Michael Sappol
Author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America
About the Author
Michael Sappol is fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala. He is the author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America and Dream Anatomy, and the editor of A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Age of Empire and Hidden show more Treasure: The National Library of Medicine. show less
Image credit: Michael Sappol
Works by Michael Sappol
Associated Works
Telephone 12 — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1953
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Queens, New York, USA
- Places of residence
- Stockholm, Sweden
- Education
- Columbia University
City College of New York - Occupations
- historian of science
historian of anatomy
curator - Organizations
- National Library of Medicine
Uppsala University
Members
Reviews
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Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 8
- Also by
- 1
- Members
- 137
- Popularity
- #149,084
- Rating
- 4.2
- Reviews
- 2
- ISBNs
- 13
Sappol stated in the introduction that he was not going to consider the competition going on between medical sects or the medical advances that dissection brought. However, soon he was cherry picking quotes from herbalists and researchers and applying his own meaning to them without, in my opinion, considering the context in which the remarks were made. I cannot discount comments by René Laennec, who developed the stethoscope and the language describing the sounds it reveals, and Samuel Thompson, the founder of the first medical sect to financially challenge allelopaths, as simply reflecting society's views of the body and anatomy. In fact, my opinion is that these two helped set public opinion.
There are other issues I have with Sappol’s interpretations of events that may have to do his postmodernism orientation and my marxist / follow the money leanings. Yes the meaning that society gives to words changes over time. Today you can find certain groups of people talking about “Irish ancestors” who are not in any way referring to the Emerald Isle. However you cannot count every use of the word “irish” as anti-AfroAmerican racism. It seems to me that Mr. Sappol was cherry picking definitions of words to support his biases. If you want to really learn something about anatomy and social identity in the nineteenth-century look at Robert Blakely’s “Bones in the Basement”.… (more)