As Drew Gilpin Faust pointedly asks in her influential publication, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War: “Why do living humans pay attention to corpses?” A similar question was asked in 1854, in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, by Professor Tayler Lewis in an article that pondered whether “the sacredness of the human body” was “a notion too outdated for a modern era of science and progress.” The question, unsurprisingly, was a rhetorical one.

The human body, continued the article, relying on the dominant Protestant doctrines of the time, should not be considered merely some disposable possession for the benefit of science, for it is “not like a picture,” it is “something more than a belonging, a property, an association.” Though “motionless” and “speechless,” within remained “something of the former selfhood,” that which would one day “be raised again – yea, the same body.” Thus, even in death, the human body demanded respect and care, lest its posthumous ‘life’ in the hereafter be one of pain and fragmented formlessness.

Sympathetic to the plight of the lay community of the times and their beliefs that anatomical dissection held the capacity to cut or somehow splinter the human soul along with its corporeal vessel, some 19th-century physicians expressed a more tolerant view. “The idea that respect is due to the dead body is so deeply rooted in the human mind as to be almost instinctive,” stated Professor Thomas Dwight of Harvard Medical School. “We know, indeed, that no violence can harm the dead, but, though reason is convinced, the heart is not satisfied.” To lessen public perceptions over the abject nature of dissection, attempts were made to satisfy both the hearts and minds of the masses by championing the act as a legitimate and holy ritual; a profound ceremony essential to understanding “the human form Divine” by studying the body “as God made it.”