"Northern medical schools recognized that being unable to acquire sufficient cadavers to attract medical students could mean their dissolution, so they imported Black corpses, and in 1933, Howard University's Dr. Montague Cobb, the first African-American professor of anatomy, ironically alluded to the unconsciously egalitarian implications: "our colleagues [in the anatomy laboratory] recognized in the Negro a perfection in human structure which they were unwilling to concede when that structure was animated by the vital spark."
The clandestine nature of such transactions made estimating the relative numbers of such bodies difficult, but in 1935, Cobb rose to the challenge by analyzing the 2,139 cadavers that had passed through the Laboratory of Anatomy of Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, since 1835. He showed that the bodies of whites were initially used in the Midwest but that they were rapidly replaced by imported Black bodies. Cobb found that in contrast to white cadavers, which were local, "a heavy Majority" of Cleveland's Negro cadavers emanated from southern states.. after the wartime exodus of Blacks from the south, the imported Black bodies were replaced by those of resident Blacks, out of all proportion to immigration trends...
Northern medical schools also employed strategies to make the most of the Black and poor-white populations that they had. For example, on February 20, 1810, Dr. John Warren and Professor of Chemistry Aaron Dexter presented the president and fellows of Harvard University with a "Memorial and Petition for the Removal of Med.Lect to Boston," in which they made their case for moving Harvard Medical School from the university's home base in Cambridge across the Charles River to Boston, where it could have veiled itself of cadavers from the poor Black and white denizens of the almshouse.
Warren successfully argued that "one of the great objects" of the school was to offer students cadavers for dissection, without which Harvard might be eclipsed by "other [medical] establishments, even in the remote areas of the country." Later that year, the medical school moved to Boston."
Chapter 5- Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington
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