Dissection Photography with Brandon Zimmerman

Death doula and funeral celebrant Jill McClennen hosts Philadelphia-based medical historian Brandon Zimmerman to discuss his 2024 book, “Dissection Photography: Cadavers, Abjection, and the Formation of Identity,” about medical students (1880–1930) taking souvenir photos with cadavers and what the images reveal about coping with death through humor, ritual, and discomfort. 

Brandon describes modern cadaver lab realities, including fainting, vomiting, sensory reactions, and students naming cadavers, and contrasts today’s mostly donation-based system with past body procurement through grave robbing and unclaimed bodies. 

They explore ethical issues raised by a recent Pennsylvania grave robbing case tied to the oddities market, cemetery neglect, and stewardship, including how criminalizing ownership of human remains may drive the trade underground. 

00:00 Faith Meets Dissection

02:24 Meet Brandon Zimmerman

03:56 Why Cadaver Photos Existed

04:57 Modern Lab Coping

07:30 Uncanny Dead Body Reactions

10:59 Preservation Changes Anatomy

13:47 Donations Versus Unclaimed

14:53 Naming the Cadavers

17:31 Recognizing Someone You Knew

19:57 Where Bodies Come From

20:59 Unclaimed Lives Honored

24:23 Cremains Lost in Neglect

28:01 Grave Robbing Returns

29:21 Student Dream Photos

32:17 Oddities Market Economics

35:20 Inside the Storage Locker

38:19 Can You Spot Stolen Bones

42:10 Cemetery Laws and Security

45:59 Wrap Up and Book Info

46:57 Grave Robbing History Deep Dive

https://www.instagram.com/brandozim/

https://www.amazon.com/Dissection-Photography-Cadavers-Abjection-Formation/dp/1529222184

Transcript

If you have this preconceived notion of death, of the soul, of what happens to your body, and then you go into medicine and you're literally sticking your hands inside rotting humans, no sign of a soul, no sign of the hereafter or what have you, that comes with a lot of baggage that you have to overcome in order to be an effective physician.

Welcome back to Seeing Death Clearly. I'm your host, Jill McClennen, a death doula and funeral celebrant. On my podcast, we have conversations about death, dying, grief, and what it means to be human. My hope is that these conversations help us approach these topics with a little more understanding and a little less fear.

My guest today is Brandon Zimmerman, a Philadelphia-based medical historian. Brandon joins me to talk about his 2024 book, Dissection Photography: Cadavers, Abjection, and the Formation of Identity, which explores a fascinating piece of medical history, the practice of medical students taking photographs with cadavers [00:01:00] in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

We talk about what those images can tell us about how people cope with death and the dead, both then and now. Brandon shares some of the realities of working with cadavers, the way medical students adapt to the experience, and how humor, ritual, and even discomfort can become part of the process. We also discuss the history of body procurement, including the troubling realities of grave robbing and the use of unclaimed bodies, and how today's body donation system's different from the past.

The conversation gets into a recent grave robbing case in Pennsylvania and the larger questions it raises about the oddities market, ethics, cemetery stewardship, and our relationship with human remains. It's a thought-provoking conversation that touches on history, medicine, death, and what it means to care for the dead with dignity.

Thank you for joining us for this conversation. Welcome, Brandon, back to the podcast, since we did actually already have a conversation once about a whole different topic, and at the end, when we finished [00:02:00] recording, you told me about the work that you do, not as a volunteer, and I was like, "Okay, we need to do this again and talk all about that."

So thank you so much for coming back to talk to me. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. If we only knew when we agreed to that last year that the world would change in the way that it has, and current events and so forth. It went from just an interesting subject to being very relevant to today's times, right?

Yeah. So. For sure. So why don't you just remind us, though, a little bit about who you are. Whatever you wanna tell us about Brandon as a person, even outside of your work. Sure. I'm here in Philadelphia, lived in Philadelphia for about 25 years. I design exhibits for museums, libraries, develop content for them.

I also do a series of private research for corporate clients and so forth, anything from genealogical research to helping some salvage companies try and find sunken ships and so forth. But at my core, I really am a medical historian and have devoted a lot of time and energy, especially this last decade, [00:03:00] to researching things related to anatomical dissection, grave robbing, and a very obscure practice which I wrote a book on that came out in 2024 called Dissection Photography, which involves medical students from about 1880 to 1930 Taking photographs with their cadavers as souvenir photos.

And I feel like I shouldn't laugh about that, but there's just some humor in that, right? 'Cause I'm sure, I'm not a medical student, right? I've never had to go through medical school. I hear it is very intense, and it's probably exhausting, and you're dissecting a cadaver, and at the end of the day, you're like, "You know what?

Let's set this person up and take some pictures." I don't know. I just find that, in some ways, very human, right? Yes. We have to laugh and find some things that are serious to be a little bit more lighthearted, or else how could we ever exist? Exactly, and it's like they say, right? Humor is the best medicine.

And especially during the era in which... I [00:04:00] find them, that, particularly with the dissection photography, I find it fascinating because of the time period in which it existed. It- it's one of those things that really could only have come about in the time that it existed because you have such a crazy cultural upheaval in terms of the people who are going into medicine.

These days, we're not as religious as we were at the turn of the 20th century. We're not as accepting of women in the workplace, people of color in the workplace, although a big asterisk next to that these days, right? So it's this massive change in so many people's lives and so many different things that one has to overcome, religion being the main one.

