UC medical school students and their cadavers
Photo courtesy of the Carnegie Library for Local History,
Museum of Boulder Collection.
In 1883, when the University of Colorado’s medical school opened in Boulder, there were three faculty members and only two students. Tuition was a one-time fee of five dollars for in-state students and ten dollars for those from out-of-state. In order to graduate, each student had to dissect a human body.
Most of the cadavers were bodies of indigent men and women who had no one to pay for their funerals. Even so, their cut-up remains were respectfully laid to rest in unmarked graves.
The whereabouts of the remains of the first dissected bodies are unknown. By 1890, however, CU had a handful of medical students; and they were enough to warrant the University’s purchase of the first of three plots in Columbia Cemetery, at 9th and Pleasant streets in Boulder.
……………Silvia Pettem, historian, as published in the Daily Camera. 2009.
Thank you to Museum of Boulder for this information.
