Yale School of Medicine and Slavery

Traces in the Archive: An Anatomical Museum and a Black Family

The archive—the collections of historical records and artifacts that are the bedrock of historical research—never tells us everything we want to know. Sometimes our research is rewarded by documents that enable us to construct concrete, fleshed-out stories about the ways that slavery and white supremacy were infused into the world inhabited by Yale medical students and their teachers. At other times, though, we find no more than faint, tantalizing traces that are frustrating in their fragmentary character and haunting in the unanswered questions they invite. At such junctures, we are left to turn to a wider knowledge of historical context—including what we know about patterns at other antebellum American medical schools—in order to begin to extract meaning from the sparse clues that we discover in the archive.

Yale’s anatomical museum is a case in point. We know from medical school publications and financial records that one existed. We also know that antebellum American medical students learned racial science through museums as well as through textbooks and lectures, and that anatomical museums were a key site for affirming, displaying, and teaching scientific racism. Yet, unlike the detailed surviving documentation about the collections that professors assembled at other antebellum northern schools such as Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania and the ways that the exhibits were designed to display biological racial difference, [1] we as yet know very little at all about the Yale museum—and absolutely nothing about what became of it.  Nevertheless, we can infer from what we know about other such collections that the anatomical museum—featuring comparison of human skulls, for example—most likely was an important vehicle for establishing the fundamental premise of biological racial difference in the minds of Yale medical students.

We know that from the very start, the faculty of the young Medical Institution of Yale College invested in anatomical preparations for teaching—including skeletal remains, preserved body parts, and anatomical models—that they purchased in Philadelphia, which then was the leading center for medical education in the United States. Between April 1812 and March 1815, the biggest expense of Yale’s new medical school was for “anatomical preparations.” Starting in 1812, Jonathan Knight, the professor of anatomy, kept the school’s financial accounts, and the very first line of his account book for that year records the payment of $169.49 ¼ in January for “anatomical preparations made & bought in Philadelphia & the expense of bringing the same to N[ew] H[aven].” [2] (Figure 1) Knight was himself attending a course of medical lectures at the University of Pennsylvania and had made connections with the professor of anatomy, Casper Wistar, who was helping him acquire anatomical specimens. “I suppose that three skeletons would be desirable,” Benjamin Silliman wrote that month from New Haven to Knight, “one with the bones connected by wires to be suspended by a cord & pully in the anatomical room in full view of the class for constant reference;—one similarly put together but capable of having the bones unhooked & taken apart so as to be shown in pieces when necessary;—and one with the bones connected by the natural ligaments dried & unvarnished.” [3]

Page from Jonathan Knight's daybook showing a payment for "anatomical preparations"

Figure 1. The first line of anatomy professor Jonathan Knight’s daybook, in which he kept the medical school’s financial accounts, recording the payment of $169.49 ¼ in January 1812 for “anatomical preparations made & bought in Phil[adelphi]a & the expense of bringing the same to N[ew] H[aven].” Jonathan Knight, Account Books of the Medical Institution of Yale College, 1812-1839, Day Book A, p. 1A, entry for January 1812, no MS#, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

We also know from correspondence and financial records that the faculty of the fledgling Medical Institution of Yale College acquired anatomical preparations from Paris, a common practice among the faculties of new medical schools in the United States across the antebellum period. With the reorganization of medicine in the wake of the French Revolution, Paris had emerged as the most vibrant center of Western medicine and its hospital wards and dissecting rooms became a mecca for ambitious American physicians studying abroad. French wax anatomical models, pathological specimens, and anatomical preparations either dried or preserved as wet specimens in alcohol-filled jars were among the physical artifacts that were prized by the faculty members who assembled and curated American medical museums. In an entry dated 24 January 1823, Knight records that he borrowed $500 for the medical college and that “of this I sent $300 to Messrs. Webster & Hillhouse in Paris to purchase anatomical preparations.” [4] A year later, he again notes “$300 sent to A. B. Hillhouse for anatomical preparations.” [5]