If you have this preconceived notion of death, of the soul, of what happens to your body, and then you go into medicine and you're literally sticking your hands inside rotting humans, no sign of a soul, no sign of the hereafter or what have you, that comes with a lot of issues. It comes with a lot of baggage that you have to overcome in order to be an effective physician.

And these days, 'cause I spent a lot of [00:05:00] time when I was working on my book, I spent a lot of time in modern cadaver labs with students. Fascinating to see, although they can't take photographs, it's fascinating to see the various coping mechanisms that some students have to this day, and you can trace them back historically.

Wow, you guys behaved the exact same way that I came across this reference when 1880 from this guy in Chicago behaved the same way. Outside of just the fainting, the vomiting, the, the passing out, so on and so forth. That still happens. But, but also it's so fascinating to see the different techniques, let's say from 1900 and 2019 10 of what students then do once they become acclimated to seeing a human being, dissecting a human being, and so on and so forth.

Some of the same students who either passed out or vomited on day one, I would see [00:06:00] maybe two months later talking about, "Oh, where are we gonna get lunch after this?" Or one time I walked into a cadaver lab and they were blaring the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. You do what you do, right? Yeah, that's so interesting too, because I guess I hadn't really thought about that, that the first time there is probably a lot of people that might vomit and might pass out, and it's not a conscious thing, right?

You could know what you're walking into, but that doesn't mean your body's going to be okay with it. And yeah, I just, I hadn't really thought about that. And everything else, you get okay with it with time, with practice, with being around things, but oh my gosh, yeah. I don't know what I would do, honestly. I like to think I would walk in and I would be okay, but also part of why I could never be a nurse or a doctor is the thought of giving somebody a needle, the feeling of the needle pushing into the flesh- Mm-hmm

just that thought [00:07:00] freaks me out. And I don't know why. But I guess also, being a chef, I have cut up a lot of animals, from a whole pig, whole fish, whole lot of chicken, right? Yeah. And so, like I know what that feeling feels like, and I know there's probably people that are like, "Oh, a human's different." I'm like, "Not really.

Our muscles are our muscles," right? A piece of beef is gonna be- Yep ... the same thing as a piece of human, the way that it feels when you're cutting it, and that doesn't bother me. But the smell of raw meat bothers me. It makes me a little... So I think probably it would be the smell also that I would not be- And what's fascinating from almost like a sociological standpoint for some of these students is, and I'm never really good at shortly synthesizing this, but where it's are you responding to when you see a cadaver, or for example, something that's more universal is you go into a funeral parlor, let's say, and you see an embalmed person.

Are- is your reaction To the fact that you see a dead body and [00:08:00] it doesn't look human? Are you responding to the human component of it, or are you responding to that kind of uncanny, unnatural component associated with it, right? An embalmed body in a funeral parlor that's had all kinds of makeup and cosmetic...

I know for me, I experienced death at a young age with my great-grandmother dying, but as an adult, the first body that I can remember seeing was my grandfather back in 2009, and I remember it was the texture of the backs of his hands that kind of freaked me out, 'cause he had a stroke and he had been on blood thinners and so forth, all kinds of IVs and so forth.

The backs of his hands when he was still alive were just purple and blue, and so they covered that up. So you could just see the makeup that was just caked on the backs of his hands, and it just looked so unnatural. But also the last thing that you picture in your mind when he was alive was all of that internal hemorrhaging and so forth.[00:09:00] 

And so it's just, again, that interplay of those don't look like my grandfather's hands, and in addition to that, you put all this makeup on the back of his hands kind of thing. So then you fast-forward to a cadaver and especially in modern times, right? You, you look at them and they're an odd color, you know?

They vary in, in texture. Once you cut them open, like you mentioned, the smell, it's the chemical formalin smell that's mixed with this something else that's in the air. I forget which component of it is, but I actually had a morgue manager tell me this, that there is something that is added to the chemicals that they preserve cadavers with that does something to your brain when you're in there that it elicits a response that makes you hungry.

I'll have to look it up and see what exactly it is, but so many people when they're dissecting cadavers are just like, "I'm hungry," or they immediately wanna eat afterwards. Oh. And it's because this chemical activates this component of their brain to do it, because you [00:10:00] would think the last thing you would want to do afterwards, eat.

Mm-hmm. And it's universal. As soon as they're done, they're like, "Where are we going to get... Where are we going to get food?" Yeah. And so I think that was fascinating from a sociological standpoint. The first time I ever did medical aid in dying with somebody, where I went to be with them specifically to give them this medication, knowing that it was gonna end their life, knowing that I was gonna sit through this whole process, right?

The next day, I remember talking to my mentor and telling her when I got home that night, I'd never been so hungry. I was like, I ate everything. I just wanted to eat nonstop, and as soon as I thought I was done eating, I'd be like, "No, I'm still hungry." And she said to me, "That's pretty common," and she thinks it was something to do with the adrenaline, that even if, again, we know what we're walking into, your body still is gonna react, that it was like the adrenaline crash afterwards.

So it might be something, not just the chemical- Yeah ... but also that, like you said, you're dissecting a body. [00:11:00] And so when they dissect the cadavers, I know when a body's laid out in a funeral, they're embalmed and they're pumped full of chemicals to preserve them. I didn't really know. I was like, is it forever?

