© Drexel University
Leviathan Press:
The so-called "history records only the great deeds of a few people, and the words of others converge into silence" (Nishikawa, "Books")
The protagonist of today's article, a specimen of the nervous system stripped of its flesh, also belongs to the silent majority.
It is also strange to say, usually, the work and the author are often a companion relationship, "Macbeth" and "Dream of the Red Chamber" have become classics, and we also remember Shakespeare and Cao Xueqin. But the relationship between the works in today's articles and the author is confusing: behind a notorious nervous system is a woman who has intentionally or unintentionally been "abstracted" and "erased".
Dissecting the human nervous system is a very onerous task — and in some cases, we have almost no idea what the person lying on the anatomist's operating table belongs to. © CARMEN DEÑÓ FOR ATLAS OBSCURA
If "Harriet" could hear it, she should be able to hear the ping-pong balls rolling briskly on the table. If she could smell it, she should be able to sense that a nearby microwave was reheating the lunch. If she could see it, she would take them to see a broken Pac-Man game console, a television set, a school bookstore with a decorative paper tape hanging from the bookstore, like the one used in elementary school to teach the DOUBLE helix model of DNA.
She might even catch a glimpse of herself in a camera lens, or in the eyes of a passerby. In fact, people often stopped and stared at her.
It was a Saturday, the weather was hot and social distancing hadn't become the norm in the land, and a group of visitors gathered at Drexel University School of Medicine in northwest Philadelphia, primarily to see "Harriet."
The first thing they saw was a showcase containing several carefully prepared special medical specimens that had long ago been used as teaching tools. Like Harriet, the specimens were produced by a prominent anatomist active in the late 19th century, Rufus Weaver.
Now, visitors saw three glass bottles on the table between the cadaver lab and the library, one of which contained a stationary intestine, the other contained a spinal cord, and a fluid (at least a century old) with an dissected eyeball floating in it. The parts have been separated, so it looks a bit like a small jellyfish, a bit like a piece of plastic that can break at any moment, and a bit like a mushroom umbrella hat.
Today, the specimen, titled "Harriet Cole," is on display at Drexel University's Queens Lane campus. Labels on other nearby specimens tell people that they were once displayed in the museum of anatomist Rufus Weaver. © JESSICA LEIGH HESTER/ATLAS OBSCURA
The visitors walked slowly through the door and came to the otherwise empty student center. They crammed into the short pile carpet (a classic arrangement of suburban offices) and saw more of Weaver's anatomy, which filled an entire row of glass showcases. Visitors saw a specimen of a hand, purple in color, which looked very powerful, but it felt a little uncomfortable. Then they saw two more specimens of the skull and neck. Then there's Harriet.
The crowd reacted.
Some said quietly, "Oh. ”
Some shouted excitedly, "Oh, wow. ”
Others muttered, "Poor Harriet." ”
"I always wanted to find her," said Malaya Fletcher, a Washington, D.C.-based epidemiologist who specializes in infectious diseases.
She still remembers learning anatomy in her high school biology class, and she'll never forget it since she heard the story.
"It's just incredible," she said, "and you simply can't believe the story is true." At this point, visitors crowded together and held their phones above their heads to take pictures. During this time, they also adjust the position of their hands from time to time so as not to photograph their faces reflected in the glass.
Visitors in awe take photos of Harriet Cole specimens during the tour. © COURTESY WILLEM YTSMA
"Harriet" is actually a network of fibers, fixed to a blackboard inside a glass cabinet placed against the wall.
The top appeared to be a brain, brown, plump, and with a pair of eyes. Looking down, you will be greeted by a complex system of seemingly fragile strings. The ropes were pulled very tightly and were artificially painted very heavy white.
It is not difficult to see from the appearance of the whole specimen that this should be the human body - some parts are characterized by limbs, pelvis and chest cavity - but there are some unusual places. The way the string winding that characterizes the limbs seems to imply that the person has fins. The fibers elsewhere looked messy, like bitten wires, and current was spurting out from the edges.
This is indeed a human medical specimen, and the biggest feature is the articulated skeleton. However, unlike ordinary human specimens, this specimen represents the nervous system, a human system that most people can't think of. Some of the visitors standing in front of "Harriet" even began to twist their toes and fingers as if they were going to map the fibers in the specimen to themselves, so that the medical specimen in front of them would be less abstract.
A label next to the display case said the specimen belonged to a black woman named Harriet Cole. She worked as a maid or cleaner in a laboratory at The Hahnemann Medical School, and donated her body to the medical school after her death in the late 19th century. Legend has it that Weaver dissected her nervous system and, after processing it, made this masterpiece of medical specimens and used it as a teaching aid.
More than a decade before it was officially exhibited at The Hahnemann School of Medicine, the specimen also participated in the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and won the Blue Ribbon Award. It was featured in several sections of life magazine and was featured in academic textbooks. But before everything —before the nerves penetrate the body's wrapping —these fibers stimulate a human body. In 2012, the Information Office of The Haneman School of Medicine praised the donor of the specimen as the university's "longest-working staff."
When the dissection began, no one paid much attention to the donor whose nervous system had been extracted for this scientific and anatomical adventure. In the decades that followed, stories about this "Harriet" emerged, and together with various legends, solidified into everything we know today. This specimen and the legends that haunt it are truly stunning, but at the same time unsettling.
They show us how institutional inequalities can penetrate beyond death, how "great" white men use women's bodies to elevate their status and tout each other, where these stories are rooted and most critical: how truth becomes mutilated, exaggerated, distorted over time, until it is no longer known — like a bubble specimen on a shelf that has been forgotten by the world.
Weaver's Anatomy Museum is full of teaching specimens. In this photograph taken at the end of the 19th century, the specimen that was finally called "Harriet" is placed in a cabinet on the left side of the painting. © COURTESY LEGACY CENTER ARCHIVES, DREXEL UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF MEDICINE, PHILADELPHIA
The history of Western medicine is littered with all sorts of nasty-sounding violence, from forced experiments to lame or cruel therapies to "treating" patients into "spectacles" that would be universally labeled "terrible" if they were today.
