Philadelphia History Meetup

The Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides (APT) will hold its next book club meeting on Tuesday, July 21 at 7 pm on Zoom. The selection is Grave Dealings: Body Snatching in Philadelphia, 1762-1883 by Tim Dewysockie. (BTW, Dewysockie will be the speaker at the APT monthly meeting in October – just in time for Halloween!).

In the 18th century the first American medical school was established in Philadelphia. Following the model of European universities, anatomical lectures were conducted with cadavers. But where did the bodies come from? Dissection was viewed as a fate worse than death, and the only legal source of “stiffs” was executed criminals. But there were not enough. As the medical profession and its need for “anatomical material” grew, a new, macabre practice emerged: body snatching.

Body snatchers secretly obtained bodies from cemeteries and sold them to medical schools for dissection. But how did body snatching work? How did body snatchers and medical schools avoid getting caught, and what happened when they did? How did the era of the body snatchers end? Grave Dealings: Body Snatching In Philadelphia, 1762-1883 digs through archives to unearth the forgotten history of a time of graveyard patrols and anatomy riots, when the dead needed protection from the living. Philadelphia pioneered and became the center of American medical education and practice–and body snatching–in the 18th and 19th centuries.

There is no fee to join the book club and everyone is welcome! Participants should come ready to discuss the book. The Zoom link will be sent out the week of the meeting in the APT Tour Talk email. Non-members who wish to attend should contact APT Secretary Pam Covey phillyguides@gmail.com by 5 pm the day of the meeting to get the Zoom link.

The Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides (APT) has arranged an outing to see the Independence Seaport Museum‘s new exhibit: Seeking Profit and Power: Philadelphia, China Trade, and the Making of America on Tuesday, July 28 at 10 am. This will be a two-hour visit with a guided tour for $5.

Have you ever wondered what happened after the United States achieved independence from Britain and lost its dominant trading partner? Independence Seaport Museum’s major new exhibition, Seeking Profit and Power: Philadelphia, China Trade, and the Making of America, showcases how as a young country we avoided economic isolation by creating a new foreign trade partner in China. It was lucrative. It was risky. And as a newly created nation, our economic survival depended on it.

Seeking profit and power, merchants saw dramatic opportunities to make money from Americans’ desire for Chinese goods like tea, silk, and porcelain. The fortunes they built helped expand Philadelphia’s role as a major port and city. Seeking Profit and Power is comprised of roughly 150 objects that have rarely been seen, many from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Through exploring these artifacts with a museum guide, APT visitors will learn how early trade relationships with China helped build America into a global economic power.

Highlights include the rise of wealthy Philadelphia merchants like Stephen Girard, whose China-trade fortunes turned early Philadelphia into a global port, yet also launched us into the moral complexities of opium smuggling and the use of enslaved labor on merchant ships.

You can purchase your ticket in the APT store, ‘field trip: tour or site visit.’ Contact APT Director-at-Large vpmccafferty@msn.com with any questions. Please join us!

Photo courtesy of the Independence Seaport Museum.