Or how's that work? But the chemicals are put into them to preserve them, so when they're doing a dissection for a medical purpose, they can't pump them totally full of chemicals, I assume. It would change the structure of the things inside the body, wouldn't it? So what do they do with that? And it does.

On average, it shrinks everything, and interestingly, although not necessarily the most PC topic, a perfect example of how the preservation process alters a body is, so for example, the female genitalia. The various parts become so small and so shriveled that it ceases to be of a utilitarian use for ana- anatomical study [00:12:00] just visually.

Hmm. Right? So there have been some schools who have advocated to stop- The dissection of the female genitals because it's effectively in their minds has become an unnecessary mutilation to the body because its utility, which is to vi- you know, to see it, has been effectively rendered useless, let's say, as a result of the preservation process.

So the same way with some veins, some arteries and so forth, that depends on obviously the cadaver to cadaver. We're all different. The last cadaver lab that I observed for my research for my book, there was a gentleman who had Parkinson's He died at 95, 96. He was super tiny, but as a result of age combined with the Parkinson's, combined with being sedentary and so forth, like his one shoulder was locked almost over top of his body.

You would think [00:13:00] that would render him unable to be used as a cadaver, 'cause you're looking for the most sort of universal, generic, air quote, "generic" body for use because if you're studying your vascular system but somebody is just riddled with all kinds of blockages and so forth, you can't find their veins, then again, the utility component is lost.

So they unveiled this, and this guy was a former doctor. He donated his body to science. It was like the last thing he wanted. Mm-hmm. And so they gave the students the option, "This is such an unusual, and it's going to be very difficult to dissect him. Would you like a different cadaver?" And the students were like, "Absolutely not," because there's that human component of knowing he was a doctor, knowing he donated his body.

Mm-hmm. Which most cadavers for medical dissection in, at least in Pennsylvania, most are donated. Most, but not all. I also learned that, which I thought was interesting, is that ... And that's the big difference between [00:14:00] the era of my book and today. Back then, there was really no such thing as a donated body, right?

These are the bodies of the poor. These are bodies of people who unclaimed and/or grave-robbed. But today, most donated their body to science. So it's also that thing of you have this visceral reaction that sometimes you can't control, but also then you're ... It's like, it's almost like it resets their brains and then they remember, "I'm not doing this taboo thing.

I'm not doing this awful thing. This is what they wanted." Yeah. "This was their last gift to humankind and our health and all that." So a lot of people get over it faster these days, I think, in terms of those different things, because they know this is what this person wanted. And it's also interesting to watch the adaptive measures that some students take, and again, how that has stayed the same over the last 150 years.

'Cause one of the things I was struck by when I'm looking through old med school yearbooks, 1910, [00:15:00] 1912, and students are talking about dissecting their cadavers and they've named them. They've given them nicknames. Okay. And of course, back then, the references are either so obscure that you're like, "I have no clue what that is," right?

Like this one class, they nicknamed their male cadaver Ovary So it's inside joke, but then there's a lot of awful ones that are based off of race or gender or whatever. Mm-hmm. But then fast-forward to today, and students are still nicknaming their cadavers because calling it... And I would talk with some of them, I would interview some of them and be like, "Do you guys nickname your cadavers?"

And they were like, "Yeah, 'cause we didn't feel calling it an it was appropriate." And yes- Mm-hmm ... you can call it a he or she, but it's no l- it's not really a he or she anymore. It is an it, in that it's not a human, it's human remains, right? Yeah. That distinction there, depending upon how you look at it, right?

But we still look at it as a specimen rather than a human physically, although the respect we give to them are obviously still in the form of respect [00:16:00] it 'cause it's a human. But they didn't wanna call it an it. There was this one cadaver, very tiny, elderly Black woman on table 10, so they called her Miss 10.

So that was the nickname there. It's the single largest cadaver I've ever seen. This dude's like 6'4", like 6'5", something like that. His shoulders were hanging off the side of the table, and probably mid-calf was hanging off the table. This guy was just- Wow ... huge. So they called him Bubba, lovingly. So things like that that brings a little bit of the human component to it.

Conversely, there were some of those students who opted to instead to call it an it, because their real names are obviously withheld from the students. The students don't know who they were. So there were those students who did not believe that giving... Since they didn't know the cadaver's true name in life, they felt it disrespectful to give one in death.

They just referred to it as he, she, or it. Which is interesting to see it from both [00:17:00] sides, 'cause both sides in this case made sense, right? So yeah. But it's just it was crazy to me to be like, "Oh my gosh, you guys still do this." Like- Yeah ... and then it makes, from the time and when this stuff is recorded, around 1900, but it's, we've been dissecting humans, Vesalius is going back 500 years, right?

Did, in 1415 or whatever, are they naming their cadavers back then? Has this been something that they've been nicknaming dead people for the last 500 years? Uh- Probably, yeah And I would assume that- It seems very human. Yeah, it seems very human to wanna nickname 'em. And then I just thought, so they don't know the person's name or anything.

It probably doesn't happen that often, but what if you walked in and you recognized somebody? Oh, that's the guy that lives in my neighborhood. I've actually seen them before. That must be something. Once again, you probably never really came across it. I can't imagine it happens that often, but I'm sure it has to happen occasionally, especially, again, like most of the people that donate in Philly, they probably use the [00:18:00] same company.

