Monument: First Human Dissection in Arkansas

Little Rock, Arkansas

For many, many years, doctors were forbidden from dissecting human bodies to obtain medical knowledge in Arkansas -- and lots of other places. Religious beliefs held that corpses had to be intact in order to go to the afterlife. That taboo was finally broken in Arkansas in November 1874, at the Little Rock Armory. The event was later judged so important by the Arkansas Medical Society that it erected a monument on the spot in 1927.