More than this, we know from the way that the anatomical museum was featured year after year in the school’s annual circulars that Yale’s medical faculty members were quite proud of this pedagogical resource. These circulars or annual announcements were published as small booklets that were at once catalogs of the school’s faculty, students, curriculum, and resources, and advertisements pitched to prospective students and their families. “[An] important advantage which New Haven possesses for a medical school,” urged the Annual Circular of the Medical Institution of Yale College, for the Lecture Term of 1839–40, “consists of the general moral character of its population, and the freedom of the city from theaters, circuses, and other public places of amusement.” [6] Turning to the medical facilities available for instruction, the circulars routinely featured the medical school’s museum alongside its library, the hospital, and the anatomical dissection facilities available to students. “The anatomical museum has been gradually collected,” the Annual Circular for 1832-1833 stated, “which contains Medical Apparatus comprising a collection of dry and wet anatomical preparations, models, on an enlarged scale, to exhibit the structure of the ear, and other minute parts, and a machine for obstetrical demonstrations, etc.” [7] In 1835, when an additional floor was added to the medical college building as part of a larger renovation, one student wrote to a recent graduate that “the old lecture room is neatly refitted and is appropriated for the Museum.” [8]

Another place where archival traces of the museum appear is in the list of donors to the medical college’s collection, which was also published in the annual circulars.  Ordinarily we have the name and place of residence of the donors—usually physicians—but no record of what they gave the school.  In 1840, for example, Dr. Christopher Johnson from St. Croix, who we know attended the enslaved sick on several large plantations in the West Indies, [9]  made an unspecified donation to the school. [10] But there are exceptions. In 1841, Dr. E. H. Bishop of New Haven donated to the museum “a valuable collection of fish, and other specimens of Natural History, collected during a residence in the West Indies.” [11]

"Donations to the Institution," Annual Circular of the Medical Institution of Yale College, for the Lecture Term of 1840-1

Figure 2. Annual Circular for 1840-1841, noting donations to the Medical Institution of Yale College that include the materials from Edinburgh phrenologist George Combe’s lecture tour of the United States. Annual Circular of the Medical Institution of Yale College, for the Lecture Term of 1840-1 (New Haven: Stanley & Chapin, 1840), 7.

The Annual Circular for 1840-1841 boasted of the acquisition of a particularly important collection for the museum, namely, the lecture materials from the prominent Edinburgh phrenologist George Combe’s U.S. lecture tour. (Figure 2) Although popular phrenological enthusiasm was the subject of satire, (Figure 3) in the 1830s and 1840s, phrenology was also a serious science of craniology that studied the external appearance of the skull as an indicator of character, mental capacity, and potential. Combe’s lecture materials had been “deposited in the Institution, by citizens who composed the class attending the lectures of Mr. George Combe in New Haven, the entire collection of busts, casts and models of the brain, &c., about 150 in number, used by that gentleman to illustrate his lectures in this country.” [12] Combe had in 1838 begun a lecture tour of the United States that ended in New Haven in 1840. “We remained in New Haven from the 15th of February to the 20th of March,” he later recalled. “The audience attending my class included most of the professors, and a portion of the students of Yale College, and a large number of the citizens. It was the largest class, in proportion to the population, which I have had in the United States.” [13] A New Haven hatter who had attended one of Combe’s lectures, Giles Mansfield, wrote to his daughter that year that “this lecture was gotten up at 25 cts. a ticket (50 cts other nights) to raise money in order to buy Mr. Combe’s casts for the use of our citizens. The object was accomplished, & the casts taken of by being deposited somewhere about Y[ale] college.” [14]

Calves' heads and brains, or, A phrenological lecture

Figure 3. Satirical depiction of George Combe delivering a phrenological lecture to an Edinburgh audience in a room filled with skulls, books, and plaster casts of heads. Henry Thomas Alken, printmaker, soft-ground etching, J. Lump and L. Bump, London, 26 September 1826.  Medical Historical Library. Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale School of Medicine.