I have a client that's donating their body to science, and they say on their website they'll go to Temple Hospital. There's three different hospitals that they go to for the medical students to use. A lot of these medical students are also in Philly, walking around Philly, so they're potentially walking by my client, who one day they might actually end up having this person.

That would be weird. So at least how it was five years ago, and I don't know if it's changed, but five years ago when I was researching the modern component still of my book, University of Pennsylvania was the only school that 100%, their cadavers came from people who donated them to the school, right?

Penn being what it is here had a plenty of people donating to science, and a lot of them are Ex-professors, ex-clinicians, so on and so forth. So I think in a situation like that where you almost have this kind of, this ecosystem Right ... I bet you it happens more [00:19:00] often than we would think that the staff, maybe not the students, but the staff would encounter people that they knew in life.

I only know of one instance at the, one of the schools that I observed where the woman in charge of the cadaver lab received a shipment of cadavers. They come in these big, long cardboard boxes. Takes the lid off, they're wrapped inside of a bag, and pulled back the bag and it was her old boss who had retired, like, 20-some years ago.

But it was her old boss, and she immediately recognized her, and I can't remember if she viewed it as, like, a conflict of interest. I don't think she did. I think she said that she was, like, honored and took care of her and so forth. But you can see that being emotionally disturbing, right? Mm-hmm. I knew this person in life and now I'm gonna cut him open.

So yeah, I, I think in major medical hubs, Philly or Boston, I bet you it happens a lot more than we think. Oh, that would be weird. Which has gotta be trippy. Yeah. That would be super trippy. And so you said most of the [00:20:00] bodies are donated from, like, somebody saying, "I wanna give my body to science." Where do they get the other ones then?

So Pennsylvania still has, at least for, though probably not for very much longer based off of this grave robbing scandal that's rocking the world. Oh, yeah. But it is... So there is still a very small percentage, and I used to have the number, I wanna say it's something like 17% or 7%, something like that, the bodies still come from unclaimed bodies, people who are unidentified or people who have no family to care for them and so forth.

There is a small percentage that is still used. And again, University of Pennsylvania being the only school that does not need to tap into the Gift of Life registry. They have their own. There, Drexel, Temple, PCOM, all these other Philly schools here, and there's one out in Pittsburgh. But, so the Pennsylvania schools still do occasionally take- Unclaimed bodies.

Yeah. I know [00:21:00] recently there was a article somewhere that I read that there was a funeral ceremony that got done for some of the unclaimed people in Philadelphia, where they went out and a bunch of people went out to just honor these lives. Because, yeah, you don't think about that. There's actually even a group that I'm part of in Philly where they were talking about how somebody died in Philly, the family was out on the West Coast, and the family wanted the ashes but couldn't afford the transportation cost.

You can't just really kind of put them in a box and mail them. There's a whole thing involved. And so they were raising money to ship this person's ashes back to the family. Wow. So some of it is cost, where if you- Yeah ... have a family member that dies and you can't afford the cost of a funeral for that person, unfortunately, and that's heartbreaking.

Again, on top of all the other things in our country that I'm like, for the richest country in the world, you mean [00:22:00] to tell me that we can't figure out how to fix this problem? Again, 'cause typically these are gonna be people that are unhoused, probably people of color, potentially drug addiction, right? A, a lot of things that we push them into the them versus us category.

And unfortunately, that does still happen, where bodies go unclaimed. But I thought that was beautiful, that a group just got together and was like, "You know what? We need to..." I guess there's a whole cemetery section where there's little markers, but there's no name 'cause they don't know the names of some of these people.

Yeah. But a group of people were like, "We need to honor them. We're gonna go out and give them a real funeral." I just thought that was so beautiful. It is. It's a human thing, right? I think especially in instances when you have a loved one who is still around, who is like, "I can't afford," or, "I'm on the other side of the country," or what have you, it's heartbreaking that it's like you can't get your loved one's ashes returned because of something as silly and manmade as money.[00:23:00] 

The schools here in Philly, and I think it's been a growing thing, the med schools now, they hold a cadaver remembrance ceremony at the end of their dissecting curriculum, where they all come together and they hold these beautiful ceremonies, light candles and place flowers, and the families of those who donate the remains, they come.

It's a beautiful thing, but also to your point, if it's like these are the people who did it willingly. Fascinating to see- How culturally, societally, monetarily, racially, donating a body to science has been flipped almost a total 180 here in terms of now it's become almost a fashionable thing to do.

Mm-hmm. It's like poor people don't donate their bodies to science anymore. It's the rich elite folks who... The cadaver remembrance ceremonies and the... It's, you can't have any kind of communicable disease anymore. You can't have been addicted to XYZ. They're very stringent for any kind of biological contamination, et cetera.

[00:24:00] So it's like they've, they only dissect the cream of the crop anymore, so to sp- Mm-hmm. It's, it's, it's crazy how we went from robbing poor Black cemeteries basically to now it being a very rich white industry. Yeah. Uh, but then along with that is the converse of that in terms of what happens to certain people.

Again, if their families are still around, that's one thing, but I can say that, for example, last time I was on with you here talking about Mount Vernon Cemetery here in Philadelphia, which has been neglected for decades, I was presenting at a Association for the Gravestone Studies conference back in 2000, and a member of the Laurel Hill Cemetery staff came over to me and was mentioning one of the people who used to work at Mount Vernon when the gatehouse became so decrepit there, they were having cremains shipped across the street to Laurel Hill And they were accepting them there for them, and then [00:25:00] this person would come pick them up and then take them to the cemetery, 'cause you couldn't have any mail delivered at the cemetery.

