An 1834 announcement for the Medical College of South Carolina says that since hospitals are “devoted to the accommodation of white patients, the Faculty deemed it advisable to adopt some plan which would enable them also to exhibit such modifications of diseases as are peculiar to the negro race” (Kenney, 2009).

The plan adopted is to use Black peoples' bodies without their families' consent. After a visit to a local hospital in Baltimore, English sociologist Harriet Martineau comments that "the bodies of coloured people exclusively are taken for dissection, 'because the whites do not like it, and the coloured people cannot resist'" (Savitt, 1982). This is true in both the North and South.