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Why I Love Moral Dilemmas
Apparently I’m most interested in writing true stories about events that, in essence, center on moral contradictions. My first trade book, Donora Death Fog: Clean Air and the Tragedy of a Pennsylvania Mill Town, was about a group of people forced to endure a disaster that could have been foreseen but who largely supported the…
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Why It Wasn’t Just Gray’s Anatomy
No, not the TV show, the anatomy textbook. Known far and wide as Gray’s Anatomy, and still published today by Elsevier, Henry Gray could not have found success without his artistic partner, Henry Carter. Here’s their story. Henry Carter self-portrait Henry Vandyke Carter had been keeping a diary since he was fourteen. He was now…
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Irish Surgeon Becomes America’s Leading Body Snatcher
A 40-year-old man was taken to Saint Steevens’s Hospital today after being thrown by a horse and, upon landing, hitting his head on a wall 18 days ago. Dr. Samuel Clossy, who studied at Edinburgh University under the renowned surgeon William Hunter, decided to cut a hole into the man’s skull to expose the brain.…
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Feuding Founders of First US Medical School
The early years of the nation’s first medical school did not go smoothly. Not at all. The medical school, now the Perelman School of Medicine, was founded under the auspices of the College of Philadelphia, which would eventually become the University of Pennsylvania. The first class of medical students started classes on Thursday, November, 14,…
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Incident at the Marshall House
He was either a traitorous villain or a martyr for the cause, depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon line your ancestors lived. It was 1860, and a man named James W. Jackson, a rabid secessionist, was managing the Marshall House, a hotel that once stood on the corner of King and Pitt Streets in…
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The Business of Body Snatching
DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE WEAK OF HEART! Otherwise, have at it. It’s a story about body snatching. Cooool.
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A Tale of Two Henrys
St. George’s Hospital stood stately and regal in a corner of London’s Hyde Park, its raised colonnaded entrance beckoning visitors inside its healing walls. Now a posh hotel called The Lanesborough (below), St. George’s in 1858 birthed a worldwide bestseller from its dissection and post-mortem rooms. The book would furnish students for a dozen decades…
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How a 16th Century King’s Decision Sort of Led to the Doctor’s Riot of 1788
You can kind of — kind of — blame the craft of body snatching on King James IV of Scotland. King James IV James was the son of King James III and Margaret of Denmark, and assumed the Scottish crown at the ripe age of 15. He had famously been forced to attend a border…
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When the Publick Rose Up Against Its Doctors, Part 2
Ah, the contemptible Mr. Hicks. Little is known about John Hicks, the perpetrator of the act that led to the Doctor’s Riot of 1788. Hicks is said to have looked out a window of the anatomy lab on April 13 and seen some children playing outside. He waved the amputated arm of a cadaver at…
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When the Publick Rose Up Against Its Doctors, Part 1
Donora’s heroic physicians during the smog of 1948 learned their trade long after medical education had recovered from the destructive effects of the so-called “Doctor’s Riot of 1788.” The event was a bloody post-revolutionary protest against medical students in New York City stealing corpses to study anatomy. The incident ravaged
