A contemporaneous 1884 medical journal cited epidermis found in the stomachs of Greely expedition dead as the decisive postmortem evidence of cannibalism

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Within about four months of the 22 June 1884 rescue of the survivors of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition — some ten weeks after they reached the United States that August — the medical trade press was treating cannibalism among the dead as settled rather than open. The Southern Medical Record (Oct. 1884, vol. 14, no. 10, pp. 368–370), reprinting a piece originally published in Medical Age under the title "The Greely Expedition and Anthropophagy," wrote that "there can be little doubt in the mind of any one who has followed the daily newspaper reports" that the flesh of the dead had been eaten, and named three grounds together: "The ravings of the half-crazed men when first rescued, the partial stories of sailors of the relief ships, and the revelations made at the post mortem examination of Lieutenant Kislingbury and others, would establish the fact in the mind of any one." Among those three it singled out one detail as decisive: "A conclusive point was the finding of epidermis in the stomachs of some of the dead" — skin being much harder to misidentify as non-human than a scrap of muscle.

The evidentiary posture matters as much as the verdict. This is a professional medical venue that did not perform the examination it cites and says outright that it is reading the newspapers — a secondary account resting partly on the same camp rumor it appears to settle, one step removed from Winfield Scott Schley's own primary relief-expedition report on the state of the bodies. What it adds is not independent confirmation but a clinician's stated reason for believing: a differential-diagnosis argument that skin is identifiable where muscle is not. That reasoning is absent from the bare "rumors of cannibalism" phrasing used in standard secondary biographies of expedition commander Adolphus Greely (claim-greely-arctic-disaster-survivor-ran-us-weather-bureau-1887-1891), and it predates by 18 years the genuinely independent quantitative case made in claim-2002-bioenergetic-study-finds-greely-expedition-food-shortfall-implies-cannibalism. Greely's own memoir declines to engage with the charge at all (claim-greely-1886-memoir-declines-to-address-cannibalism-charge).