Some historians believe that looking at the past with today's moral values will yield little. They argue that events that were seen as commonplace in the past may now seem necessary to be condemned, and that the discomforts of this must be accepted and endured when judging history, rather than forcibly applying contemporary morals to the past.
Other scholars, including three medical historians at Johns Hopkins University, published an article in the October 2020 journal The Lancet, insisting that fighting the horrors of history helps highlight the inequalities that still exist in medical resources, treatments, and so on.
（www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32032-8/fulltext）
Alaina McNaughton and Matt Herbison are among those scholars who have worked in the intersection of the past, present and future. They were both public historians, archivists, and educators.
When the aforementioned group of visitors visited, both McNaughton and Hebison were working at the Drexel Heritage Preservation Center. The main responsibility of this institution is to preserve and interpret the various archives of Drexel University, in addition to the archives of a number of other schools. (McNaughton later left the agency and went on his own to do another job until now.) Both men enjoyed delving into history, with a librarian-specific attention to detail, and a novelist-like love for stories of all kinds.
In addition, their work requires them to describe and examine a variety of first-hand accounts in the context of the past. And "Harriet Cole" is the most obvious, confusing and challenging work product of the school's long history.
Researchers like Herbison and McNaughton are neither anatomists nor ethicists: although they inherit the "Harriet Cole" finished product, they themselves do not choose to acquire, dissect, and display the human body. As the specimen's present custodians, they were tasked with finding all the historical records about Harriet Cole, stripping the facts from the noise, and piecing together as complete a story as possible, under the unfavourable premise that official records often ignored women and people of color.
Some of the visitors standing in front of "Harriet" even began to twist their toes and fingers as if they were going to map the fibers in the specimen to themselves.
Months before the visitors arrived, Hebison and McNaughton stood in front of the showcase and discussed the task they had taken. They pointed to the writing on the wall, the blue ribbon of the World's Fair with metal tassels, and Weaver's bust, and their eyes were permanently fixed on not far away.
Hebison, who was about 45 years old at the time, wore glasses with lenses that were not thick, his hands folded tightly on his chest, and the thoughts in his mind were stacked one after another, like a vertebrae. McNaughton was younger, with short red hair and cat glasses, holding his chin up while scrutinizing the showcase.
McNaughton, Herbison, and other collaborators, including medical historian Brandon Zimmerman, have been working to unearth missing, distorted, or ignored stories of women in archives. This time, they were clearly going to find out everything about Harriet.
They wondered, more than 130 years later, how to describe the staggering preparations and creepy "flesh stripping" operations that had been painstakingly dissected when Harriet was first dissected. Also, whose body belonged to him? What does it mean if one of the university's oldest institutions never knew that the donor would be in a showcase forever after his death?
"I've started to look at suspicious things that seem to be deliberate, like the words on the label," Hebison said, "and sometimes I say something like, 'It's always been called Harriet's nervous system specimen.'" As he said this, Hebison raised his finger to put "Harriet" in quotation marks.
"So, she should have donated her own body," Herbison said. "Well," he continued after a five-second pause, "we don't know what the facts are. ”
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Our nervous system is always working hard, and the current is crackling inside and never stopping. The brain and spinal cord are full of bundles of nerve fibers, and their branches, and the branches of the branches, are spread throughout the human body, transmitting all kinds of information back and forth.
Among these fibers, a special type of cell called a "neuron" talks to other cells in the body. Scientists estimate that there are tens of billions of neurons in the brain, and there are probably at least 200 million neurons in the spinal cord. Information is transmitted through this network through fine fibers called "axons," and roads are not smooth—there is a small barricade called a synapse on these highways. Once you encounter these roadblocks, you must jump over them to ensure that the information continues to pass on. At this point, the body releases a chemical called a "neurotransmitter." That's why you feel a variety of different sensory stimuli, such as when you move your finger to touch the hot pot, you feel pain, and then you move your finger away.
（www.nature.com/scitable/blog/brain-metrics/are_there_really_as_many/）
（www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5845477/）
Scientists have learned about neurons in recent centuries, and still haven't figured out how they communicate through chemicals and electrical signals. Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón Cajal and Italian scientist Camillo Golgi were awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their research on the structure and properties of the human nervous system. It is worth noting that the views of the two men are completely different.
Like the German anatomist Joseph von Gerlach, Gorky believes that all nerve cells stick together. In the end, though, Ramonkhaha proved that there are gaps between nerve cells, and that electrical impulses in the brain jump from one cell to another.
A color sketch of the human nervous system drawn by the Persian anatomist Mansour ibn Ilias in The Anatomy of Mansour. © National Library of Medicine
However, before we have this knowledge, many people suspect that there is a connection between the brain and the rest of the body. In the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, the Greek physician and philosopher Galen used his method to dissect sheep, weasels, monkeys and elephants, and deduced the composition of the human nervous system. In the 14th century, the Persian anatomist Mansur ibn Ilyas drew a color sketch of the human nervous system in his book Tashrih-i Mansuri.
Renaissance thinkers like Vesalius went a step further, drawing not only branches of the nervous system, but also embodying more and more detail. By the 18th century, anatomists began to paint more about the human nervous system. Scottish surgeon John Hunter, for example, recorded the olfactory nerve in detail. His brother William opened an anatomy school for students and researchers to take a closer look at the spinal cord.
So by the end of the 19th century, when the genius and conceited anatomist Rufus Weaver became obsessed with the human nervous system, the field had long been understood. However, few people can travel in this country in the way Weaver does.
Weaver was born in 1841 in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He always combed his hair shiny, almost exactly like a surgeon, and combed his black beard sharply. Weaver attended the Pennsylvania School of Medicine, but also attended the University of Pennsylvania and Jefferson School of Medicine, and later entered the Hahnemann School of Medicine in 1869, which advocated the use of homeopathy. (The Hahnemann School of Medicine eventually became Hahnemann University, and in the 1990s, the university's medical department merged with the Pennsylvania School of Medicine.) At the end of the 20th century, the merged university was incorporated into Drexel University. That's why we can find Weaver in the university's archives today. ）
After the Civil War, Weaver was ordered to exhume the bodies of more than 3,000 Confederate soldiers and to try to verify their identities and homeland. Weaver is good at dissection, is very sensitive to all kinds of details, and has a high tolerance for human internal organs.