Combe was an admirer of the racial theorist and University of Pennsylvania anatomy professor Samuel Morton and of his book Crania Americana (1839), though not of Morton’s contention that different races were separately created by God, a claim sometimes used to support pro-slavery arguments. Combe believed in a hierarchical scale of humankind that placed the non-European races—particularly people with darker-colored skin—at the bottom, and western Europeans at the top. Displaying skulls and plaster casts of European and African heads was part and parcel of public phrenological lectures, though Combe was wary of alienating his audiences by presenting too strong a position opposing slavery. [15] In the memoir of his U.S. tour, Combe reflected that “I have not introduced the question of abolition into my lectures, because it is foreign to their object. So far, however, as the subject lay incidentally in my way, I have not shrunk from it, but have introduced the skulls and casts of Negroes among those of other varieties of mankind, and freely expressed my opinion of the moral and intellectual capabilities indicated by their forms.” [16] What seems clear is that like the museums in other antebellum medical schools that are better documented, the “anatomical” museum at Yale broadly encompassed natural history and comparative anatomy, displaying skeletal remains, plaster and papier mâché models, and specimens of healthy and morbid human anatomy.

Even though we lack an inventory, catalog, or any systematic description of Yale’s anatomical holdings, we can surmise from what we know about the museums at other medical schools that Yale’s collection more than likely was also a site of racial pedagogy. Human crania and casts of human skulls were all but ubiquitous in the collections at other medical schools, where faculty used them to exhibit biological racial difference. The construction of race in this way helped to support the widely assumed premise that Black and white patients experienced disease in different ways that both called for distinctive diagnostic and therapeutic strategies and could be used to reinforce the lessons about white supremacy that lectures and textbooks conveyed.

At the same time, through a comparative examination of human skulls and plaster casts, Yale students who came from enslaving families—as well as New Englanders who later set up practices in southern states after graduation—would have been invited to discern the physical evidence of human racial difference that at the time was being enlisted by some medical thinkers like Morton to support the idea of polygenesis—that is, the theory positing that discrete human races are of different origins, the products of separate creations, as opposed to the monogenist position of a single origin. [17] Polygenism in turn often was used in support of a pro-slavery argument, positing that Black bodies were by nature singularly well suited for labor in hot climates and for the institution of slavery. [18]

It is likely that the minutes of the medical faculty meetings for the antebellum period would tell us more about Yale’s anatomical museum and much else. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale at one time held the Minutes of the Faculty of the Medical Institution of Yale College for the years 1814 to 1880. But sometime between 1989 and 1998, all of these critically important records went missing. [19] At the same time, the generous acquisitions budget of a wealthy institution like the Beinecke means that new documents are constantly being added to the collection. The 1839 letter from Durant H. Davis to Ashbel Smith on the “fancy trade” or sex slave market that is explored in the vignette on “Yale Medical Alumni and Slavery” is a case in point. A rare book dealer, William Reese (Yale College ’77), sold the letter to the Beinecke in 2010, having bought it for $3,500 at a public auction in Dallas. [20] The letter then made its way without fanfare into the archival storage for the Yale Collection of Western Americana where a postdoctoral researcher with the Yale School of Medicine and Slavery Project discovered the letter and recognized its significance.

Letter mentioning Black family living in medical school

Figure 4. Yale medical student Jacob Keeler mentions in a letter to a recent graduate that “the back part of the [medical] college is occupied by a colored family, who has the care of the college, cleans it and tends to warming of the different apartments.” Jacob Keeler to James Coleman, [New Haven], 15 October 1835. Coleman Brothers Collection (Ms Coll 36). Medical Historical Library. Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale School of Medicine.

Another single letter—this one preserved in the collection of the Medical Historical Library at Yale’s medical school—offers us an even more fleeting glimpse of the place of race in the workaday life of the medical school (Figure 4). In 1835, a Yale medical student wrote a letter to a recent graduate in which he mentions in passing that a Black family was living in the medical school. In the same paragraph in which he remarks on his fellow students that “a great many of them [are] from the South,” he writes: “The back part of the [medical] college is occupied by a colored family, who has the care of the college, cleans it and tends to warming of the different apartments.” [21] Knight’s account books for Yale’s medical institution also record payments in January of that year and again the following year to an unnamed man for janitorial work, though it is not certain that he was a member of the Black family living in the school. Knight paid $50.00 “for wages of man for taking care of rooms &c,” though which rooms are as unspecified as is the wider labor encompassed by “&c.” [22]

Figure 5. The medical school building as it would have appeared in 1835, when a Yale medical student noted that “the back part of the [medical] college is occupied by a colored family.” Jacob Keeler to James Coleman, [New Haven], 15 October 1835. Coleman Brothers Collection (Ms Coll 36). Medical Historical Library. Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library. Yale School of Medicine.  Annual Circular of the Medical Institution of Yale College for the Lecture Term of 1840-1 (New Haven: Stanley and Chapin, 1840).

