Alysha Justine Lieurance

ALYSHA LIEURANCE, then a graduate student at University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was approved funding in September 2023 to aid research on “Who’s in the White? Health, European Immigration, and White Racialization in 19th and 20th Century America,” supervised by Dr. Margaret Ann Judd. The project investigates how systems of surveillance, poverty management, immigration restriction, and disability governance shaped the lives, health, and postmortem trajectories of individuals in the Hamann-Todd Human Osteological Collection (HTHOC). Using coroners’ reports, hospital and asylum records, naturalization files, city directories, and newspapers, this research employs close archival reading to “flesh in” the experiences of predominantly poor, immigrant, and disabled white men whose bodies entered the collection through Progressive Era institutional pathways. Archival findings were organized into three themes. First, examining how moral panic surrounding “tramps” interacted with the Ohio Anatomy Act to influence dissection eligibility, despite the absence of explicit tramp labels in HTHOC records. Second, showing how federal immigration criteria, namely the public charge doctrine, shaped clinical documentation at Cleveland City Hospital. Finally, exploring how early workers’ compensation laws contributed to stigma against disabled laborers and contextualizing skeletal trauma through linked case studies. Overall, bias, stigma, and bureaucratic judgment shaped HTHOC individuals’ data as it was transcribed from one source to another, challenging assumptions of its neutrality.