Christopher Willoughby

Christopher Willoughby is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department at Tulane University in New Orleans, where in 2012, he also received his Master’s. He is completing his dissertation entitled “Pedagogies of the Black Body: Race and Medical Education in the Antebellum United States,” which has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (Philadelphia). He was the 2014 winner of the W. Curtis Worthington Jr. Prize from the Medical University of South Carolina’s Waring Historical Library, for the best graduate student essay in the history of health science.

Anatomy and Anatomy Education

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, dissection and study of human corpses became the primary method for medical students to gain intimate visual and tactile knowledge of the body and prepare to perform surgery on the living. As the chief medical city in the United States during this period, Philadelphia also became the leading center of anatomical ...