This blog post is based on the article ‘Abraham Bäck, scarcity, and the racial anatomy of skin’ published in The Historical Journal: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X25101039

In February 1744, the Swedish physician Abraham Bäck (1713–1795) dissected the body of an unidentified African man at the Hôpital de la Charité in Paris. Best remembered today as Carl Linnaeus’s best friend and as a leading medical reformer in Sweden, Bäck was then a young anatomist completing his training abroad. His experiments were part of a wider eighteenth-century fascination with the origins of dark skin colour, a debate that divided physicians, naturalists, and intellectuals across Europe.

African cadavers were a rare presence in European dissection theatres. This scarcity was striking, given that Afro-descendant communities were by no means absent from Europe. Historians estimate that between 1500 and 1800, more than 2.5 million Africans lived across the continent, with large populations concentrated in Iberia, Italy, France, and England. Yet, like most Europeans, they were baptized Christians, integrated into households, and usually buried within communities that protected their remains from body snatchers.

In cities like Paris and London, African cadavers were therefore rare and started to become increasingly sought-after by anatomists. In northern European countries like Sweden which had little involvement in the slave trade until later in the eighteenth century, they were rarer still. For young physicians such as Bäck, travelling to the great medical centres of Europe offered a chance to encounter bodies they would never have found at home. His Parisian dissection was the first time he had access to an African body.

Scarcity gave these cadavers unusual epistemic weight. When anatomists secured access to what they considered a “remarkable” body, rare, exotic, or simply unusual, it provided opportunities for them to make bold claims, to showcase observational skill, and to publish findings that enhanced their medical authority. Bäck was no exception to this tendency. In 1748, he published his research on ‘black’ skin colour in the Transactions of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences. It was a year of many achievements for him, as he was also appointed chief physician of Stockholm and junior physician to the Swedish royal court. It is uncertain whether Bäck’s research on race directly advanced his career that year, but the publication of his research on skin in Sweden’s most prestigious scientific journal certainly contributed to reinforce his professional reputation in his home country.

Historians have often traced the rise of scientific racism to the middle of the eighteenth century, when polygenesis and naturalist theories of race gained traction. However, Bäck’s experiments provide a largely overlooked addition to this story. He primarily worked within the framework of neo-humoral medicine, which sought to explain skin colour through bodily fluids and temperaments rather than as the result of environmental adaptation. Bäck’s research was firmly rooted in traditional Christian monogenism and foreshadowed some aspects of Linnaeus’s own humoral taxonomic turn by a decade. More broadly, Bäck’s little known experiments remind us that the making of “racial anatomy” was not only about ideas or prejudices, but also about professional ambition and access to resources.

The scarcity of African cadavers in European anatomy theatres shaped both the questions physicians asked, and the authority they derived from answering them. Anatomists were not always motivated by entrenched racial ideology. For instance, curiosity, religious commitments, intellectual rivalry, and career opportunism all played important roles. But scarcity amplified the value of certain bodies, and in doing so, it made race into a privileged object of inquiry.

By situating Bäck in this context, we can see how the early medicalization of race in Europe intersected with wider intellectual, social, and material factors. The marketization of dissection, the circulation of enslaved bodies, and the competitive culture of Enlightenment science all came at play in the anatomical theatre. There, African cadavers became commodities that could help European physicians build reputations and claim ‘empirical’ authority on a much-debated topic.

Bäck’s experiments on skin, as unsettling as they may be, shed light on how the production of knowledge about human difference was bound up with dynamics of scarcity, curiosity, and exploitation. Overall, Bäck’s case helps us understand the foundations of racial science in Europe not just as a matter of theory or prejudice, but also as a practice shaped by the bodies that were – and those who were not – available for dissection.

Abraham Bäck, Scarcity, and the Racial Anatomy of Skin by Vincent Roy-Di Piazza