And they were like, "I wonder whatever happened to that stuff." And I was like, "Oh, this was back when the cemetery was still functional?" And they're like, "No, this was, like, last year." And I'm like, "Say what?" They're like, "Yeah, we don't know whatever happened to them." I was like, "Neither do I. That's a very good question."

And so we went over and we found in the front room of this gatehouse, which is just dilapidated, but hasn't been a functioning structure for decades upon decades, right? The whole front room was just piles and piles of just junk. Metal, scrap, just boxes of screws or boxes of just metal bits that somebody was saving.

It was just, like, basically just a, a scrapper's horde. You go into the next room and that's where they had all of the cemetery's burial records in these rusty filing cabinets [00:26:00] against a wall, covered in rust and covered in dirt, and dude's porn collection was on top. And totally surreal. Just, just a surreal landscape of just scrap metal and kitsch shit and, and burial records, right?

And we start rummaging through, and in this front room, there were two window seats, old window seats that opened up, and there were scrappers literally coming the next week to try and gut the gatehouse and see whether it was gonna be functional or not. And shoved inside these window boxes, tucked into the back corner with all of this scrap metal and screws and nuts and bolts and everything, here were two boxes about the size of a brick, two cardboard boxes filled with cremains.

One of them was dated 2018, one of them was dated 2013, and it's just like these people were alive... You think on average, death to dissection [00:27:00] usually is a year or two, 'cause they embalm you, then they freeze you. So it's not just you die on a Monday and they're dissecting you on a Tuesday kind of thing.

Like- Oh, okay ... like at least a good year or more goes by. So it's like this box is dated 2018, let's think at most this guy died in 2016. Maybe he had family, maybe he didn't, but either way You're now a box in this dilapidated gate house shoved in the back, and if we hadn't, if I hadn't have heard that from this woman, if I hadn't have gone looking, when the scrappers came, they're not gonna know- No

what that stuff is, right? No. And they would've literally went in the trash. Wow. So it's kinda like soup to nuts, not only in terms of it, it's so heartbreaking that people can't get their loved ones back, but also even if they get them back and then they take them to the cemetery, like what even happens to them within that liminal space sometimes is just nightmarish.

Again, as current events- This is probably a good time, [00:28:00] then, to talk because- Segue, yeah. Yeah. You said that some of the research you do is on grave robbings. That's one of those things where I genuinely was like, "That's a thing of the past. That doesn't happen anymore." And then, what, like a month ago it became worldwide news that- Yep

a guy outside of Philly was arrested for digging up bodies. They found a bunch of bones in his car, and he even had an Instagram where he was selling these body parts, the bones. Yeah, craziness. I was like, "Oh my gosh. I didn't think that happened anymore." Yep. Yep. And I can't tell you how many publishers passed on my book, which was published in England.

If I needed any other reason to love the English more, which I was already in love with them because of Midsomer Murders and fish and chips. But like- ... I fell in love with them because they were like, "Love it And when we were picking out a photo for the cover of my book, I was like, [00:29:00] "Okay, I'm gonna give you a range.

Here's a very tame one with a skeleton and a little guy holding a skull," and, and I was like, "And we can run the gamut. Here's one that's, that's pretty awful," which I'll, I'll show you. So as you can see, focus. Oh my God. A cadaver skeleton, but they're... This is commonly referred to as a student dream photo.

As I mentioned earlier, with the religious component, given the times, a lot of these students would write letters or they would write on the back of postcards, or they would commonly discuss the nightmares that they would have- Oh, yeah ... as a result of dissecting, particularly because of the Judeo-Christian belief that we're gonna rise when Jesus comes back and so forth, and this connection of we go into- how we go into the ground is how we will be raised up.

Mm-hmm. And so cutting away at these people, removing things from their bodies and so forth, these students were racked with these nightmares, thinking that the resurrected dead [00:30:00] was gonna come looking for them on the day of. So that's what these nightmares were, them essentially being dissected, the living dissectors being dissected by the di- the bodies that they dissected.

So this internalized kind of self-doubt, self-hate, from a psychological standpoint, th- they're the most what today we would probably refer to as offensive. They're the most offensive images, 'cause they staged them doing all kinds of bizarre stuff, but the historian component of it, I find them to be the most fascinating and rich to try and interpret, because it's not just class photo and we're all standing in a line, it just happens to be that the guy standing next to me is dead.

There's a psychosexual, psychosocial component to those types of images, and it's especially fascinating 'cause this is an industry that does not show vulnerability, right? You're supposed to be the expert on our species, so to show any kind of vulnerability in medicine is a weakness, be it physical or intellectual [00:31:00] weakness.

So the fact that they chose to show those vulnerabilities in that way is as fascinating as it is bizarre. So I showed that photo to my publisher in England, and they were like, "Yep, that's the one." It's like, "You sure? Because this is gonna be the most grotesque one." They're like, "Nope, love it." So that's the one we went with.

But I cannot tell you how many publishers I have pitched this book and also grave robbing, because especially back in the day, late 19th, early 20th century, the number one person doing the grave robbing was the school janitor. That was their duties. And so many times the janitor at the school would be Black, and his job was to go to poor, primarily Black cemeteries and rob graves.

