7,000 buried on campus a costly problem
Experts estimate up to 7,000 bodies are buried on the University of Mississippi Medical Center campus.
They are former patients of the state’s first mental institution, called the Insane Asylum, built in 1855, and underground radar shows their coffins stretch across 20 acres of the campus, where officials have wanted to build.
But those officials have faced a steep cost — $3,000 to exhume and rebury each body, as much as $21 million total.
Now UMMC is studying the cheaper alternative of handling those exhumations in-house, at a cost of $400,000 a year for at least eight years. It also would create a memorial that would preserve the remains with a visitors center and a lab that could be used to study the remains as well as the remnants of clothing and coffins.
Ralph Didlake, who oversees UMMC’s Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities, believes the lab would be the first of its kind in the nation — giving researchers insight into life in the asylum in the 1800s and early 1900s.
It would be a unique resource for Mississippi,” said Molly Zuckerman, associate professor in Mississippi State’s department of anthropology and Middle Eastern cultures. “It would make Mississippi a national center on historical records relating to health in the pre-modern period, particularly those ... institutionalized.”
Didlake, Zuckerman and others have formed the Asylum Hill Research Consortium, made up of anthropologists, archaeologists, historians and even an expert in dating the wood of the coffins.
It was the consortium that developed the memorial/visitors center/lab plans.
Karen Clark of Clinton would like to see a grant given to collect DNA from all the patients. “It would make these people identifiable if family members came forth,” she said.
She is willing to donate her own DNA to see if it matches her great-great-great grandfather Isham Earnest. The War of 1812 veteran moved to Neshoba County in 1842, was ruled “insane” in the 1850s and is believed to have died at the asylum between 1857 and 1859.
“Hundreds, if not thousands, of descendants are here today because of Isham Earnest,” she said.