Picture a circular skylight above you, once opened to lower bodies into the room below for dissection. Davidge Hall was completed in 1812 as part of the College of Medicine of Maryland, which later became the University of Maryland School of Medicine — one of the first medical schools in the United States. The building was designed by Robert Carey Long Sr. in a neoclassical style and contains two lecture amphitheaters, including the famous Anatomical Hall with its circular skylight designed to provide maximum natural light for dissections and demonstrations.
The skylight served a practical purpose beyond illumination: it could be opened to allow bodies to be lowered in and out, which was important given the grim reality of nineteenth-century medical education. Before the adoption of body donation laws, medical schools relied on a shadowy trade in corpses — grave robbers known as resurrection men supplied Davidge Hall and medical schools throughout America and Europe with bodies for dissection. Baltimore's cemeteries were regularly raided; the residents of some neighborhoods took to burying their dead in iron coffins with locks.
The school where Edgar Allan Poe may have briefly studied, where generations of Maryland physicians were trained, still operates as part of the University of Maryland's medical complex. The lecture hall inside is unchanged from the early nineteenth century — wooden benches rising in tiers around a central demonstration table.