So I pitched all kinds of variations of books and so forth, and almost universally the publisher came back with, "No, too gruesome. No modern context. Nobody cares about this anymore. This is so outdated." And now I'm [00:32:00] just like, I don't wanna say, "I told you so." I don't wanna give you the middle finger, but it's also, "Hey, we wanna revisit this topic because oh boy," and this guy's kind of like the more and more information that comes out, it's like exceeding expectations here in terms of what he was doing.

But yeah, a thing of the past, not so much. Although I will say that obviously while deplorable on both instances, be it in its historical place or modern place, you're still desecrating the dead. But it's like at least that was in the pursuit of knowledge and furthering humans and, again, our species and our health and so forth.

This was purely for commerce. And the thing that I am concerned of when this finally goes to court and so on and so forth, is that my fear is that they're gonna try and, 'cause I even see it on social media a lot, "This guy's sick. This guy's clearly just a sicko." No. No. No, he's not. No, he's not. They're gonna try some kind of insanity plea or anything like that.

No, absolutely not. Sicko. He's sick in the head, and [00:33:00] I've tried to post about this frequently on, on my Instagram page of this is, this was commercial. This was, this was not, Satan didn't tell him to do it. Jodie Foster didn't tell him to do it. The talking dog from Son of Sam didn't tell him to do it. The ghost of Ed Gein's mother didn't tell him to do it.

This was purely supply and demand. And yes, he probably gets some kind of thrill out of it. The photos that you can see online of the tombs that he raided, especially breaking into a mausoleum is one thing, but how he would put these huge slabs, these 800-pound granite slabs that are flush to the ground, that he would raise them up almost like he was putting a car up to steal the tires off of it.

He put bricks underneath and then slide his way in and rappel down. You don't do that unless you're getting a thrill out of that. Mm-hmm. So in that capacity, maybe you could argue there's a sick need to have some kind of macabre thrill there. But again, at anywhere from 600 to 1,200, depending [00:34:00] upon the dentition, this was money in the bank.

This, this was clout within the oddities community, and it will undoubtedly result in the criminalization of owning human remains in the state of Pennsylvania, unquestionably. I'm actually surprised, given how puritanical our state is, that it hasn't happened already. But the fact that this case leads back to the Philadelphia suburbs, and then if you remember, it was either last year or the year before that now, the stolen remains from Harvard's morgue The morgue attendant who was selling bits of cadavers to these third-party sellers, again, oddities dealers, they traced that back to Pennsylvania as well.

Oh. So all road- That part I didn't know ... all roads lead back to good old PA. So yeah, I don't see us walking away without this resulting in making, passing a law that you can neither own nor sell human remains. I know there [00:35:00] are difference of opinions on it. At the end of the day, how do I feel about it? I think it will solve nothing.

All it will do is drive it underground. It will drive prices up, it will drive them to be more rare, more collectible, because there's a complete misunderstanding of what a lot of this stuff actually is. Did you see the video that the CSI guys took of his locker? No. They open up this storage locker. I've spent a lot of time in natural history museums.

I was once a exhibit developer for the Mütter Museum, so I've seen it and smelled it all. But when they open up the locker and you can see these desiccated mummies, these rotting corpses, and they're stacked and but they're still in their funeral suits. There's these stained, decomposing funeral suits with these...

Some of them had, he'd taken the heads off of them, 'cause he wants the skull and so forth. And again, it's, it's that interplay of you [00:36:00] see a skull, that's one thing. You see a cadaver, that's one thing. But when they're dressed in a suit or when they're dressed in something that's human, right? That we wear clothing and so forth, when you see that interplay there of this headless mummy but still in his funeral outfit in the back, it took me aback.

I was just like, "I can't believe that this is a thing." There are plenty of cases of Egyptian grave robbers in the 1830s and '40s going through and just literally hacking off the heads of mummies and stealing the skulls. It was like, wow, man, you were taking entire bodies. It's crazy. It, it really is. But again, with all of that, this was for commerce.

The, this was greed meets the perfect storm in that you have a cemetery that really nobody's taking care of. And I would not be surprised if you start tracing his activities back, which unfortunately no one's going to do because it costs money. Again- Mm-hmm ... money thing. You don't start, you don't start doing this [00:37:00] 67 miles from your home, right?

You started locally. Yeah. You started seeing what you could get away with, when you could get away with it. Started small. It's like it follows the same progression of a serial killer, right? Nobody's gonna go grave rob this, again, as dilapidated as it is, as neglected as it is, it's still a pretty famous abandoned cemetery, Mount Moriah.

Yeah ... he, I, I Googled where he lived. There's six cemeteries within walking distance of his house. It's check those places out. And everyone initially was saying, "Oh, they're gonna do all kinds of DNA testing and they're gonna be able..." And my partner, who's a MD-PhD at Penn, she was like, "There's no way they're gonna do- Yeah

DNA testing times 100-plus bodies. That's 9/11 level, like CSI kind of, 'cause you would need to, A, be able to get a viable DNA sample from these remains, which you may or may not be able to do. You would then have to find out which ones are which. You would then have to contact family members who could potentially [00:38:00] maybe give you viable samples of DNA.

Then you're going to match them. Yeah. Not to mention how much has already been sold. Yeah, if he had 100 still in that locker How many have been sold? Yeah. Yep. So it's exactly like you said to his Instagram account. Mm-hmm. I think it's like Dead Shit Daddy or whatever it was. Yeah. Like, yeah, I was definitely chasing clout in the oddities world, but it's also like anybody who knows anything about this stuff, you take one look at them and you are like, yeah, th- those didn't come from a historic medical collection.

