Secrets of the bones
BY SALLY ACHARYA
When Rachel Watkins examines the bones in her lab, looking closely for telltale pits and marks, it may seem like a scene from a detective show. But Watkins isn’t searching for the cause of her subjects’ deaths. She’s hunting for clues about their lives.
The people she studies left no legacy of diaries or letters to tell future generations what it was like to scratch out a meager living in a segregated world as day laborers and domestic servants.
It’s up to their bones to tell their stories. And Watkins has become the bones’ interpreter.
The AU professor of anthropology has been conducting research on a collection of some 700 skeletons held by Howard University, one of the world’s largest collections of documented human skeletons. They are the remains of Washingtonians who lived between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.
The skeletons came from people whose bodies were left unclaimed in the hospital after their death, which indicates, Watkins says, that they were so poor their families simply couldn’t afford a burial. Their bodies were donated to Howard’s medical school for use as cadavers in anatomy classes.
Most were African American. All were destitute. But they were not anonymous. Their names, addresses, and even occupations were often known and recorded, which gives Watkins a slim but crucial layer of information as she works to create a profile of people whose stories long went untold.
“Bones retain quite a bit of information about the life of a human being, not just their health but the life they lived, and the quality of life,” Watkins says.
Exposure to tuberculosis leaves lesions on the ribs. Vitamin deficiencies leave the bone with a porous surface. Stress on the bone can cause it to lay down excessive bone mass, called marginal lipping.
These bones, Watkins knows, are all that’s left of the lives of real people, and those people lived within a particular time and cultural context. For instance, if the bone shows marginal lipping, it’s a clue that the person did such arduous physical labor that the bone responded by strengthening itself.
If a person had tuberculosis, there’s a good chance they lived in the kind of crowded and disease-ridden conditions that spread the disease.
The collection has proven a valuable interdisciplinary resource for AU students. Watkins recently gave a laboratory tour to students in a class on inequality taught by Professor Bette Dickerson, sociology, CAS. Examining the skeletons provided the students with a context for looking at the sorts of biological consequences that accompany the social consequences of inequality.
As a scholar, Watkins focuses on the history of the health of African American populations over time, with a particular focus on urban populations and the relationship between social climate and patterns of health and disease.
Through her work, people who were marginalized in life are finding a voice.
“That’s where the bones come in. You can tell so much about a person from looking at the skeleton. They really have a story to tell.”
Reprinted from American Weekly, Nov. 29, 2005.
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