Med School Owes Its Existence To Many Bodies of Knowledge

When the University of Maryland's medical school opened 200 years ago, doctors had one big problem: They needed dead bodies, and there was no good way to get them.

In those early years, the school turned to grave robbing. More than a few corpses got yanked out of fresh dirt in nearby cemeteries and wound up on the dissection table for anatomy lessons.

So as U-Md. begins to celebrate its bicentennial and a distinguished history as the nation's oldest public medical school, it seems only fitting that one of the centuries-old cadavers has resurfaced.

In Michigan.

On eBay.

Everyone, it seems, has a skeleton in a closet. And even weirder: There are still people willing to pay for them.

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The school's founding in 1807 can be traced to an ugly incident over a cadaver. Word had spread that John Beale Davidge, a Baltimore doctor, was dissecting a corpse to teach anatomy. An angry mob smashed his building to pieces, an uproar that prompted Davidge and other doctors to win state approval for a Maryland school offering formal medical training.

"There were reports of hostility when it was discovered a grave had been emptied," said Larry Pitrof, executive director of the Medical Alumni Association, whose book on the school's history is scheduled to be published next year. "They had a pretty good idea where it had wound up."

Medicine didn't have much of a reputation back then. Sometimes barbers acted as surgeons, many common diseases had no known cure, quacks sold bottles of cure-all. And anyone serious about the study of anatomy had to get bodies -- somehow.

Without dissections, the only way medical students could really learn was in surgery, said Ronn Wade, director of the Maryland State Anatomy Board. "And they didn't have anesthesia then. It's kind of hard to learn anatomy when you're trying to cut something out [and] the patient's screaming and yelling and hemorrhaging."

U-Md. was the first school in the country to make dissection compulsory, Pitrof said. But it wasn't until the late 1800s, with a growing recognition of the importance of medical education, that Maryland legislators made it legal for the medical school to use unclaimed bodies.