In 1880, Weaver became the superintendent of the University Anatomy Museum at The Hahnemann School of Medicine, and from then on he was busy building an unparalleled room for anatomical specimens. First, he removed all the paper models and the "moldy" dried specimens, and then placed hundreds of new medical specimens on the third floor of the light-filled museum, many of which he had made himself, such as bladder stones, slices of healthy and diseased brains, and a whole uterus— a tumor in parts of the area that was open and opened to see the 6-month-old baby inside.
According to a widely circulated bulletin in the mid-1880s, Weaver, an anatomist, imagined the specimens— along with the museum's hundreds of other displays—as teaching tools, rather than "just curiosities."
In 1902, a reporter for The North American described Weaver as a "little professor" "full of energy, creativity, and vitality" who was "as relaxed and pleasant as a Friday morning," speaking of his collection of "beautiful tumors" filled with tenderness and awe. ("It's the lungs," the reporter quoted Weaver as saying, "Isn't it the most handsome thing you've ever seen?") ”）
In a 19th-century photograph, Weaver poses next to a fresh corpse with a chest that has been cut open and limbs hanging from his side like slices of meat in a butcher's shop. Weaver himself stood tall—standing on so many spines, the profession he was engaged in might be dangerous.
© INTERNATIONAL HOMEOPATH
It all seemed normal, and it wasn't until Weaver was ready to begin dissecting and showing off the full human nervous system that his colleagues thought he was crazy, or about to go crazy.
In the previous years of teaching practice, Weaver has always wanted students to experience the complexity of the nervous system, but the effect is not good. If you can have such a nervous system specimen, you will definitely receive good results. "Students always do a good job of labeling bones, muscles, blood vessels and internal organs when they take exams,"
An anatomy teacher at the time later recalled, "But when it came to the brain and nerve parts, they became stagnant and hesitant." To this end, Weaver hopes to find a way for students to more intuitively understand and master the nervous system.
To this end, Weaverte traveled to Europe to find a solution, but found nothing, and decided to make a neurological specimen himself. Back in Philadelphia, he told his colleague, the dean of the college, and the prestigious anatomist A.R. Thomas about the idea of dissecting the entire human body to obtain the primitive nervous system.
Weaver wanted to seek the latter's advice and support, but was sternly rejected. In 1915, at a celebration in memory of Weaver, Philadelphia physician William Weed van Baun commented that Thomas and many of his colleagues were "strongly opposed to Weaver's idea." They insisted that the plan was stupid, reckless, and likely would "ruin [Weaver's] vision and at least cause him to malfunction," Van Bowen continued.
However, Weaver was not intimidated, and in the spring of 1888, a target was chosen.
Anatomists used the dissected human body as a teaching tool – a practice that continues to this day. Image source: CARMEN DEÑÓ FOR ATLAS OBSCURA
The donor, who later became known as Harriet Cole, was initially described in the profile as "a woman about 35 years old with moderate fat," Thomas wrote— and while there were countless rumors that he opposed the plan, he was one of the few ways we know what Weaver did next.
Prior to the formal autopsy, the body "was pre-injected with zinc chloride solution," Thomas said. (Zinc chloride solutions are sometimes used as disinfectants.) ）
The body apparently floated in the bucket for a while before Weaver began to dissect it. We don't know the exact course of the autopsy now, because Weaver never records it. "This guy loves dissection, that's all," Herbison said. (In 1931, on Weaver's 90th birthday, a journalist specifically mentioned that "he declined all invitations to write papers or related articles, and as a result, it is said that his vast knowledge would be lost with his death.") ”）
Much of what archival researchers have about Weaver's life comes from a scrapbook in 1916. The book is one of the collages by Thomas Lindsley Bradford, a lecturer at The Hahneman School of Medicine and librarian. He was responsible for editing articles, photographs, and anecdotes about Weaver and other prominent homeopathic physicians at the school. However, in so many materials, there is no Weaver's self-description of the anatomical process.
The process of dissecting the human nervous system is "trivial, tedious, and slow."
In the 20th century, since scientists mastered the techniques for isolating DNA strands, real-world models of the nervous system "went from the highest level of craftsmanship to something that was passed," said Brandon Zimmerman, a medical historian and public program leader at the Drexel Heritage Center. After scientists, archivists, and the general public turned their attention to DNA, dissection became less important and useful.
Thus, the anatomical specimen of "Harriet Cole" has survived to this day, most likely because it assumed the function of a teaching tool and was either fortunately or pitifully "discarded" for a period of time– apparently the specimen remained unattended in the storage room for a considerable period of time.
Coincidentally, in recent years, some other ancient specimens made by Weaver have also been "hidden" under people's eyes for a long time, and they have regained everyone's attention. Between 2016 and 2018, Zimmerman made several trips to The Haneman School of Medicine to find out if there were any old objects that had not been discovered. On one occasion, he found the gold plaque that once marked the entrance to the Weaver Museum lying on the ground, used as a door block. Another time, he found one of Weaver's anatomical works—a human palm—so unprotected in the plastic container of fries in that street food bar.
"As long as you seal a layer of wax paper, the oil won't drip out," Zimmerman said.
Although the specimen "Harriet Cole" is eventually obsolete and no longer a state-of-the-art teaching tool, its production is definitely an amazing feat, and the admiration for it has never stopped —at least for a century, countless medical students have done similar exercises, sometimes even to the point of copying such a specimen.
In the 1920s, two medical students in Kirksville, Missouri dissected and produced a neurological specimen — but we also know very little about the methods they used. Inspired by postcards on the theme of Weaver's anatomy work in recent years, students from the Modern Human Anatomy Program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine have also experimented, and their specimen-making process has given us some insight into the challenges Weaver was likely to face back then.
Anatomy of the Nervous System by Shannon Curran, 2017. © neuropathology blog
In 2017, Shannon Curran launched the project. The following year, Justin Blaskowsky began a second dissection of the nervous system. Other students are responsible for helping to clean and maintain specimens in production. Both of Curran and Braskovsky's dissections, which took about 100 hours, required "small and small forceps to carefully peel off the fat and connective tissue components attached to the nerves, and had to be guaranteed not to destroy the nerves," said maureen Stabio, their mentor.
