about how some of the country’s top medical schools—places like Harvard, the Universities of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia—used the corpses of enslaved people, often purchased on the black market, as tools for their research and medical education. “The body trade was as elaborate as the trans-Atlantic and domestic slave trade that transported Africans to the New World and resold African-Americans on our soil,” she wrote in an essay for the New York Times based on her research. “But when enslaved people died, some were sold again and trafficked along the same roads and waterways they traveled while alive.” Medical schools typically used the corpses of executed criminals or unclaimed bodies from prisons and almshouses, itself an abhorrent practice, but when there were not enough of those needed bodies for their anatomy classes, schools paid people to go to cemeteries and dig up the bodies of the enslaved.