Those came out of the ground. When the outer layer of the bone delaminates and starts to chip away, you're like, that's a skull, that's a bone that's seen decomp and weather and humidity, and so that's a bone that came out of the ground. That wasn't a professionally prepared anatomical specimen. And again, those are still fraught with controversy because even in the 19th century, you're like, who did they take to make those specimens from, right?

So it's not like it's a kind of [00:39:00] a clean thing, but trying to compartmentalize a prepared medical specimen from 1880 versus a skull that you stole out of the ground. If you do this enough, you can tell. They just scream off the page, oof, that came from someplace. See, I wouldn't know what to look for, so if I was somebody that was in the market for a skull, which potentially I am the kind of person that would be in the market for a skull, I wouldn't know what to look for.

Like you said, somebody that is a actual collector and they have more over time, but for the average person that just thinks, oh, it might be kinda interesting to own a human skull- Wow ... I wouldn't know that you'd be able to tell a difference because- Yeah ... it's been in the ground and all those things. And I think that's what one is banking on when one is doing illegal activities like that.

You're banking on the amateur oddities person who doesn't really know any different, and I'm sure that's what he was doing. It also then of course raises [00:40:00] the ethical questions of if others in the oddity community did know him, was aware of it, you know, and the fact- Yeah ... that you did nothing and so forth, does that make...

It might not make you legally culpable, but again, ethically, morally, and so forth, if you're aware this thing was going on- Mm-hmm ... you know, because you have to know that this is going to affect the community. Yeah. You can see it in the video, 'cause I also thought, I was like, wow, how unprofessional. It's like the Lancaster Police or whatever, when they go into the storage locker, they're just like- They're screaming and cursing and, "Oh my...

I've never seen anything like this." You know, just losing their minds. The one police officer was like, "Oh, it's the worst thing I've ever seen in my life." I was like, "Really, dude? That's the worst thing you've ever seen in your life?" Like- It is Lancaster after all. That's what my partner said. That's what she said, 'cause she grew up in that area.

She's- Exactly. It's like for her, I was like, "Dude, raise your sights. What do... Like, I've seen worse things like that outside my house." This is Philly, but yeah, I guess Lancaster. But, but their [00:41:00] response to this stuff was, like, just this complete sort of, like, histrionic kind of just wowing out hyperbolic reaction, and you could see that within, 'cause he had some stuff in glass cabinets.

Mm-hmm. Some of them were what we would consider to be legit oddities intermixed with this stolen stuff. Yeah. He, at one point they're like, "Oh, this face looks like a, like a mummy," and it's, yeah, that's probably a legitimate mummified body part. Yeah. So it's that intermixing of the stolen with what one could consider to be a legitimate oddity, curiosity, and so forth, that it's if you were aware of this stuff, you had to have known that if this gets out in the wrong circumstances that this is all just gonna get meshed in together as one, and just ruin, quote-unquote, "ruin" everything.

Not to mention the fact that just the hundreds of family members that, that you're n- that you've ruined, and the hundreds if not thousands more who now [00:42:00] have no faith in that cemetery. And then also because of the laws changing, which is something I did not know until I got involved in, in cemeteries at Mount Vernon of...

'Cause you'll see back in teens, '20s, '30s, and then into the 19th century, they used to move bodies around cemetery to cemetery, or even within the cemeteries. They used to move them around like they were nothing. It's almost like just move table one over to table three, 'cause we got a group of six coming in for brunch.

They just would move people with no problems. No, "You buried this person in the center of the lot 'cause it was quick and easy, but now we need to bury more people, so dig her up, move her over here, and put six more over here." Or, "Hey, my wife died in childbirth with my infant son. I'm gonna bury you in Mount Vernon."

And then I live another 20-some odd years, maybe I'm richer, more well-known, fancier or whatever, and I go, "Hey, I don't want her over there anymore. I'm about to die. I'm gonna [00:43:00] buy a plot across the street in beautiful West Laurel Hill." You dig her up and you move them all over there. That was common. Now you need a court order, right?

Now you need a reason to do that, and it's very expensive and so on and so forth. So even within that of, let's say, like a modern person, I have zero faith in Mount Moriah Cemetery anymore. I want my loved ones dug up and put someplace where it's safe. That's not simply just going somewhere and paying somebody to dig them up.

You gotta go to the courts. You gotta file all kinds of... That's a hell of a process to do. So the fear that must be in so many of those families, the faith in that place, I really wish that the state would step in. I think going back to what we were talking about at the very beginning here in terms of the disposition of certain people's remains, it's like cemeteries, it's like we either need to go to hell with them, it's an outdated thing, or we need to get serious about saving them, protecting them- And [00:44:00] go that route.

This middle ground is no longer working. And while I think things like green burial movements, cremations and so forth, I do think that's the future of that industry. Mm-hmm. In some ways, and I can't remember if it was the Philadelphia Inquirer or the Wall Street Journal, somebody recently wrote that cemeteries are having a problem because nobody's paying for your standard burials anymore.

Yeah. They wanna go different options mainly because of the expense, right? Yeah. So if you just become this place where people just cut holes in the sod and dump ashes, does it need the same level of protections that it once did? I don't know. I don't have an answer to that, but I think that is also part of this, we're seeing a major cultural shift right now, I think, that people are looking at cemeteries in different ways, and even the rewilding component, you see a lot going on right now.