She also said the students also had to overcome the difficulties of mold and dryness, and that the dissection process itself was "trivial, tedious and slow." Curran and Braskovsky had to work hard to ensure that the nerves were not scratched, entangled, or messed up when the craniotomy was opened. The students rescued many peripheral nerves, but not all of them, and the school is now looking for ways to preserve the specimens for a long time. Stabio is now "still amazed" when he thinks of the work "Harriet" and Weaver's great success in perfecting the preservation of the entire nervous system.
The general flow of 19th-century dissection is well documented, including the preparation of corpses by traditional methods prior to dissection (often involving the use of a mixture of arsenic, tartarate, stone carbonate, glycerin and water), as well as the operation of peeling off the skin and internal organs layer by layer. In an 1883 pamphlet, The Dissector's Manual, an anatomist at Oxford University anatomist W. Bruce-Clarke and Anatomist at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, explained each step of anatomy step by step.
It didn't take long for the booklet to be reprinted in Philadelphia, introducing people from Weaver's time to the general anatomy. For example, the booklet instructs students to inject a solution made of boiling flaxseed oil and red and white lead (with turpentine varnish and sometimes wax and resin) through the aorta or femoral artery as soon as the preservative penetrates into human tissue. According to an operating manual published in 1822, this technique could help anatomists see the vascular system in a corpse.
However, none of these so-called how-to guides mention However accomplished the "Harriet Cole" masterpiece. The earliest mention of Weaver's research on the human nervous system was Thomas. He described Weaver's process of dissecting the nervous system in an 1889 issue of The Hahnemannian Monthly of the Haneman School of Medicine. However, Thomas's sketches are rather vague, spending most of the time explaining the basics of anatomy, and it is unclear exactly how Weaver protects fragile neural structures when cutting or sawing bones. It's not hard to imagine that this must be an unusually tedious job, because the spinal cord — a tough bundle of nerves — is basically as wide as your thumb.
We don't know all the ingredients of the preservatives Weaver used, we don't know all the tools he used, and we don't have any details of which steps in the dissection process were straightforward and surprising, and which were particularly tricky and cumbersome. We don't even know the exact time Weaver made "Harriet Cole." According to Thomas, Weaver began dissecting on April 9, completing the dissection in June, and finalizing and completing the entire specimen in September. Years later, however, Van Bowen reported that Weaver spent nearly 7 months on the autopsy alone, followed by "7 days of intense work and a great deal of patience to put the specimen on the board," for a total of "9 months of hard work."
Weaver is said to spend 10 hours a day in his damp office, taking 2 weeks just to solve the problem at the bottom of his skull. "After all the tiny branches of nerves have split, North American emphasizes, Weaver wraps them in alcohol-soaked gauze or cotton wool — things that need to be replaced frequently — and then rubberizes these fragile nerve fibers, all designed to keep the nerves soft.
Weaver took out almost all the nerves in the body, except for the intercostal nerves—the nerves that line the ribs proved difficult to handle. Waver is said to have removed the corpse's brain, but retained an outer membrane called the dura mater. He filled his entire brain with "curls," then sewed it up and put it back in the showroom. Thomas also wrote that in order to show the optic nerve, Weaver kept the eyes of the corpse and "injected a lot of things" into it to inflate it.
Weaver in the studio is surrounded by pre-made specimens. © COURTESY LEGACY CENTER ARCHIVES, DREXEL UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF MEDICINE, PHILADELPHIA.
Weaver later recalled to The North American that fixed specimens were far more "boring and demanding" than the dissection itself. He painted each fiber with lead paint and then fixed them with a total of 1,800 pins. (According to Thomas's records, most of these pins were removed immediately after the nerves were dehydrated and fixed in position.) According to these records, Weaver spent months in total disposing of the bodies, with a hiatus in between due to a period of time during the summer vacation. Thomas writes that the final specimen was "very, very clean, without any external organization, smooth as silk."
Almost at the same time as it was finished, "Harriet Cole" immediately became famous. The specimen was sent to Chicago for the World's Fair, while Weaver himself reluctantly followed. "It was hard to make the specimen, but for me, at the Chicago World's Fair that summer, the work of caring for the specimen and explaining it to the visitors was even more painful," he explained to The North American, sullenly. ”
After the Chicago World's Fair, the specimen (which at the time wasn't called "Harriet," at least not in the public eye) was returned to Philadelphia and exhibited at the Weaver Museum, which at this time was already a temple for all specimens that could embody the virtuosity of anatomy. "Today," Van Bowen proudly commented in 1915, "at the Weaver Museum, at the Hahnemann School of Medicine, there are the greatest and most amazing anatomical specimens in the world. ”
The first people to write written works on the theme of "Harriet Cole" did not pay much attention to the donors of the specimen. Thomas, for example, focused primarily on the work itself and On Weaver's hard work. Seven years later, The Medical and Scientific News, a monthly journal frequented by physicians, introduced "Harriet Cole" and praised Weaver's virtuosity and the many accolades the specimen received.
The unnamed journal author wrote that the anatomical specimen represented "an enduring patience and extraordinary skill never before seen in the history of practical anatomy." He also noted that the work had been "classified as impossible." In his published history of The Hanemann School of Medicine, the homeopathic physician and medical historian Bradford praised the specimen as "a masterpiece, an excellent embodiment of Dr. Weaver's skill and mastery."
The name of the woman who donated the specimen first appeared in a publication, in a 1902 issue of The North American. An unidentified journalist specifically pointed out in the article that Weaver used various anatomical materials to bring the body of the woman named "Henrietta" to life.
The reporter described the remains donor this way: "About 35 years old, in good health, well-developed adipose tissue. The name "Harriet Cole" first appeared in Van Bowen's 1915 commentary. Van Bowen described her as "a poor, ignorant black woman, 36 years old, without excess meat and fat" and called her body "ideal for dissection."
