Check out an IPRH Lecture by Susan Lederer: "The Living and the Dead: Anatomy and the State in Twentieth-Century America" on October 3, 2017 at 4:00 p.m. in the IPRH Lecture Hall, Levis Faculty Center, Fourth Floor (919 West Illinois Street, Urbana, IL). Organized by the Medical Humanities Research Cluster, with support from the Carle-Illinois College of Medicine and the Lemann Institute for Brazilian Studies, supported by IPRH.
In the 1950s, American medical schools reluctantly embarked on a novel solution to obtain sufficient human anatomical material for research and education. Rather than relying on so-called anatomy acts that rendered the bodies of the indigent and unclaimed dead available for dissection, medical institutions created programs in which the living could “donate their bodies to science” after their deaths. In California, the new body donor program at UCLA was so successful that the Anatomy Department announced a temporary “moratorium” on accepting any more bequests because they were so overwhelmed with potential donors. This talk examines this development in the history of anatomy, and considers why and how anatomical gifting attracted so much support at mid-century.
Susan E. Lederer, Ph.D. is the Robert Turell Professor of the History of Medicine and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Her books include Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America Before the Second World War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature (Rutgers University Press, 2002), and Flesh and Blood: A Cultural History of Transplantation and Transfusion in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2008). She is currently working on the history of willed body programs in the United States.