Ruth Richardson was the first to chronicle the modern history of dissection. Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (Penguin, 1988), Richardson's magisterial account of England's 1832 Anatomy Act, told the rivetting story of how the state decided to allocate unclaimed paupers' bodies to medical schools for dissection. Richardson's work was definitive: a work of medical history that was also a densely textured social history of English class formation, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute delved into everything from burial customs to utilitarian philosophy in order to show that in procuring a steady source of cadavers, the Anatomy Act effectively criminalized poverty itself. Michael Sappol's A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America aims to do for American history what Richardson did for English history. Modelled after Richardson's book, Traffic tells how dissection helped consolidate the American medical profession and how it contributed to nineteenth-century American identity formation.

Richardson is a hard act to follow, not least because the story of dissection is much the same in America as it is in England. As members of one of the first truly international professional communities, American doctors saw the importance of dissection right alongside their English colleagues. In both countries, dissection was, until the late eighteenth century, reserved for criminals who deserved a fate worse than death. In both countries, the formalization of dissection as a principal component of medical training during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries met with strenuous resistance from a public that saw dissection as an unconscionable violation of moral and spiritual law. In both countries, the demand for cadavers combined with the absence of a steady, legal supply created a black market in which graverobbers sold extortionately priced corpses to physicians and schools. In both countries, riots protesting the anatomists' wanton disrepect for the grave were common. American states solved the problem just as England did--by passing laws allocating paupers' bodies to medical schools. Americans responded to these laws much as the English did--by gradually, often grudgingly, assimilating anatomy as an unpleasant but important fact of life.

Written in the long shadow cast by Richardson's pathbreaking work, A Traffic of Dead Bodies is a history of American dissection that is also a chronicle of one historian's efforts to differentiate his work from the stunningly written, stunningly similar history of English dissection that precedes it. Sappol both tells a story that hasn't been told and finds repeatedly that this story largely replicates that of another country and another book.

Sappol tries to rescue his project from redundancy by digging deep into the uniquely American aspects of his story. There are detailed accounts of how homeopathic, botanical, and eclectic medicine responded to dissection, and there are whole chapters devoted to such varied material as sensation fiction's fascination with dissection, popular anatomy books, anatomical children's literature, and medical museums. This richly evocative material allows Sappol to differentiate his history from Richardson's: where Richardson focusses on how dissection dehumanized the English poor, Sappol concentrates on how dissection consolidated American middle-class identity.

The trouble is that this framework is itself the stuff of received idea. It would be hard to find a more worn master narrative or to name a nineteenth-century phenomenon that has not been read as the key to middle-class identity formation. The novel has been read that way, as have conduct books, commodities, female bodies, freak shows, orientalism, discipline, and repression, to name a very few. Sappol's focus on "embodied identity" is the least interesting, least useful aspect of his study.

A Traffic of Dead Bodies is an unwieldy combination of original research and outworn theory. Sappol's remarkable material is consistently distorted by a heavy-handed, often uncritical reliance on a mishmash of trendy concepts and chic vocabulary. Judith Butler, Stephen Greenblatt, Mikhail Bakhtin, Eve Kosofky Sedgwick, and Antonio Gramsci among others are all prominent presences in Sappol's book. We hear continuously about "performative" identity, about the "cultural poetics" of anatomy, about dissection as a "carnivalesque" and "homosocial" endeavor, about the singleminded quest of upwardly mobile doctors and lay people for "bourgeois hegemony." Race, class, and gender are likewise dutifully and frequently invoked. Theoretical buzzwords and methodological soundbytes clutter Sappol's prose, doing more to obscure the value of his project than to enhance it. The bland, almost reflexive character of the book's widest frame belies the quality and depth of Sappol's research, which deserved more subtle, supple treatment.