The New (White) Normal: Human Anatomy and the Naturalisation of White Bodies in British University Teaching, 1860–1910

Abstract

Summary The discipline of human anatomy has often been overlooked in histories of race science in favour of comparative anatomy, anthropology, ethnography and statistics. However, understanding the historical relationship between human anatomy and race science is particularly important because of the discipline’s central role, unlike its sister disciplines, in medical education. This article begins to redress this oversight, demonstrating that human anatomy played a key role in the development of nineteenth-century race science in Britain. This article considers three main elements of ideas about racial anatomical difference: the language of racial hierarchy, anatomists’ location of racial difference within the body and the perpetuation of these ideas over time. In so doing, I argue that research into racial difference was demonstrably anatomical during the late nineteenth century, playing a key role in British anatomists’ discipline-building processes, and that these ideas were present within the classroom, influencing generations of medical students.