Weaver's dissection coincided with the intensification of so-called "scientific" research into races, especially racial hierarchies. While an anatomist has a direct stake in whether a donor is obese (the less fat a donor's body contains, the more suitable it is for dissection, because less fat means that the anatomist needs fewer procedures to touch muscles, bones, and nerves), it is scholars in other contemporary fields who have uncovered the mystery of the intricacies between obesity and race.
Sabrina Strings, a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine and author of "Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia," recently wrote in an article in Bust magazine that in European and American pop culture, Obesity (obesity in the broad sense often includes overeating and hypersexuality) has been associated with the black community, at least since the end of the 19th century, when entertainers brought sarj, a Coycoi woman from Cape Town, South Africa, under the name "Hottendow Venus". Saartjie "Sarah" Baartman began when it was exhibited.
"Giant Hips" Sarje Sarah Balterman (c. 1775-1815). © Pulse Nigeria
Over time, the story begins to become: It was Weaver who made this donor great. Van Bowen wrote in his notes that the woman, Harriet Cole, "became world-famous after her death because the world's greatest anatomist skillfully separated her entire brain and spinal nervous system." The implication is undoubtedly that Weaver has turned a lonely and nameless little person into a big celebrity who is important and even immortal.
In 1960, George Geckeler, another physician at The Hahneman School of Medicine, was tasked with repairing the specimen, and Life magazine took a compelling set of photographs. The author also compiled a story about the cleaning lady who was ignored by everyone in the lab "obsessively staring at corpses" and "eavesdropping" on lectures. She also overhears the small talk of Weaver and the others, and is "very concerned about the shortage of corpses that Weaver complains about" and decides to "dedicate her body to him."
The article seems to be a realistic description of how Harriet, the long-dead woman, felt, thought, emotions and behavior at the time. However, there is no evidence of how the author of the article collected this information, and the authenticity of the story is certainly not known.
Hebison said it seemed that "no one wants to go back and examine the veracity of this story." "What the first person to tell this story said, everyone believed it." Thus, the details are like messy arithmetic rules, extending from one story to another.
© LIFE
One of the photos that Life magazine gave to the story was of Gekler bent over, eyes aligned with the eyes of the specimen. The eyebrows of Gekler's own eyes were squeezed together, as if they were those gazing at the painting, thinking carefully about what was on the canvas, trying to understand what the genius who painted the painting wanted to convey to the viewer. By this time, the subject of the legend about the specimen was no longer limited to Weaver, and there were many legends with the woman "Harriet Cole" herself as the protagonist — in any sense, this is a story of the sudden fame of an originally low-status protagonist. As a result, the stories of characters who may never have existed have become very serious.
In some parts of the United States, tomb robbery was repeatedly prohibited even after the passage of laws authorizing the collection of corpses for medical schools. © Wikimedia Commons
The body, later known as Harriet Cole, was sent to Hahnemann Medical School at a time when the American Medical School reform coincided with the reform of the American Medical School. Throughout the 19th century, anatomical research in such institutions relied on autopsies, but the supply of cadavers was never sufficient. For much of this century, there were few legal obstacles to the purchase of corpses, if not at all. Thus emerged a grey industry dedicated to the supply of medical research institutions with stolen bodies from almshouses, hospitals and even cemeteries.
David Humphrey, a medical historian at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote in the 1973 edition of the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine that in order to meet the needs of medical research institutions for cadavers without raising legal risks and without infuriating the public," The safest way is to steal the bodies of social groups that can barely resist and those who ignore the suffering of their peers. ”
Humphrey went on to write that people living at the bottom of society were highly likely to fall to the operating table of an anatomists, and that "blacks and poor whites were also targets of corpse robbers." (Zimmerman, a medical historian, notes that these populations — including Irish immigrants — are also unusually likely to contract and die from infectious diseases that can easily spread in close contact,) ）
Racism in the Name of Science: Eyeball Molds for Racial Classification in the 20th Century. © David Harrison
The medical community, dominated by white American physicians, honed medical techniques through the remains of those whose rights were not exalted, an act undoubtedly a continuation of slavery and a manifestation of a racial hierarchy that supported white supremacy. "This is one of the great ironies in the history of medicine, namely that while black people are generally considered 'inferior' or even 'not human,' their bodies are considered 'awesome' and well suited for the teaching of human anatomy," said anthropologist Robert E. Lee. L. L. Blakely and Judith Judith M. Harrington writes in Bones in the Basement: Postmortem Racism in Nineteenth-Century Medical Training.
Daina Ramey Berry, a medical historian at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote in her book The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, The Value of the Enslaved, From Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation) describes why the corpses of slaves, by virtue of their appeal to 19th-century doctors and medical students, had "posthumous value" — the ultimate means of extracting the value of the deceased.
If a black woman named Harriet Cole had voluntarily undergone an autopsy after her death more than 130 years ago, she would have been unprecedentedly unique.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the public protested against the theft of corpses. "Between 1785 and 1855, there were at least 17 anatomical riots in the United States, and there were countless skirmishes, and almost every medical research institution was affected by such events," the medical historian Michael Sappol wrote in A Traffic in Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Identity in Nineteenth-Century America) wrote. In particular, Sabol mentioned that the citizens were indignant about the theft of corpses, "rushing into medical schools, recovering the bodies of their own family members or friends, and surrounding the carcassists and anatomists."
By the mid-19th century, in order to satisfy the needs while quelling the outrage over the purchase of corpses, especially in wealthier and non-marginalized communities, many states began to enact anatomy laws that provided legal safeguards for the legal acquisition of corpses. In 1867, Pennsylvania was the first to pass such a bill. The act, also known as the Armstrong Act, gave anatomists access to unclaimed bodies that should have been buried in Philadelphia or Allegheny by the government because no one had arranged for the aftermath. However, for the city's medical training industry, the effect of this bill is still a drop in the bucket.
