A Proper Memorial At Last

The Virginia Commonwealth University Board of Visitors on Friday approved a memorial and internment site for the human remains found in a refuse well near the Egyptian Building, the original home of the Medical College of Virginia.

As a professor emeritus at VCU, father of a graduate of the university, and author of a biographical novel about Chris Baker (The Night Doctor of Richmond), the man responsible for snatching hundreds of bodies from Black cemeteries for use in anatomy dissection at MCV, I applaud this long-awaited commemoration (one other personal link, I was born at MCV).

The East Marshall Street Well Project at VCU has performed compassionate, thoughtful and difficult work since those body parts were exhumed thirty-two years ago, during excavation outside the Egyptian Building. They shepherded efforts to expose the 19^th Century atrocities and honor the people whose bodies were so horribly abused, while also searching out descendants discovered through DNA testing at the Smithsonian. This final act, erecting a memorial and internment site that honors the victims and owns up to the horrors MCV committed in obtaining and dissecting what the doctors called “anatomy material” seems to me exactly right.

I’m impressed that the memorial will be built on the site where the human remains were found, and that it means to recognize and honor not just those people, but all the hundreds of others who were not retrieved from that well or from other wells said to exist beneath the Egyptian Building and near the site of the University College of Medicine, a competing medical school founded by Dr. Hunter McGuire on Clay Street and later merged with MCV. In an ideal world, all of those wells would be uncovered and all of the human remains recovered. In the real world, in which those wells lie under buildings (for instance, the Kontos Medical Building and the Egyptian Building itself), that will never happen. I'm impressed, too, by the memorial’s design, said to be inspired by the Dogon culture Toguna structures of West Africa, from which so many of Richmond’s Black population had been enslaved and transported here.

The projected Internment Memorial (Marshall and 12th Streets, downtown Richmond. Note columns of the Egyptian Building at left. (Photo clipped from VCU News article 4/27/26.)

The $3.6 million dollar memorial and internment site will have a low roof. Visitors will be able to enter its open tent-like metal frame, sit and reflect. So much to ponder there. Construction is projected to begin next summer.

One more note of gratitude: By no means was the Medical College of Virginia the only medical school in the U.S. that robbed graves for their anatomy labs. Harvard College, The University of Georgia, and the University of Virginia have discovered similar remains, and no doubt most or all of the 70-80 medical schools in the U.S. during the 19^th Century also practiced body snatching. To my knowledge, VCU is the only university to have undertaken such a bold owning up to its dark history. Perhaps the memorial here will encourage other universities to memorialize their victims. If not, then VCU’s memorial will have to stand in for them all.

VCU News article about the Memorial.