"Today, a dead body is an alien entity that we encounter briefly in a hospital, funeral home, or place of worship, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people tended to die at home rather than in hospitals, and the body, imbued with religious and social significance, was lovingly cared for in a way that bound the dead person to his family and society.
The corpse was carefully bathed and groomed and postmortem photographs, portraits, or other images were often created and distributed. This care of the body certified the person's meaning and status as a member of a family and community. Dissection, however, gave the corpse a very different meaning, limiting him to a bit of useful flesh, an object to be surgically severed from his community, treated with disdain, then discarded like trash.
For Blacks, anatomical dissection meant even more: it was an extension of slavery into eternity, because it represented a profound level of white control over their bodies, illustrating that they were not free even in death. Burial rituals were so psychologically important that insurance companies sold Blacks a macabre "social security" by collecting relatively high weekly payments towards funeral expenses.
Physicians, however, ascribed Blacks' horror of postmortem dissection to superstition, complaining that even during epidemics they avoided hospitals because they feared ending up on anatomists' slabs. But whites quietly shared this revulsion, including doctors, who avoided dissecting the bodies of their colleagues."
Chapter 5- Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington
*in case y'all thought that bone stealing shit was funny. Steal your own people's bones, then.