It is tempting to imagine that this unnamed man performed some of the labor attached to the position that at most medical schools at the time was designated “janitor,” a role that encompassed not only what we now would regard as janitorial work but also the critically important job of tending to the needs of the dissection room. It was often the janitor who was tasked with resurrecting cadavers from burial grounds and arranging the purchase of bodies from outside suppliers, preserving the cadavers when they arrived and laying them out for use, and disposing of the remains after the students had finished dissecting. [23]

In antebellum southern schools these “janitors” were commonly African American men—some enslaved and owned by the faculty, others free—who lived in the school, while in the North they often were recently arrived immigrants. In both regions, this wider scope of janitorial work was vital to the everyday functioning of a medical school, while the frequent relegation of this labor to Black and immigrant workers—like the designation “janitor” rather than laboratory assistant or diener—reflected the low respect and sometimes disdain attached to this position. By 1845, Yale’s faculty not only employed a designated “janitor,” James Cook, but listed his name in the annual circulars on the same page as the faculty members. A New Haven resident of that name appears in the 1850 census as a 40-year-old “Laborer” born in Ireland. [24]

Nevertheless, the passing mention of a Black family living in the one and only building that comprised Yale’s medical school (Figure 5) —scarcely three months before we know of the raucous arrival of medical students carrying the body of a murdered Black sailor to the dissecting room — invites us to reflect on the larger history of racialized labor in the nineteenth-century medical school.  Did the Black residents of the school take part in receiving the sailor’s body, or cleaning up after the students had finished the dissection?  It is possible that research that goes beyond what has been possible in this one-year pilot project might reveal other sources that would help us better understand the dynamics of race and racialized hierarchies of labor in the everyday operations of the school.  At the same time, though, it is tempting to script this faint trace of a Black family living in the school into a longer history that focuses on the service workers—disproportionately people of color and largely ignored by historians—who keep medical institutions running today. [25]

Endnotes

1. On these and other anatomical museums and their role in medical education, see Christopher D. E. Willoughby, Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022). The University of Pennsylvania has in particular done extensive historical investigation and justice work relating to the Samuel Morton Cranial Collection, https://www.penn.museum/sites/morton/.  On Harvard’s return of human remains, see https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/9/16/harvard-pledges-to-return-human-remains/.  And see Samuel J. Redman, Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).
    
2. Jonathan Knight, Account Books of the Medical Institution of Yale College, 1812-1839, Day Book A, p. 1A, entry for January 1812, Medical Historical Library, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale School of Medicine.
    
3. Benjamin Silliman to Jonathan Knight, New Haven, 29 January 1812, box 1, folder 11: Incoming letters to the Dean or Yale Administration in Yale School of Medicine Miscellaneous Papers, Ms Coll 4, Medical Historical Library, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale School of Medicine.
    
4. Jonathan Knight, entry of 24 January 1823, in Day Book, vol. 2, 1820-1830, Jonathan Knight Account Books and Daybooks, GEN MSS 1855, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.  On the collecting of anatomical specimens by American physicians in Paris, see John Harley Warner, Against the Spirit of System: The French Impulse in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), esp. 137-41.
    
5. Knight, Day Book, vol. 2, entry for August 1825.    
    
6. Annual Circular of the Medical Institution of Yale College, for the Lecture Term of 1839–40 (New Haven: Woodward & Carrington, 1839), 7. The same text also appeared later in Annual Circular of the Medical Institution of Yale College, for the Lecture Term of 1845–6 (New Haven: William H. Stanley, 1845), 7.
    
7. “Circular,” in Catalogue of the Officers, Graduates, and Students of the Medical Institution of Yale College (New Haven: Baldwin and Treadway, 1832), 14–15.  
    
8. Jacob Keeler to James Coleman, [New Haven], 15 October 1835, Coleman Brothers Collection, Ms Coll 36, Medical Historical Library, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale School of Medicine.  
    
