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Cadavers used in anatomy classes were buried in unmarked lots in Columbia Cemetery

The University of Colorado Department of Medicine and Surgery opened in Boulder in 1883 with two students. By 1890, the medical school included more than a dozen students, two of them women. In order to graduate, each student was required to dissect an entire human body.

Records of these cadavers reveal a little-known cross section of life and death in Boulder County. The body parts were interred in unmarked lots, where they remain today, in Boulder's Columbia Cemetery.

Prior to the school's opening, Dr. Lumen M. Giffin moved to Boulder from New York to become professor of anatomy and physiology. In the early days, tuition for the three-year program was a one-time fee of $5 for in-state students and $10 for those from out of state. The courses included lectures, chemical laboratories and dissections.  

¾«Æ·SMÔÚÏßӰƬ alum Silvia Pettem is an acclaimed local historian and author of Separate Lives: Uncovering the Hidden Family of Victorian Professor Mary Rippon.

One of the bodies donated to Giffin's class was that of miner Frederick Nelson. He had sought refuge from a forest fire and suffocated in the shaft of the Bald Mountain Mine near the town of Sunset. His relatives were unknown, and no one claimed his remains.

Many of the deceased met similarly unusual or violent deaths. According to coroners' records, in 1909 Herman Schmidt's skull was crushed by a falling rock while he worked as a laborer on the construction of Barker Dam, below Nederland. Schmidt was a recent immigrant with no known family or friends. 

No one knew anything about Michael Clifford at the time of his death except his name. He was murdered in a drunken brawl in the town of Marshall. The university also welcomed his body.

Few, if any, of the cadavers used in the classroom dissections were female until 1914, when Cyrus Deardoff donated the body of his 70-year-old wife, Ellen, who had been declared insane and starved herself.  

Cyrus had, at one time, been a prominent gold miner in Ward. However, he died destitute a few months after Ellen's death. He saved the expense of a funeral and the stigma of being consigned to a pauper’s grave by agreeing in advance to give the university his body, as well.

The year was a busy one for the medical students. By then, CU had purchased its second cemetery lot, and bought a third one a couple years later. 

Additional bodies came from people who died by suicide or from influenza or other infectious diseases. Some, like Thomas McCormick, died from an overdose of morphine in the county jail.

Then there was William Ryan, a farmer, who had suffered from chronic alcoholism and was found dead in bed. He had no family, but he did have a watch and chain and a horse and buggy. CU got those items, too.

In 1924, citing a lack of appropriate medical facilities, CU's medical school moved to Denver. In 2008, the school transformed itself again with a move to the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora.

A year before the school left Boulder, Giffin died of a stroke at age 72. At the time, he was the oldest physician in Boulder. He, too, was buried in Columbia Cemetery—intact and in his own grave with family members. But while Giffin is resting is peace, the other bodies in Columbia Cemetery are resting in pieces.

Top image: Luman M. Giffin (center) and his class in the CU Medical School during the late 1890s. (Photo: courtesy Carnegie Library for Local History, Boulder)

Silvia Pettem is a ¾«Æ·SMÔÚÏßӰƬ alum (1969) and is the author of Separate Lives: Uncovering the Hidden Family of Victorian Professor Mary Rippon. This column originally appeared in the Daily Camera. She can be reached at .