This sort of reasoned, pained sensitivity was rare in the heyday of British anatomy schools. The far more common tactic was to sneak into a graveyard and dig up someone else’s relative to study. The act became known as body snatching. It was a new crime, distinct from grave-robbing, which involved the pilfering of jewels and heirlooms buried in tombs and crypts of the well-to-do. Being caught in possession of a corpse’s cufflinks was a crime, but being caught with the corpse itself carried no penalty. Before anatomy schools caught on, there were no laws on the books regarding the misappropriation of freshly dead humans.
And why would there be? Up until that point, there had been little reason, short of necrophilia,[4] to undertake such a thing.
Some anatomy instructors mined the timeless affinity of university students for late-night pranks by encouraging their enrollees to raid graveyards and provide bodies for the class. At certain Scottish schools, in the 1700s, the arrangement was more formaclass="underline" Tuition, writes Ruth Richardson, could be paid in corpses rather than cash.
Other instructors took the dismal deed upon themselves. These were not low-life quacks. They were respectable members of their profession.
Colonial physician Thomas Sewell, who went on to become the personal physician to three U.S. presidents and to found what is now George Washington University Medical School, was convicted in 1818 of digging up the corpse of a young Ipswich, Massachusetts, woman for the purposes of dissection.
And then there were the anatomists who paid someone else to go digging. By 1828, the demands of London’s anatomy schools were such that ten full-time body snatchers and two hundred or so part-timers were kept busy throughout the dissecting “season.” (Anatomy courses were held only between October and May, to avoid the stench and swiftness of summertime decomposition.) According to a House of Commons testimony from that year, one gang of six or seven resurrectionists, as they were often called, dug up 312 bodies. The pay worked out to about $1,000 a year—some five to ten times the earnings of the average unskilled laborer—with summers off.
The job was immoral, and ugly to be sure, but probably less unpleasant than it sounds. The anatomists wanted freshly dead bodies, so the smell wasn’t really a problem. A body snatcher didn’t have to dig up the entire grave, but rather just the top end of it. A crowbar would then be slipped under the coffin lid and wrenched upward, snapping off the top foot or so. The corpse was fished out with a rope around the neck or under the arms, and the dirt, which had been piled on a tarp, would be slid back in.
The whole affair took less than an hour.
Many of the resurrectionists had held posts as gravediggers or assistants in anatomy labs, where they’d come into contact with the gangs and their doings. Drawn to the promise of higher pay and less confining hours, they abandoned legitimate posts to take up the shovel and sack. A few diary entries—transcribed from the anonymously written Diary of a Resurrectionist—yield some insight into the sort of people we’re talking about here:
Tuesday 3rd (November 1811). Went to look out and brought the Shovils from Bartholow,… Butler and me came home intoxsicated.
Tuesday 10th. Intoxsicated all day: at night went out & got 5 Bunhill Row. Jack all most buried.
Friday 27th…. Went to Harps, got 1 large and took it to Jack’s house, Jack, Bill, and Tom not with us, Geting drunk.
It is tempting to believe that the author’s impersonal references to the corpses belie some sense of discomfort with his activities. He does not dwell upon their looks or muse about their sorry fate. He cannot bring himself to refer to the dead as anything other than a size or a gender.
Only occasionally do the bodies merit a noun. (Most often “thing,” as in “Thing bad,” meaning “body decomposed.”) But more likely it was simply the man’s disinclination to sit down and write that accounts for the shorthand. Later entries show he couldn’t even be bothered so spell out “canines,” which appears as “Cns.” (When a “thing bad,” the “Cns” and other teeth were pulled and sold to dentists, for making dentures,[5] so as to keep the undertaking from being a complete loss.)
Body snatchers were common thugs; their motive, simple greed. But what of the anatomists? Who were these upstanding members of society who could commission the theft and semi-public mutilation of someone’s dead grandmother? The best-known of the London surgeon-anatomists was Sir Astley Cooper. In public, Cooper denounced the resurrectionists, yet he not only sought out and retained their services, but encouraged those in his employ to take up the job. Thing bad.
Cooper was an outspoken defender of human dissection. “He must mangle the living if he has not operated on the dead” was his famous line. While his point is well taken and the medical schools’ plight was a difficult one, a little conscience would have served. Cooper was the type of man who not only evinced no compunction about cutting up strangers’ family members but happily sliced into his own former patients. He kept in touch with the family doctors of those he had operated on and, upon hearing of their passing, commissioned his resurrectionists to unearth them so that he might have a look at how his handiwork had held up. He paid for the retrieval of bodies of colleagues’ patients known to have interesting ailments or anatomical peculiarities. He was a man in whom a healthy passion for biology seemed to have metastasized into a sort of macabre eccentricity. In Things for the Surgeon, an account of body snatching by Hubert Cole, Sir Astley is said to have painted the names of colleagues onto pieces of bone and forced lab dogs to swallow them, so that when the bone was extracted during the dog’s dissection, the colleague’s name would appear in intaglio, the bone around the letters having been eaten away by the dog’s gastric acids. The items were handed out as humorous gifts. Cole doesn’t mention the colleagues’ reactions to the one-of-a-kind name-plates, but I would hazard a guess that the men made an effort to enjoy the joke and displayed the items prominently, at least when Sir Astley came calling. For Sir Astley wasn’t the sort of fellow whose ill will you wanted to take with you to your grave. As Sir Astley himself put it, “I can get anyone.”
Like the resurrectionists, the anatomists were men who had clearly been successful in objectifying, in their own minds at least, the dead human body. Not only did they view dissection and the study of anatomy as justification for unapproved disinterment, they saw no reason to treat the unearthed dead as entities worthy of respect. It didn’t bother them that the corpses would arrive at their doors, to quote Ruth Richardson, “compressed into boxes, packed in sawdust,… trussed up in sacks, roped up like hams…” So similar in their treatment were the dead to ordinary items of commerce that every now and then boxes would be mixed up in transit. James Moores Ball, author of The Sack-’Em-Up Men, tells the tale of the flummoxed anatomist who opened a crate delivered to his lab expecting a cadaver but found instead “a very fine ham, a large cheese, a basket of eggs, and a huge ball of yarn.” One can only imagine the surprise and very special disappointment of the party expecting very fine ham, cheese, eggs, or a huge ball of yarn, who found instead a well-packed but quite dead Englishman.
4
Which was also, up until 1965, not a crime in any U.S. state. When necrophilia’s best-known modern-day practitioner, Sacramento mortuary worker Karen Greenlee, was caught absconding with a dead young man in 1979, she was fined for illegally driving a hearse but not for the act itself, as California had no statutes regarding sex with the dead. To date, only sixteen states have enacted necrophilia laws. The language used by each state reflects its particular character. While taciturn Minnesota refers to those who “carnally know a dead body,” freewheeling Nevada spells it all out: “It is a felony to engage in cunnilingus, fellatio, or any intrusion of any part of a person’s body, or any object manipulated or inserted by a person into the genital or anal openings of the body of another where the offender performs these acts on the dead body of a human being.”
5
How could people of the nineteenth century have allowed teeth from cadavers to be put into their mouths? The same way people from the twenty-first century can allow tissue from cadavers to be injected into their faces to fill wrinkles. They possibly didn’t know and probably didn’t care.