Through critical analysis of newspapers and medical papers, this monograph provides a historical examination of the dissection of African American bodies in the United States, how dissection was utilized by white medicine and in the media by white supremacist culture, and resistance to this in Black newspapers.
Smith analyzes the connections between dissection and slavery. Abolitionists used stories about the exploitation of black cadavers in medical schools to criticize the institution of slavery while slave owners used the medicalization of black bodies to frame them as diseased and different, and to justify slavery. She discusses the racial politics of dissection in medical education, dissection as discussed in literature and newspapers in the 19th and 20th centuries, and racial politics of anatomy from the Civil Rights movement to modern day.