Humphrey writes that even in Philadelphia after the Armstrong Act went into effect, anatomists at jefferson Medical School (where Weaver studied) "probably had other medical practitioners ... Attempts were made to fill the gap between legal sources and actual needs with bodies stolen from the Lebanese Cemetery in the black cemetery of Philadelphia. "[One of the initiators of the Armstrong Act, William W. Bush, said that he would be working on the act of Armstrong' Act. William S. Forbes was later charged with grave robbery but was eventually acquitted. Throughout Pennsylvania, newspaper headlines have been filled with scandals of medical students robbing graves at night.
In 1879, a doctor named T.S. Sozinsky published an article in penn monthly discussing tomb robbery and dissection. He pointed out that although "almost everyone considers the theft of corpses to be an extremely abhorrent act from all angles", there are still a large number of corpses obtained through illegal means throughout the country every year. He also said that anatomists in Michigan, Illinois and Pennsylvania, knowing it, still spent money on autopsy bodies from factories and almshouses, ranging from $5 to $30 per body. (Sozinski added that in Pennsylvania, grave robbers are convicted of fines of $1-50 and serve no more than a year in prison.) ）
In 1883, before Weaver dissected the nervous system that would later become known as Harriet Cole, the Pennsylvania government passed a more comprehensive bill and created an administrative committee to assign unclaimed bodies to medical schools based on the number of new students enrolled each year. This model was later emulated by other states.
There is no evidence that the bodies used in Weaver's autopsy at Hahneman Medical School were illegally obtained, but the exploitation of black bodies — both the living and the dead — has been a major theme in the story of "Harriet Cole." Zimmerman observes that even if all the obstacles at the legal level are removed, dissecting the act can still be troublingly torn between legal permission and moral dilemmas. ("Can we confirm that she does have the will to donate her body for a scientific cause?") Zimmerman asked himself, "No, we can't confirm." ”）
On the surface, at least, the story of Harriet Cole voluntarily dedicating her body to an anatomist is unusual—especially since dissection was controversial at the time and there was little formal avenue for donating the body.
"Most doctors today agree that not doing an autopsy is crazy because the benefits of dissection to society as a whole are significantly higher than the remains of the body in the grave and slowly decaying," said James M. Thompson, a pathologist and medical historian at the University of Calgary. James R. Wright said.
On the other hand, many patients in New England in the 19th century were sensitive to postmortem dissection, even fearful. Rana Hogarth, medical historian and author of Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840, said: "In the eyes of doctors, anatomy is an essential step. But for most ordinary people, they don't want their bodies to accept such a fate after their own death. ”
Humphrey, a medical historian at Carnegie Mellon University, explained in the 1973 edition of the New York Medical College Gazette that in the 19th-century public consciousness, dissection was "a degrading and blasphemous act to punish the deportees—much like the medieval ritual of catching and imprisoning criminals." ”
A few years ago, medical historian Brandon Zimmerman discovered the skull specimen in the photograph (the scene in the photograph is a lecture at The Haneman School of Medicine, and in front of the picture sits Weaver on the right side of the picture, and in front of him is the skull specimen). Today, the specimen is on display next to "Harriet Cole". © FRANCIS A. COUNTWAY LIBRARY OF MEDICINE/PUBLIC DOMAIN
Some non-medical people also believe that only by getting close to and understanding the internal structure of the human body can we better treat patients who are still alive. In 1882, The Christian Recorder, a newspaper sponsored by the African American Methodist Episcopal Church, publicly supported the dissection. The newspaper argues that it would be extremely foolish to seek medical attention from "people who have never been exposed to the mysteries of the autopsy room."
Even these pro-anatomy people are usually reluctant to allow their loved ones to undergo an autopsy. The anonymous author of the Christian Chronicle article satirizes grave robbery on a moral level and argues that the bodies of murderers and suicides should be given to doctors.
The very few who explicitly allowed or even asked doctors to dissect their bodies after their deaths were overwhelmingly wealthy whites with remarkable achievements. In 1889, the Philadelphia-based New American Anthropometric Society began collecting the brains of doctors and public intellectuals who held a phrenological view—the so-called "phrenology," a view that associates intellectual characteristics with cranial features. These donors are keen to join the "brain club" under this association, on the one hand, to expand the influence of this field, on the other hand, to gain a certain reputation and status.
（pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30117197/）
Schematic diagram of Phrenology, 1883. Phrenology is a hypothesis that a person's psychology and traits can be determined according to the shape of the skull, for example, if the area responsible for "memory" is more prominent, the person's memory will be better. Phrenology is now considered pseudoscience. © wikipedia
In the medical field, obtaining anatomical license is not easy. William Osler, a founding professor at Johns Hopkins Hospital, is known for asking his family for permission before handing over his body to a student — but he is also known for his efforts to get that permission.
White, a pathologist at the University of Calgary, specifically mentioned in a 2018 article published in the journal Clinical Anatomy that "autopsy clearance and organ-preserving abuse were not uncommon in Philadelphia in the late 19th century." In 2007, the journal Academic Medicine published an article about a marked increase in the number of american body donations in the 20th century. Ann Garment, then a medical student at New York University, and three co-authors specifically mentioned that giving remains was a very rare act at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, enough to be news.
In 1899, The New York Times reported on a wealthy horse dealer in Maryland who donated his body to Johns Hopkins Hospital. In 1912, 200 doctors in New York City also donated their bodies to the autopsy after their oath of death, in order to eliminate public shame about the matter.
Medical historian Venecia M. Venetia M. Guerrasio wrote in a doctoral dissertation on the subject of the Pennsylvania Anatomy Act that the first person identifiable to contact the state dissection commission that promised to donate the body to scientific research after death — that is, a woman named Minnie Faber — did not appear until 1922, when she made it clear that she intended to leave the body to The Hahneman School of Medicine.
In the early to mid-20th century, the New York Eye Bank began to collect corneas, and public interest in donating bodies for medical purposes also increased. Guelaccio wrote that the Pennsylvania Anatomical Commission established procedures for donating remains in 1952. In 1968, shortly after the completion of the first successful heart transplant, the United States introduced the first Uniform Anatomical Donation Act, which established standard procedures for the donation of remains.
