{"id":64430,"date":"2025-09-25T15:13:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-25T14:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/?p=64430"},"modified":"2025-09-25T15:14:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T14:14:06","slug":"how-cadaver-scarcity-shaped-the-racial-science-of-skin-in-enlightenment-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2025\/09\/25\/how-cadaver-scarcity-shaped-the-racial-science-of-skin-in-enlightenment-europe\/","title":{"rendered":"How cadaver scarcity shaped the racial science of skin in Enlightenment Europe"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This blog post is based on the article \u2018Abraham B\u00e4ck, scarcity, and the racial anatomy of skin\u2019 published in The Historical Journal: <\/em>https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1017\/S0018246X25101039<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In February 1744, the Swedish physician Abraham B\u00e4ck (1713\u20131795) dissected the body of an unidentified African man at the H\u00f4pital de la Charit\u00e9 in Paris. Best remembered today as Carl Linnaeus\u2019s best friend and as a leading medical reformer in Sweden, B\u00e4ck 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 B\u00e4ck, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scarcity gave these cadavers unusual epistemic weight. When anatomists secured access to what they considered a \u201cremarkable\u201d 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. B\u00e4ck was no exception to this tendency. In 1748, he published his research on \u2018black\u2019 skin colour in the Transactions of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences<\/em>. 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 B\u00e4ck\u2019s research on race directly advanced his career that year, but the publication of his research on skin in Sweden\u2019s most prestigious scientific journal certainly contributed to reinforce his professional reputation in his home country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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, B\u00e4ck\u2019s 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. B\u00e4ck\u2019s research was firmly rooted in traditional Christian monogenism and foreshadowed some aspects of Linnaeus\u2019s own humoral taxonomic turn by a decade. More broadly, B\u00e4ck\u2019s little known experiments remind us that the making of \u201cracial anatomy\u201d was not only about ideas or prejudices, but also about professional ambition and access to resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By situating B\u00e4ck 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 \u2018empirical\u2019 authority on a much-debated topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

B\u00e4ck\u2019s 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, B\u00e4ck\u2019s 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 \u2013 and those who were not \u2013 available for dissection.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Image credits: engraving of samples of \u2018Ethiopian skin\u2019 published in Bernhard Siegfried Albinus\u2019s Dissertatio secunda de sede et causa coloris Aethiopum<\/em>\u2026 (Leiden and Amsterdam, 1737). Albinus was B\u00e4ck\u2019s anatomy teacher in Leiden. The letters and numbers separate the different layers of the skin, with I.B and D.<\/em> depicting the fictitious \u2018black\u2019 inner skin layer based on viscous putrefied fluids.Digital scan by Dr. Lo Barck, reproduced with courtesy of the Hagstr\u00f6mer Library, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm.<\/sub><\/sup><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n
\n

Abraham B\u00e4ck, Scarcity, and the Racial Anatomy of Skin<\/a> by Vincent Roy-Di Piazza<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This blog post is based on the article \u2018Abraham B\u00e4ck, scarcity, and the racial anatomy of skin\u2019 published in The Historical Journal: https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1017\/S0018246X25101039 In February 1744, the Swedish physician Abraham B\u00e4ck (1713\u20131795) dissected the body of an unidentified African man at the H\u00f4pital de la Charit\u00e9 in Paris. Best remembered today as Carl Linnaeus\u2019s best […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":823,"featured_media":64524,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,6,11216],"tags":[2364],"coauthors":[11906],"class_list":["post-64430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","category-humanities","category-medicine","tag-the-historical-journal"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/823"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64430"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64526,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64430\/revisions\/64526"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64430"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=64430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}