"Harriet"

"Harriet" was a big-hearted Negro who worked as a scrubwoman in Philadelphia's Homeopathic Hahnemann Medical College for years after the Civil War. Among her duties was cleaning up the room where young Dr. Rufus B. Weaver cut up cadavers to show medical students how the human body was constructed. "Harriet" doubtless heard Dr. Weaver declare many a time that the study of anatomy was the most interesting of all the medical sciences. He loved anatomy so profoundly that he would never practice therapeutics as long as he lived. He loved the subject so deeply that he examined and helped identify 3,000 Confederate soldiers who had been buried on the battlefield of Gettysburg, close to which he was born in 1841.

"Harriet" doubtless heard Anatomist Weaver grumble that the 3,000 Confederate cadavers furnished him little new information about anatomy. She doubtless heard him complain about the difficulty of getting good specimens to dissect. She doubtless heard him yearn to be the first anatomist to make a thorough dissection of the human cerebrospinal nervous system from head to heel, from spine to sternum.

When she died "Harriet" willed her body to the hospital. Anatomist Weaver put her in a tank of preservative while he consulted with other anatomists on what to do. Then he flayed and boned "Harriet" piecemeal, spent months getting out every last tiny nerve in her corpse. As Dr. Weaver freed a length of nerve, he kept it soft and flexible by wrapping it in gauze and cotton wet with alcohol. When "Harriet" became no more than a pair of eyes, a dura mater, a spinal cord and a lacework of branching nerves, Dr. Weaver stiffened her with white paint, pinned her to a board.

"Harriet" as an anatomical model was unique (see cut). Foreign savants stopped in Philadelphia to admire her. Generations of medical students learned neurology by tracing her ramifications. She made a special trip to Chicago for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Hahnemann Medical College made Dr. Weaver a professor, gave him a Rufus B. Weaver Anatomical Museum, gave "Harriet" an honored vault. In 1925 he retired from teaching. Last week when arteriosclerosis and his 95 years made him unable to resist longer, Death took Dr. Weaver.

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