In 1888 an English doctor dissected a corpse down to its nerves. And illuminated forensic science along the way
If you stop by the bookstore of the Faculty of Medicine of the Drexel Universityin Philadelphia, you’re most likely in for a scare. Fright that will be followed by an uncomfortable gesture. Discomfort from which you will jump to surprise. And surprise that will give way to absolute fascination. There, locked in a glass display case located in the Student Activities Center of the faculty, received visitors until at least a couple of years ago, a dissected human body, tall, well bleached and with bulbous eyes with an expression of superlative and perennial surprise. The most curious thing is that the corpse does not preserve the skin. Not even the muscles. Not even the veins. Not even cartilage. Not even the bones. The corpse, baptized “Harriet”, is pure nerve. And it is in the most literal and full sense of the word. “Harriet” is the result of the surgical virguerÃa of the late 19th century, the result of meticulous and pioneering work – it had so much of both that there were those who believed it impossible – prepared more than 130 years ago by the Dr. Rufus B. Weavera former professor of Hahnemann Medical Collegenow known as Drexel College. Maybe in the era of 3D printing Harriet’s vision is less moving than in 1900, when medical students observed her; but the effect revives when you know two things. One, that Harriet are the remains of a real person, a former employee of the center who died at the age of 35; two, that to give it shape Weaver had to arm himself with patience and separate, filament by filament, the entire nervous system. The process took five to six months. and it only failed in the intercostal area. This is your story. With the eye of an anatomist and the pulse of a seamstress By the late 1880s Dr. Weaver was a well-established and respected professional. He was almost 50, had made a name for himself by identifying and removing bodies from fallen soldiers at Gettysburg and had been working for some time as a professor of Anatomy at the Hahnemann Medical College. In mind, however, Weaver had a project that would allow him to gain fame in the United States and abroad: completing a total dissection of the cerebrospinal system. During his travels through Europe he had seen partial works, but none that showed a complete “x-ray”. Help for his task came, it is believed, from where he least expected: from Harriet Cole, a young African American who was dedicated to cleaning the anatomy laboratory. Although he was only 35 years old, Cole’s health was very delicate. He suffered tuberculosis and his forces were greatly undermined. Before he died in 1888, however, he decided to donate his body to science and offer Dr. Weaver the opportunity he was looking for for his ambitious nervous system project. Over the next six months, Professor Weaver, armed with patience, eyesight and a seamstress’s hand, set about extracting the entire cerebrospinal nervous system. It takes a look at the result to understand that the work was anything but simple. Only the base of the skull required two weeks of dedicationalmost half a month during which he cut the bones piece by piece to keep the dura mater intact and that the eyes remained attached to the optic nerves. With the help of a very fine needle he separated the cranial nerves, the spinal cord and its nerves. Then he used bandages, gauze and pads soaked in alcohol and applied white lead-based paint and shellac to preserve them. Extracting and preserving the intricate system of filaments that shaped Harriet Cole’s system was only part of the challenge. To shape the composition that still today, 13 decades later, continues to amaze Drexel medical students, he had to suspend the mass of fibers from a special board with thousands of pins. The result, named “Harriet” in a nod to the donor, was used by Weaver for his anatomy classes at Hahnemann Medical College; but his virguerÃa soon transcended the walls of the laboratory and even the limits of Philadelphia. In 1839, about three years after the professor’s death, the board was presented and achieved distinction in the famous Word’s Columbian Exhibition. Since then, Harriet’s image has been reproduced in books, articles… Even today, more than 130 years later, the Legacy Center in Drexel University welcomes applications of teachers who want to use their images for their classes at universities or secondary schools. Who was Harriet? As time has passed, the focus has also been placed on Cole herself. Years ago precisely the Legacy Center decided to go beyond inherited history since the end of the 19th century and delve into the figure of the former Hahnemann cleaner. Specifically, he asked himself some questions: Did Harriet really exist? And if it was so, who was it? Why did he donate his body? Under what circumstances did you decide it? Did she know what Professor Weaver would use her corpse for? During their investigation they found many clues and circumstantial evidence, but no conclusive data. The Legacy Center located an 1870 census entry referring to an African-American woman named Harriet Cole who worked as a domestic servant and lived in Philadelphia, right in the same district where Hahnemann College was located; also a death certificate with his name signed in March 1888 and which attributes the cause of death to tuberculosis. What’s more, the center dedicated to medical study is designated as the “place of burial.” Does that mean that Harriet is the same person that, stripped of muscles, veins, bones and cartilage, we continue to see pinned at Drexel University? The institution recognizes that it is very difficult to know. The gaps in the center’s records between 1869 and 1900 make it difficult to go further. In any case, slip that it is not crazy think that Harriet Cole was a poor woman who, faced with the prospect of imminent death, decided to bequeath her … Read more
