By Tara Duggan, San Francisco Chronicle The Tribune Content Agency
Limb bones with saw marks. Skulls cut in half. Long ribs, pelvic bones and sections of vertebrae. Over 4,000 human bones and bone fragments in all, tumbled together in a pit where someone had buried and seemingly forgotten them in 19th-century San Francisco.
Workers doing lead remediation work at Fort Mason discovered the bones in 2010, a week before Halloween. They had lain just a few feet below ground at the former site of a Civil War-era Army hospital. Incision marks in some of them caused a park service archeologist to initially think they were the results of amputations. The pit also contained pill bottles and other medical artifacts, but no records remained to explain the bones' presence.
Now, more than a decade after the original discovery, researchers have finally pieced together a theory of how the bones came to be there.
Colleen Milligan is one of them. She and two other forensic anthropologists from Cal State Chico drove to San Francisco to view the bones a few months after the original discovery, once National Park Service archeologists had cleaned them and placed them in museum cabinets.
"This didn't fit the pattern of remains that were typical in an archeological site," said Milligan, a professor and chair of the university's anthropology department. She was used to dealing with laid-out skeletons from a grave site or cemetery, not parts of different people, all chopped and commingled.
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P. Wiley, professor emeritus at Cal State Chico (he goes by the initial), said the anthropologists were "just absolutely floored by the remains. They were incredible." He said they had seen all kinds of bones before, but that "they aren't sawed, generally; you generally don't get a craniotomy."
The team eventually determined that the remains came from at least 25 individuals, including men, women, adolescents and fetuses, without a single full skeleton among them. The remains appear to be from individuals who immigrated to California and do not include any Native Americans, Milligan said. Their research indicates that the people were impoverished, fitting the profile of those whose bodies were made available for medical science at the time.
Last year, the researchers co-authored a book on their findings: "Archaeology and Bioarchaeology of Anatomical Dissection at a Nineteenth-Century Army Hospital in San Francisco," with Cal State Chico anthropologist Eric Bartelink and Peter Gavette, an archaeologist at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
Their theory is both shocking and convincing: that a pioneering Civil War doctor named Edwin Bentley used the unclaimed cadavers of poor people in San Francisco - which he had access to as a pathologist who performed autopsies for the city - in the 1870s to teach anatomy and surgical methods at one of the first medical schools in the West. Then, the hypothesis goes, someone discarded the cut-up body parts rather than having them properly buried. The flesh decayed, leaving the bones.
Bentley was "quite the famous surgeon and anatomist, and he also had a penchant for disposing of remains in unusual places," said Bartelink. (The book describes how someone opened a 15-gallon keg found at one of his former residences to find two human heads and several limbs preserved in fluid.) He added, "Of course, today we look back on this and realize it does not remotely mesh with current-day ethics."
Nowadays, people get to chose whether their bodies are donated to science with a mark on their driver's license. There has been a recent movement to repatriate remains of Native Americans that were stolen in earlier eras and placed in museums and archives. But clues found in the Fort Mason bones tell a fascinating story about medicine, medical ethics and society in early California.
An army surgeon arrives
Before Fort Mason got its name, the hilltop spot on the city's northern waterfront was established during the Civil War as an Army post called Point San Jose. There were barracks, stately officers' homes and a hospital, where Bentley was stationed in 1869.
During the Civil War, Bentley had overseen the Army's general hospital in Alexandria, Va., and taught anatomy at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Amputations were by far the most common surgical procedure during the war, with as many as 60,000 performed, in part because doctors didn't have time to conduct more nuanced treatments, according to the National Library of Science.
Bentley became famous for being one of the few surgeons to successfully perform a leg amputation at the hip - successful in that the soldier lived to have his portrait taken with his prosthetic two years later.
"With such an invasive surgery, I wouldn't want to go through that back then. The success rate was not high at all," Gavette said. But because of Bentley, "the guy survived and lived a happy life."
Bentley went to San Francisco after the war, where he taught anatomy at University of the Pacific Medical College from 1870 to 1875, and also performed autopsies as the pathologist at the City and County Hospital, then located at the northeastern waterfront not far from Telegraph Hill, where "he had direct access to those most likely to be unable to pay for their own burial," the authors write.
At the time, the California Anatomy Act of 1863 allowed surgeons who taught anatomy to take the bodies of people who were not claimed by loved ones within 24 hours of death. (Afterward, the law called for the remains to be interred in a cemetery.)
Fate of the poor
The law had the most impact on people living in poorhouses, workhouses or jails, Bartelink said. In San Francisco, the majority of the population had come from elsewhere, so it was common for the poor not to have family members nearby to bury them.
"The mentality of this time period was that people who were indigent or criminals who died were considered fair game for dissection because they were seen as owing their debt to society," Bartelink said.
The people whose remains were found at Fort Mason appear to have been poor, because they had a similar diet to that of people buried in a pauper cemetery in Santa Clara, said Bartelink, who reconstructed their diet through chemical analysis of the skulls and other bones.
The analysis also showed that the people were not from the Bay Area, a fact that could be traced to the source of their drinking water in childhood. But the authors could not trace any of the remains to specific individuals, in part because so many death records of the period were lost in the 1906 earthquake and fire, Gavette said.
"The supply of 'subjects' was ample for all the requisite needs of the professors and students," Bentley said in a speech at the San Francisco college where he taught, according to an 1872 article referenced in the book.
Bentley praised California's anatomy law in his speech, as it was actually considered an improvement on practices in other areas of U.S. where grave robbing, especially at African American cemeteries, provided the cadavers medical schools needed.
The authors found another intriguing clue that tied Bentley to the remains: a thigh bone with a cut through the top, where it attaches to the hip socket. They suggest it could be a sign that Bentley was training students on the hip amputation surgery he had developed during the Civil War, a skill he would have been uniquely able to teach.
Today the bones remain at Cal State Chico, which curates the collection for the National Park Service. In the book, the authors note the remains have yet to be buried as was required by the 19th-century anatomy law, and they acknowledge their role in perpetuating their displacement. But for the present, the team hopes to continue the research, including possibly doing DNA testing to learn more about the long-forgotten individuals represented.
"We're giving a voice to people who were voiceless when they lived," Bartelink said. "Society didn't seem to care for them. But this research gives us a window to tell their stories."
Reach Tara Duggan: tduggan@sfchronicle.com; X: @taraduggan