New York Dissector

A Traffic of Dead Bodies enters the sphere of bodysnatching medical students, dissection-room pranks, and anatomical fantasy. It shows how nineteenth-century American physicians used anatomy to develop a vital professional identity, while claiming authority over the living and the dead. It also introduces the middle-class women and men, working people, unorthodox healers, cultural radicals, entrepreneurs, and health reformers who resisted and exploited anatomy to articulate their own social identities and visions. The nineteenth century saw the rise of the American medical profession: a proliferation of practitioners, journals, organizations, sects, and schools. Anatomy lay at the heart of the medical curriculum, allowing American medicine to invest itself with the authority of European science. Anatomists crossed the boundary between life and death, cut into the body, reduced it to its parts, framed it with moral commentary, and represented it theatrically, visually, and textually. Only initiates of the dissecting room could claim the privileged healing status that came with direct knowledge of the body. But anatomy depended on confiscation of the dead--mainly the plundered bodies of African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, and the poor. As black markets in cadavers flourished, so did a cultural obsession with anatomy, an obsession that gave rise to clashes over the legal, social, and moral status of the dead. Ministers praised or denounced anatomy from the pulpit; rioters sacked medical schools; and legislatures passed or repealed laws permitting medical schools to take the bodies of the destitute. Dissection narratives and representations of the anatomical body circulated in new places: schools, dime museums, popular lectures, minstrel shows, and sensationalist novels. Michael Sappol resurrects this world of graverobbers and anatomical healers, discerning new ligatures among race and gender relations, funerary practices, the formation of the middle-class, and medical professionalization. In the process, he offers an engrossing and surprisingly rich cultural history of nineteenth-century America.

French's unsurpassed Gazetteer of the State of New York is a complete history & description of every county, city, town, village, & locality in New York. But more than that it is a record of the founders & early settlers of practically every locality in the state-an astonishing achievement & the reason that the book has remained among the top genealogical reference works for New York State. Of course, no single person could have generated all this information on his own, so under the supervision of J.H. French "surveyors & agents were instructed to visit every city, town, & village, to search records, examine documents, consult the best living, printed, & manuscript authorities, & to make returns to the general office of all the reliable matter & information obtained." Thus was created an accurate & comprehensive gazetteer, with descriptions of each county, city, town, & village arranged according to a uniform plan (of more value today to the genealogist than ever before). Information provided for each locality includes founding (& founders), early settlements (& settlers), historical sketch to the time of writing, loading institutions, schools, & churches, prominent & representative citizens, stories of general & local interest, statistics from state censuses, & names of every natural & man made topographical feature. Preceding this core part of the Gazetteer is a full 150-page survey of the government, topography, & institutions of the state of New York. Outstanding as the Gazetteer is, its usefulness as a research tool is severely limited by the lack of an index to the thousands of narnes that appear in the text & footnotes. But this reprint edition puts an end to this unfortunate situation, as it incorporates Frank Place's Index of Names, a 16000-name index first published in 1962 by the Cortland County Historical Society. In 1969 the Society issued a second printing of the Index incorporating a "Supplement" of additions & corrections, & a third printing in 1983 included a "Supplementary Index to Place Names." With the Society's permission, we have incorporated the final index edition of 1983 with our reprint of the Gazetteer, making it the most complete & the most useful edition ever published.