History's Samuel Redman Discusses Alleged Scheme to Sell Donated Human Remains in Boston Globe
Content
Professor of History and Director of Public History Program Samuel J. Redman was interviewed for a Boston Globe article on a recently discovered conspiracy to sell human remains on a grisly illicit market.
Redman, author of “Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums," says this type of scheme dates back to the mid-19th century, when states began passing “anatomy acts” laying out the process for the legal buying and selling of medical human remains.
"Where exactly these remains came from has long been an uncomfortable question with murky answers,” he says. Sources in the mid-19th century included “morgues and prisons and alms houses, as well as the continued looting and grave robbing of Native American remains.”