At that time, there were many celebrities interested in the brain, and the American poet Whitman was one of them. After his death in 1892, at his request, his brain was removed by several medical scientists for research purposes. © Wikipedia
"I know that there are some people, such as the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who voluntarily dissect their bodies after death, but there are very few such people," Sozinski commented in 1879. Choosing to join the ranks of voluntary donations is no ordinary thing. "If the story of 'Harriet Cole' were true, it would probably be unusual," White wrote. If a black woman named Harriet Cole had voluntarily undergone an autopsy after her death more than 130 years ago, she would have been unprecedentedly unique.
For the past few years, McNaughton, Zimmerman, Herbison, and their peers have been tracking down Harriet Cole. Based on the work of their predecessors, they tried to find the truth of this controversial story in many historical facts and form a reliable written record. To do this, they rummaged through all the records and archives in search of traces of Harriet Cole's lifetime.
What archival researchers need most is something at their fingertips, such as digitized census records, newspaper articles, and other materials that can be easily accessed and summarized through direct search. Then there are some files that are not easy to find, such as birth certificates, death certificates. Then it's time to fish through the sea of archives—they may get footage from meeting minutes, church lists, or elsewhere. However, there can be frustrating gaps in all of these sources.
The predecessors of Knaughton, Zimmerman, and Herbison did not think about leaving any clues for the descendants who sat decades later in a quiet office in Philadelphia. As a result, people like McNaughton sometimes find only fragments of answers, and sometimes they can't find anything.
In 2018, Mike Norton found in the census archives that in 1870 a black woman named Harriet Cole lived in Philadelphia and worked as a domestic servant. Archives show she was 25 years old at the time and couldn't read or write. Zimmerman went through Philadelphia's city archives and collected records of patients' admissions and admissions. One record shows a woman named Harriet Cole who was admitted to the hospital multiple times over two years, at least once because of tuberculosis. (Records also show that the woman was unmarried, childless, and born in Pennsylvania.) However, Zimmerman noted that it is difficult to confirm the authenticity of these records. Women in their 30s, who died in 1888, were born when slavery was still prevalent. And because it's impossible to determine who Harriet Cole was who once lived on the land, researchers certainly can't be sure whether she or her family was enslaved — a fact that puts a question mark on the veracity of many records. "If she had been born into a slave family, it is likely that she herself would not have known exactly where she was born," Zimmerman said. ）
McNaughton also recovered a death certificate from the Brockley Almshouse (later renamed Philadelphia General Hospital) showing that on March 12, 1888, a black woman named Harriet Cole died of tuberculosis at the age of 36 and was buried a week later at The Hahneman School of Medicine. (The record also includes the name of another institution that was mistaken for a time for a "deceased name" because of its scribbled handwriting, which is the source of what Zimmerman called a "19th-century spelling error.") The burial site was a hospital, Herbison said, which often meant that the body of the deceased was handed over to the hospital for autopsy through the procedures at the time. The medical school, therefore, "is the legal resting place of these deceased."
Hair color tool box for racial classification in the last century. © David Harrison
However, there are also contradictions in this information. To do this, the researchers had to stop. For example, age is not right — Harriet Cole should have been 43 in 1888, according to the 1870 census file, which contradicts the statement on the Brockley Almshouse death certificate — either because at least one of them was misrecored, or because there were several women with the same name living at the time, or because the woman named Harriet Cole was not very clear about her true age.
In addition, while these archives indicate that a black woman named Harriet Cole did live and die in Philadelphia at the end of the 19th century, it does not prove that she worked for Weaver, that she voluntarily sacrificed her body to Weaver, and that the neural specimen was her.
McNaughton, who had wanted to go through the minutes of the Haneman School of Medicine faculty and board meetings, found that there was no more detailed record of this, which was really maddening. But even with such a record, it is hard to guarantee that a low-income black domestic servant will be mentioned. "College faculty members must have been on the minutes of meetings, but there was no guarantee from the rest of the staff that they would only be recorded when they were mentioned by regular employees," Hebison said, "so even if there was a secretary who had worked for the medical school for 20 years, his name might never appear on the record." According to McNaughton, the records of the 19th century were fragmented, lacked systematicness, and tended to highlight "important big men." Information about lower-level employees is not simply "underreported," Harbison adds: "But systematically defaulted." ”
As far as these archival researchers are concerned, none of the Weaver Museum's catalogues of specimens have survived. As you can imagine, such a catalogue is likely to outline the many of weaver's autopsies of the owners of the remains. For example, some entries in the 1869 catalogue of the 1869 specimen of pathologist William Pepper, director of the Pathology Museum at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, detail the age, race, occupation, and cause of death of the donor of the remains. Readers can tell from these records that the livable scapula specimen in the museum came from a 30-year-old man named John Mealy. On June 2, 1866, he was shot in the left shoulder and admitted to the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, where he died nine days later. However, there is no such written record of Harriet Cole's specimen.
Weaver with "Harriet," 1918. © COURTESY LEGACY CENTER ARCHIVES, DREXEL UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF MEDICINE, PHILADELPHIA
If the stories about Harriet Cole are true, the ideal evidence that Mike Norton and Herbison can find are two entries in the Hahnemann Medical School faculty memorandum— one documenting Harriet's work and home address at school (which can be compared to census records), and the other documenting her cause of death (tuberculosis, which can be compared to a death certificate) and explicitly stating that the body was dedicated to Weaver. "However, we haven't even found a shadow of these records," Hebison said.
As a result, all conceivable information channels failed, and Mike Norton had to stop and fish for fun. "Later, it's a bit like walking up to the bookshelf and opening the box where the materials are stored," she said, "and then I thought, 'Appear!'" But the result was still disappointing. ”
Later, she turned her attention to the countless short-term bills of the late 19th century — receipts, bills, cancellation checks, etc. — which were said to have reappeared in the 1980s when strange noises were made in the cabinets containing them, waking up the night watchmen. It can be said that Mike Norton searched for countless pieces of ancient documents, but did not find a needle.
Hebison suspected that the owner of the neural specimen might not have been Harriet Cole at all, and that the name might have appeared only to fill in the gaps in historical memory. If this is the case, then the name of the original owner of the specimen has been forgotten or never recorded.