9. Annual Circular of the Medical Institution of Yale College, for the Lecture Term of 1844-5 (New Haven: Stanley & Chapin, 1844), 6–7.  On Johnson’s practice, see Meredith Reifschneider, “Enslavement and Institutionalized Care: The Politics of Health in Nineteenth-Century St Croix, Danish West Indies,” World Archaeology 50, no. 3 (2018): 494-511.
    
10. Annual Circular of the Medical Institution of Yale College, for the Lecture Term of 1840-1 (New Haven: Stanley & Chapin, 1840), 7.
     
11.  Annual Circular of the Medical Institution of Yale College, for the Lecture Term of 1844-5, 6–7.
     
12. Annual Circular of the Medical Institution of Yale College, for the Lecture Term of 1840-1, 7.  
     
13.  George Combe, Notes on the United States of North America, during a Phrenological Visit in 1838-39-40, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Maclachlan, Stewart, & Company, 1841), 3: 245.
     
14. G[iles] M[ansfield] to Dear Daughter, [New Haven], 6 April 1840, in Madeleine B. Stern, “A Letter from New Haven—1840,” Yale University Library Gazette 49, no 3 (1975): 288-92, p. 290.
     
15. James Poskett, Materials of Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 68. Poskett offers a nuanced account of phrenological theories of racial difference.
     
16. Combe, Notes on the United States, 2:49.
     
17. On the large literature of literature on the relationship between monogenist/polygenist debates and pro-slavery politics, see Terence Keel, Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018); and, on the relationship of these debates to anatomical collections and medical education, see Willoughby, Masters of Health.
     
18. See Christopher D. Willoughby, “‘His Native, Hot Country’: Racial Science and Environment in Antebellum American Medical Thought,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 72 (2017): 328-51.  On the genealogy of this idea, see Mark Harrison, "‘The Tender Frame of Man’: Disease, Climate and Racial Difference in India and the West Indies, 1760-1860,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70 (1996): 68-93; Katherine Johnston, The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022); and Suman Seth, Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
     
19.  The catalogue entry is https://search.library.yale.edu/catalog/12820908, accessed June 14, 2023.  The loss of the faculty minute books has been verified by the Beinecke.
     
20. Durant H. Davis to Ashbel Smith, Greensboro, Alabama, 24 November 1839, WA MSS S-3142 D2919, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.  On the auction sale and dealer, see Stamp Auction Network, “Spink Shreves Galleries Sale 121: Floyd E. Risvold Collection - American Expansion & Journey West - January 27-29, 2010,” https://stampauctionnetwork.com/f/f121.cfm, in “Spink Shreves Galleries Sale 121: Risvold Collection, Exploration and War cont.,” https://stampauctionnetwork.com/f/f12117.cfm; and Michael Morand, “In Memorium: William Reese ’77” (June 16, 2018), https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/article/memoriam-william-reese-77, all accessed June 14, 2023.
     
21.  Keeler to Coleman, 15 October 1835.
     
22. Jonathan Knight, Day Book C, entry for January 1835, p. 4b, and January 1836, p. 4b.
     
23. See Diana Ramey Berry, The Price of Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017), 148-193; Tanya Telfair Sharpe, “Grandison Harris: The Medical College of Georgia’s Resurrection Man,” in Robert L. Blakely and Judith M. Harrington, eds., Bones in the Basement: Postmortem Racism in Nineteenth-Century Medical Training (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 206-24; and John Harley Warner, “Witnessing Dissection: Photography, Medicine, and American Culture,” in John Harley Warner and James M. Edmonson, Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine: 1880-1930 (New York: Blast Books, 2009), 7-29.
     
24. Annual Circular of the Medical Institution of Yale College, for the Lecture Term of 1845–6; “James Cook, ‘United States Census, 1850,’” FamilySearch, accessed May 17, 2023, https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:M685-FH9.
     
25.  For recent studies of the racial politics of health care labor and the crucially important but often poorly paid work often done by people of color, see, for example, Beatrix Hoffman and Dana Yarak, “La Primera Línea: Latina/o Frontline Health Workers During COVID-19’s First Wave,” U.S. Latino and Latina Oral History Journal 5 (2021): 10-32, and Gabriel Winant, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021).