Who Was Harriet Cole? - The Unknown Life of the World’s First Dissected Nervous System
The story is told as follows:
Harriet Cole was a member of the custodial staff at Hahnemann Medical College (Drexel University), Philadelphia in the late 19th century. When she died of tuberculosis in 1888, she donated her body to Dr. Rufus Weaver to be used for anatomical study. For the period of 5 months after her death, Dr. Weaver worked meticulously to carefully extract every nerve from Harriet’s corpse, and arrange them to be studied. Save for the filaments on intercostal nerves from between the ribs, he succeeded. Dr. Weaver effectively achieved the first full dissection of the human nervous system, winning several awards at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Dr. Weaver’s accomplishment is still extremely impressive today, as it is one of only four full nervous system dissections in the world.
But who was this woman who now sits greeting students entering the medical school?
The most common facts of the story are these: Harriet Cole was African-American, she died of tuberculosis, and she was 35 at her time of death. As for the rest, it’s up for debate. Back then, it was common for medical schools to receive cadavers from prisons, poor houses, and asylums. Body donation was almost unheard of. If Harriet’s body was used with her permission, there’s no written record of it, and it was likely so she wouldn’t have had to burden her family with funeral costs. There is a death certificate for a Harriet Cole in 1888, and it states that this woman died of tuberculosis at age 35, was African-American, and lived very close to Hahnemann. It also lists her place of burial as Hahnemann Medical College.
I am not saying that the common story told about how Harriet Cole’s body fell into the hands of Dr. Weaver is a complete myth, but understanding the time period of the supposed donation should lead us all to question just how much of this process was Harriet’s choice.
Onto the dissection itself, it was achieved through a time-consuming step-by-step process. Dr. Weaver started from the top, chipping away at the skull, separating and spreading the dura mater and cranial nerves and pinning them to a blackboard. Dr. Weaver then worked his way down, wrapping each nerve in moist gauze, and then later covering them in lead paint for preservation. The final result was titled simply “Harriet,” a full human body shown only in nerves, including the eyes, mounted on a blackboard to be used in medical study.
While we can remember Dr. Weaver for his great accomplishment, let us also take a moment to think of Harriet, who, although she has contributed to the rapid advancement of medical science in the 19th-20th centuries, we as a society know very little about.