Body Snatchers and Resurrectionists: A 19th C Necessary Evil?
I’m constantly researching medical history these days. No, I’m not heading for med school. I’m just writing a series of romantic mysteries set in the Regency era (early 19th C). One of the main characters is Dr. Holt, a former ship’s surgeon, a current consulting physician, and now a forensic detective. He and Lady Danford solve mysteries with a mix of his medical knowledge and her emotional intelligence.
One great source for me has been the pair of books by Guy Williams, The Age of Agony (18th C) and The Age of Miracles (19th C). I’m learning all about the early pioneers in science-based surgery and disease treatment. But of course, because of my lamentable tendency to be drawn to the dark side, I’m fascinated with one unfortunate aspect of medical training in that time… body snatching. Grave robbing.
Anatomists and medical students needed corpses. And in those days, most bodies were buried according to religious practices. The only bodies legally assigned to medical training were those murderers executed for their crimes, and even in London, there weren’t enough of those. Enter the “resurrection men,” who “resurrected” corpses for some of the most prominent anatomists in London and Edinburgh.
The most famous grave robbers were a pair of Williams—Burke and Hare—who supplied the elite doctor and medical trainer Doctor Knox in Edinburgh. Burke and Hare started off merely slightly over the legal line, delivering the body of an old pauper who had died of natural causes in their boarding house. Encouraged by the good doctor’s generous payment, they soon turned to digging up recent burials from churchyards. But running low on supply, they graduated to creating their own, getting poor street people drunk, then crushing them to death. Presumably Dr. Knox made sure not to notice how many of the corpses supplied by Burke and Hare died in such an unusual way. Hare turned King’s evidence and testified against Burke, who was executed (no word on whether his body legally was used as an anatomy lesson). Dr. Knox was not prosecuted, but he was more or less run out of Edinburgh and had to set up a new practice in East London where standards were lower.
Hoosier Body Snatchers
My husband and I are currently working on the Most Interesting Book Ever, a chronicle of our “wander Indiana jaunts” around the small towns in our homestate. I’m just joking about it being an interesting book topic, but you know, we have found instances of body snatching even here. One involved prominent physicians, the Mullen Brothers, who trained medical students in southern Indiana. According to one local chronicler, in 1845, they were teaching near the town of Versailles (this is pronounced, in Hoosier fashion, Vur-saylez), and one of their students was their brother JW. He wanted to impress his big bros, and recruited a couple other students (Gordon and Glass) to check out a new grave in the Versailles cemetery.
Unfortunately for them, the townspeople were lying in wait for yet another graverobber, a local doctor. (I’m getting the idea that the medical profession did not boast great reputation back then.) The doctor didn’t show, but the medical students did, and they were attacked by the locals. The young men fled towards what seemed to be open land beyond the graveyard. In fact, it was 120 foot precipice over a rushing creek. Gordon flung himself off, and the other two followed suit. I guess a suicide seemed preferable to the violent punishment the mob was planning. Amazingly, they all survived when some trees broke their fall. They were, however, arrested and tried, though they all got off on a technicality. The precipice has been known ever since as “Gordon’s Leap.”
Really, I’m learning a lot about medical history from my research, but what does it say about my morbid tastes that I’m now digging deep into other accounts of graverobbers and their ghoulish profession?
(I will atone by writing about John Keats, who trained as an apothecary at medical school in London, fortunately choosing poetry as his side-hustle rather than graverobbing.)
