ABSTRACT University of Pennsylvania undergraduate students researching their institution’s complicity in slavery were not sure what they would discover when they began their work in 2017. They learned that the medical school had a long history dating to the mid-eighteenth century of harvesting the bodies of poor Black and White Philadelphia residents from the almshouse and local burial grounds. In addition, the university’s nineteenth-century medical researchers broke new ground in developing racist scientific theories about the alleged anatomical basis for White supremacy. Thousands of wealthy White southerners attended medical school at Penn before returning to plantations to practice medicine on enslaved people. The student researchers created an outdoor augmented reality “exhibit,” accessible through a cell phone, to make their research findings more widely available.
Kathleen M. Brown (Thu,) studied this question.