Abstract
In the nineteenth-century United States, medical schools routinely trafficked in human remains to supply dissecting rooms. Beyond intercepting remains from hospitals, prisons, and morgues, professors, students, and their proxies also commissioned grave robberies or liaised with cemetery thieves to acquire stolen bodies. One such grave robbery occurred in Philadelphia in December 1882 when thieves plundered Lebanon Cemetery, a burial ground for Black residents, in the hope of selling the unearthed bodies to Jefferson Medical College. This event captured the attention of reporters and editors in Philadelphia and nationwide. This article examines a diverse array of those sources, teasing out the differences between the coverage in Philadelphia’s city newspapers and that in the Christian Recorder, locally published by the African Methodist Episcopal Church and an example of the thriving Black press. While the local city papers covered the heist with a trademark sensationalism, the Christian Recorder struck a different tone, aiming its coverage at furthering social and political goals. By leveraging the language of patriotism, religion, and racial uplift, it linked dissection and self-determination, advocating for sacrificing some bodies in order to protect others—both in life and in death—and, in the process, testifying to Black people’s intrinsic humanity.