A Traffic of Dead Bodies:
Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America
Michael Sappol

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ADDITIONAL REVIEWS:

"In his well-crafted and superbly researched book, Sappol takes us on a fascinating and morbid journey through the powerful and expansive world of anatomical medicine, foregrounding its centrality to the making of modernity. . . . It is an impressive and engaging work of cultural history that greatly enhances our understanding of society and medicine in America's long nineteenth century."--Alexandra Minna Stern, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography

ADDITIONAL ENDORSEMENTS:

"This is a wonderful book--original, ambitious, fascinating, detailed--offering an important new approach to the history of scientific medicine as based on anatomical knowledge and a richly textured argument about the centrality of the anatomical body to the bourgeois American sense-of-oneself."--Elizabeth Fee, author of Disease and Discovery and Making Medical History

"This marvelous book exhibits the kind of intelligence and conceptual innovation that should attract a wide range of readers. Creative, cleverly written, and finely argued. Sappol's very smart cultural history of anatomy as both activity and ideology sketches an illuminating picture of nineteenth-century American aspiration and self-understanding."--Regina Morantz-Sanchez, University of Michigan

"This is a well-crafted, extensively researched, fascinating study of the cultural politics of anatomy in nineteenth-century America. It explores an impressive range of cultural expressions, pulling together a disparate array of phenomena that no one has linked before. This book will be of great value to cultural and social historians as well as to historians of medicine."--Karen Halttunen, University of California, Davis

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File created: 11/5/2009

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