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 ![Illustration from Argument before the Tewksbury Investigation Committee, July 15, 1883](/sites/g/files/omnuum6316/files/chsi/files/tewksbury_committee.jpg)

 

**Illustration from Argument before the Tewksbury Investigation Committee, July 15, 1883, by Benjamin Franklin Butler (1818-1893)**   
 Established in 1854 as a hospital for the poor, the Tewksbury State Almshouse could legally supply cadavers to Harvard Medical School. This was for a fee and only at the discretion of the superintendent. By the 1880s, however, the public feared that conditions at the almshouse were in grisly decline because the patients were worth more dead than alive. An investigation followed in 1883, leading to reforms at the hospital.  
  
 The Democratic Central Committee, 1883  
 Harvard Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine