> The skeleton’s bones are held together by wire, like you would see in a school biology set, and he suspects the IORM ordered the body through a catalog.
Kind of buried the lede there.
> He and Hatem believe The Bluebird’s skeleton could be that of a woman, based on its small stature and broad hips. Benkert said a historian he consulted in 2017 guessed the skeleton may have been a young man, possibly from India.
Given the timing, India or the dead body of an unclaimed indigent were my first guesses.
In the late 19th and early 20th century it was commonplace for educational skeletons to be made from real bodies, frequently sold by poor Indian families. This only stopped when plastic became a practical option.
And before somebody cries foul; education is very important, and real bodies were once the only source of durable anatomically correct teaching skeletons.
A colleague of mine studied physiology and anatomy at McGill University likely in the 1970s. She said the cadavers were mainly unclaimed bodies of homeless people from the city of Montreal. The rule was that all work was to be done in the university labs, but she said students often snuck body parts out to conduct dissection work after hours in their dorm rooms. A lot has changed in the field, but it wasn't that long ago that we treated the dead like a tool.
In Michael Crichton's, "Travels", he discusses his experience dissecting a human body while in med school. The two most memorable bits: 1) the dissection triggered a hunger response in people and 2) they kept the hands covered to help the students dehumanize the body. I don't mean "dehumanize" in the sense of removing their dignity, but the hands apparently can make it more difficult to study the body as a subject and not a dead human.
I read it years ago, but remember really enjoying it.
Medical schools in countries like Argentina use cadavers as an essential tool for teaching anatomy, allowing students to gain hands-on experience and a deeper understanding of human anatomy.
You may have misunderstood the above comment. While using cadavers in medical education is commonplace, _taking body parts home_ is no longer the norm.
In 18th to early 19th century US/England, body snatching aka grave robbing was a common activity of medical students. And in England, it was a profession. As was guarding the freshly buried against such. When New York Hospital and Columbia didn't limit themselves to blacks, you got the 1788 Doctors' Riot and several deaths. A riot at Yale in 1824.
I wonder if you could teach history by emphasizing "surprises for the time traveler"?
Kind of buried the lede there.
> He and Hatem believe The Bluebird’s skeleton could be that of a woman, based on its small stature and broad hips. Benkert said a historian he consulted in 2017 guessed the skeleton may have been a young man, possibly from India.
Given the timing, India or the dead body of an unclaimed indigent were my first guesses.