The lack of discipline among the students led to outright rebellion against their teachers. "This evening," Pray wrote, "we finished up physiology and are told to go into the diseases of women next. Mirabile dictu! We are determined to protest against any such proceeding."

Despite Sager's exotic collection of "minute preserved foetuses" and "several organs of generation, etc.," the students kept up their protest, and a few days later Pray reported in triumph, "We remonstrated against studying the diseases of women and were told to [buy] Pereira's Materia Medica, and so I purchased a copy $6." Sager went on, nonetheless, to become the professor of obstetrics and the diseases of women and children at the U-M.

It was a volatile mix: a roistering group of students and a laissez-faire faculty. When dissection began in late November 1846, Pray reported, "Today our subject, a poor Negro girl, was brought up. Poor despised and disregarded African, degraded and despised in life you are to be made a spectacle and subject of ridicule and obscene jest even in death."

Gunn made the first incision to a packed audience. "The lecture room was crowded," Pray wrote, "and before them lay stretched in the stillness of death the body of one who not long since was a living being possessed of all the feelings, desires, hopes, aspirations and passion which influence us–a sad proof of the vanity of life."

"The external organs of generation formed the subject for this evening's lecture," Pray continued. And the dissection showed that "although as much as 16 years old or more, her hymen was nearly perfect–showing that she had never been entered–which although not an anomaly is somewhat singular for one so abandoned as she probably was–or even for any girl of her age."

Throughout this time, Pray was sharing many of his evenings with his future wife, Deidamia H. Pope, then 18 or 19, who lived with her sister and brother-in-law, Frances and Earl Gardiner and their 12-year-old daughter. On December 2, Pray noted that the anatomy class had studied the neck. He went on to recount an obscene jest of his own: "In the evening had a great train [prank] with the girls with 'a piece of dead nigar.' Frightened them almost to death."

In another setting a year later, at Western Reserve–a full-fledged medical school with more than 70 students–Pray behaved quite differently. A special dissection room was set aside, he noted, for "10 or 12 headless bodies stretched out there to be jeered at and carved up by a careless gang."

He wrote that after two evenings of dissection he became "quite unwell." In a letter to his brother Joseph that Christmas of 1847, he confessed that "I tried to dissect some and did so for a while but it was too much for me and made me quite sick for a while, and I had to give it up. I have all the privileges of the dissecting room yet–but I am not healthy enough to dissect. I go to their quizzes and dissections so that is just as good."

From his writings it seems probable that Pray never found the poise in medical school to dissect at all.

Linda Robinson Walker '66 MSW is an Ann Arbor writer.

We asked William E.Burkel, professor of anatomy and cell biology and director of the Anatomical Donations Program, University of Michigan Medical School, about the current policy governing the provision of cadavers for medical research. He reported the following: Up until the late 1950s most cadavers came from institutions. Since 1958, most cadavers have come from donations governed by the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act passed that year [and revised in 1978–Ed.]. We receive about 250 bodies per year, of which about 60 percent of the people have made arrangements beforehand to donate to the University. The next of kin donate another 35 percent or so after the death of the individual, and around 5 percent are unclaimed individuals from hospitals and morgues. Of the bodies donated, 60 to 70 percent are used for various undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate teaching and the remainder are used for research. Careful records are kept of all individuals, and all remains are individually cremated when studies are done. About 80 percent of the ashes are returned to the next of kin. The remainder are buried in the U-M burial plot at Washtenong Memorial Park north of Ann Arbor. We hold an annual memorial service at Washtenong for all donors, with relatives and friends of the deceased invited. More than 600 persons attended our most recent memorial this Sept. 22. The State Anatomy Board, made up of representatives of the three Michigan medical schools–U-M, Wayne State and Michigan State–and of the University of Detroit Mercy, oversee all donations, as mandated by state law. W. E. Burkel.