Which is great for the environment, but one thing that nobody ever stopped to really talk about is if we make this look more like [00:45:00] a forest, what's going to stop- Some of these things, like grave robbing, from occurring. We're changing the landscape, we're changing the security features, we're changing what this place inherently is, but never stopped to think about what that could mean.

And who stops and really think, who stops and goes, "I wanna rewild this to save the planet, but grave robbing, so actually, you know what? I'm just gonna keep it as it..." This wasn't something that I think anybody thought of, but bet your ass they are thinking about it now, right? Oh, yeah. Because now it's whether you go green burial or whether you still do the traditional model, you need fences, you need security cameras, you need staff, you need...

Because if not- Mm-hmm ... this is just the beginning really with this. I would not be surprised if we see this happening more and more, which is unfortunate, but I wouldn't be surprised. Oh my gosh. Again, and again, criminalizing it is just going to- No, yeah, that certainly won't solve the problem. We are at [00:46:00] the end of our time.

This was amazing, and I'm like, we could probably talk for a whole other hour, so I'll just have you come back next year, and we'll update on this whole case- Yeah ... and what's going on. But can you just tell us where can people find your book if they would like to get a copy? Sure. So you can... It's currently available on, Amazon's probably your best bet.

It's called, I know this is probably reversed, but it's called Dissection Photography: Cadavers, Abjection, and the Formation of Identity- Mm ... by Bristol University Press. You can also go on Bristol University Press' website and order it from them. It might be a little cheaper. It is more on the expensive side, 'cause it is a, it is an academic book.

It's not a coffee table book. I refer to it as over 200 pages of my meta bullshit on dead bodies, is how I lovingly refer to it as. But it's got a ton of different stuff, not just on photography, but anything from religion to the different social changes of women getting into medicine and dissecting and all the various issues that people had.

By people, white doctors, old white doctors, [00:47:00] how they had when, when they entered the medical profession, grave robbing, a lot of times with, again, like I mentioned, with janitors and so forth, what they had to do. It's, the janitor one in particular I really enjoyed researching, because it's a concept- That again is so foreign to us, though not as much as it has been, right?

But just the concept of grave robbing, but especially in that era, right? It's Jim Crow era South. You're a Black man employed by a white university, or in one particular instance, before emancipation, the people who founded the Medical College of Georgia, they were all slave owners. They owned this gentleman by the name of Grandison Harris, and his job was to go rob graves for them.

And because he was a slave, that gave him certain protections, because he was considered property, so you couldn't arrest him, 'cause you can't arrest property. You can't kill him, because if you shot him, because he's property, you would own, you would [00:48:00] owe these people money. So it's, it's almost like this crazy loophole that you can't even begin to wrap your mind around.

That's why these guys used African Americans to rob African American cemeteries, right? But then simultaneously, the communities turned on them. They considered them ghouls. They were nightmares that they would tell their children. This guy in Virginia, they called him the Ghoul of Richmond. Mothers would tell their children, "If you don't go to bed, if you misbehave, Chris Baker's gonna come and get you in the night."

How these people lived their lives completely shunned by their own community because of what they do to that community, but yet simultaneously shunned by the white doctors because of their station and their race and so forth, they just become... It's heartbreaking in that way. Yes, they're doing horrible things, but It's again, something to, you can't even begin to wrap your head around in terms of what that loneliness [00:49:00] must feel, and yet simultaneously the gifts and the privileges that this person has afforded as a result of that station.

Being able to read and write, having clothes to put on their back, three meals a day, all these different sort of privileges that was afforded because of their station. I wish there was more in the historical record about that. I wish we started oral histories. People always say, "Oh, if you had a time machine, you went back in time, who'd you wanna talk to?"

And I was like, "I wanna talk to those guys." Yeah, right. Because what must, what was it like to just be stuck between those two worlds like that? So I delve, I delve into that quite a bit in terms of the psychological component of it too. So yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah, that's all fascinating. Again, I could talk to you for a whole other hour about all this stuff.

We'll just do it again sometime. But thank you so much. Perfect. Thank you for having me back. Appreciate it. Yeah, and we'll meet in person one of these days. The stuff that will cross over here in the next couple months, so hopefully you'll come to Philly and join us for one of them. I would love to. If [00:50:00] you've been listening to my podcast for a while, and you hear me and my guests talk over and over about how important it is to create a plan for the end of life, and to have the conversations with your loved ones about what's important to you, and you're thinking, "Okay, maybe it's time.

Maybe I should actually sit down and figure this out instead of just hoping it all works out later," I get it. These conversations can feel overwhelming or scary, or just like something you'll deal with another day. But you don't have to do it alone. If you want help creating an end of life care plan for yourself or for someone you love, maybe it's your aging parents, a spouse, whoever it is in your life, you can book a complimentary 30-minute call with me.

And we'll just talk. We'll get clear on what's going on for you, and what the next right steps might be. There's no pressure, just support. The link's in the show notes whenever you're ready. And if this episode made you think of someone, a sibling, a friend, or another caregiver, feel free to share it with them.

Sometimes these conversations are easier to start when someone else opens the door first. Thank you for being here. The fact that you're even willing to listen to this kind of [00:51:00] conversation means a lot.