WVTF Public Radio
Roanoke VA
Friday, November 11, 2011
Shawn Utsey, a Richmond filmmaker, uncovered chilling evidence that grave robbing was once a common activity to provide cadavers to medical students in area colleges.
Scientists usually get credit for advances in modern medicine, but Utsey thinks many other people should be honored. In the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, he says, the bodies of deceased African-Americans were often stolen from graveyards so medical students could dissect them. Now, he hopes to address that injustice.
Utsey called his film Until the Well Runs Dry: Medicine and the Exploitation of Black Bodies. The title comes from a disturbing discovery at the Medical College of Virginia, where work began on a building site in 1994.
“They discovered a well that had been used in the 19th century to discard human cadavers once they were finished with them at the medical college,” he says.
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Thanks to the FCA of the Virginia Blue Ridge for altering us to this article.