Then, as the specimen became famous, there was a desperate desire to learn more about it. Therefore, in order to concoct a good story, someone specifically found a candidate who was suitable for age, gender, and race. However, apart from the lack of available information, contradictions, and popular intuition, there is even less evidence to support Herbison's suspicions than to support the specimen as Harriet Cole.
"Harriet Cole may, of course, be a fictional figure that was artificially installed on the specimen after its fame. However, I am more inclined to believe that the specimen is indeed Harriet than in this case. Well, I'm not that confident either..." Hebison said hesitantly, "I'm probably only 40 percent sure." ”
This group of archival researchers still has some means to find the original owner of the nervous system. They could ask genealogists to help analyze the specimen owner in more depth, or they could consult church records or city archives in greater detail. Still, Hebison is fairly sure that if the decisive archival document really exists, it must still be somewhere within the Hahnemann School of Medicine. But that's all the team can do so far: McNaughton has now put the study aside, and Zimmerman is helping out in his spare time.
Herbison wondered if they had hit a bottleneck — a cycle of cul-de-sacs after cul-de-sacs. "We kept looking, looking, looking," Hebison said, "and the result was disappointment, disappointment, disappointment, disappointment." ”
The neurological specimen that was permanently fixed there might have "revealed" some information about the man named Harriet Cole. At least, in theory, forensic identification would determine the sex of the body in the glass cabinet. But according to Dadna Hartman, head of the Molecular Biology Division at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Research in Australia, any DNA is likely to break down to the point where it is unreliable after decades of applying preservatives and lead paint.
"Given the age of the biological substance in the specimen and the way it has been disposed of since it regained attention, I doubt that there is any DNA in the specimen." In addition, even if THERE is DNA, it is likely to have been highly degraded," Hartman said. He added that the best way to extract DNA is in a lab that specializes in paleontological DNA — the kind of lab that analyzes human teeth found in permafrost or prehistoric corn kernels.
Such laboratories are meant to "exist to process ancient or severely damaged biological samples," Hartman said — but there is no guarantee that something useful will be extracted from the neural specimen. This uncertainty — and the associated costs, and the risk of destroying the specimen (it has been sealed since the 1960s) — has left everyone afraid to seriously consider the possibility of using this method.
"Harriet" is a reminder of the deep cracks in the historical record and the stories that slipped into them.
It is also possible that the descendants of the owner of the specimen help us understand the ins and outs of the whole story. The highly publicized case of Henrietta Lacks – In 1951, doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital extracted the cancerous cervical tissue of a 31-year-old black woman, Henrietta Lax. Moreover, as the journal Nature points out, Laax's cells became "coolies of biological research"—similar to the case with Harriet Cole's specimens.
（www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02494-z）
Of course, there are several important differences between the two. Photographs and memories tell Laax's descendants that Laax was not a patient who had taken samples without his consent. In their eyes, Laax was a kind mother who liked pasta, danced, and painted her nails a deep red. Eventually, the researchers consulted Laax's descendants on whether to disclose the cell genome. In 2020, at least one biotech company paid compensation to her family.
In several other categories of museum collections, human remains— many of which were collected during colonial plunder — were eventually returned to the descendants of their owners. The return of Native American remains is underway, and the remains of Maori and Moriuri ancestors have been returned to their homelands from museums in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Germany, Sweden and other countries.
In January 2021, Harvard University — a university that houses 22,000 human remains — convened a committee to study 15 blacks who were likely to live in the United States during a time when slavery had not yet been abolished. The remains of these 15 blacks are preserved in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The commission will ultimately provide guidelines for the collection, display and conservation of human remains.
However, cases of medical school specimens being naturalized to the family of specimen owners are still very rare, and even basically none. If Harriet Cole had relatives and descendants alive, the researchers had not yet found them. Of course, on the other hand, so far, no one has come to claim Harriet Cole.
Drexel University staff are planning to tweak the captions hanging next to the display cases to subvert the legends that have surrounded Weaver and his legacy for more than a century. In the new caption, researchers will highlight the mysteries of Harriet Cole's story, while Zimmerman hopes to revise and expand the exhibition space for Weaver's specimens. The COVID-19 pandemic delayed this work because the researchers had wanted to convene informal interest groups, mostly high school students, and a medical field trip with the theme of "Meet Harriet." For most of 2020, none of these groups have taken place. "The result is disappointing because we've been struggling with what's currently hanging on the wall," Herbison said, "right now, we're at least a year behind." ”
Over the years, the content of the legend about "Harriet" has also changed, reflecting the changing focus of public attention. "Over the past few decades, the legends about this specimen have been changing, reflecting the psychological state of society," Hebison said.
In this story, the people involved have become actors. Weaver is of course the protagonist, and Harriet Cole gradually evolved into Weaver's muse and, after his death, became a tool to educate future generations of doctors. Harriet Cole was "a real person, but every story about her treats her like an appendage to Weaver," McNaughton said.
With more and more doctors trained in the school, this specimen has become a mascot in a sense. Graduates will fondly recall the specimen, as if they had met a friendly colleague in the hallway. Now, historians are beginning to revisit the history of medicine (and, more generally). They began to pay attention to voices that did not often appear in official documents, and "Harriet" was a reminder of the deep cracks in the historical record and the stories that slipped into them.
Voices that have been ignored by official documents, harriet himself, may always be difficult to spot. They were lost in the missing archives—to the silence of what should have been a constant buzz. "You might think of archives as an all-encompassing place," McNaughton said. "But that's not the case," Hebison commented, "and there are always far more undocumented in the archives than there are recorded." ”
Now archival researchers and historians of medicine can tell their story of their search for Harriet Cole himself—disappointed, confused, and always expecting some evidence somewhere on the shelves to be drawn out. At the same time, visitors will still stop to watch and take pictures when they see "Harriet".
The specimen shook their hearts, making it impossible for them to move away, and in that instant, the reflection of the visitors themselves condensed in the mirror glass of the display case.
文/Jessica Leigh Hester
Translation/Qiao Qi
Proofreading/Rabbit's Lingbo microstep
Original/www.atlasobscura.com/articles/harriet-cole-human-nervous-system-philadelphia
This article is based on the Creative Commons License (BY-NC) and was published by Jooche in Leviathan
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