It wasn’t so much the actual dissecting that smacked of disrespect. It was the whole street-theater-cum-abattoir air of the proceedings. Engravings by Thomas Rowlandson and William Hogarth of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century dissecting rooms show cadavers’ intestines hanging like parade streamers off the sides of tables, skulls bobbing in boiling pots, organs strewn on the floor being eaten by dogs. In the background, crowds of men gawk and leer. While the artists were clearly editorializing upon the practice of dissection, written sources suggest the artworks were not far removed from the truth. Here is the composer Hector Berlioz, in an 1822 entry in his Memoirs, shedding considerable light on his decision to pursue music rather than medicine:
Robert… took me for the first time to the dissecting room. …At the sight of that terrible charnel-house—fragments of limbs, the grinning heads and gaping skulls, the bloody quagmire underfoot and the atrocious smell it gave off, the swarms of sparrows wrangling over scraps of lung, the rats in their corner gnawing the bleeding vertebrae—such a feeling of revulsion possessed me that I leapt through the window of the dissecting room and fled for home as though Death and all his hideous train were at my heels.
And I would wager a fine ham and a huge ball of yarn that no anatomist of that era ever held a memorial service for the leftover pieces. Cadaver remainders were buried not out of respect but for lack of other options.
The burials were hastily done, always at night and usually out behind the building.
To avoid the problematic odors that tend to accompany a shallow burial, anatomists came up with some creative solutions to the flesh disposal problem. A persistent rumor had them in cahoots with the keepers of London’s wild animal menageries. Others were said to keep vultures on hand for the task, though if Berlioz is to be believed, the sparrows of the day were well up to the task. Richardson came across a reference to anatomists cooking down human bones and fat into “a substance like Spermaceti,” which they used to make candles and soap. Whether these were used in the anatomists’ homes or given away as gifts was not noted, but between these and the gastric-juice-etched nameplates, it’s safe to say you really didn’t want your name on an anatomist’s Christmas gift list.
And so it went. For nearly a century, the shortage of legally dissectable bodies pitted the anatomist against the private citizen. By and large, it was the poor who had most to lose. For over time, entrepreneurs came up with an arsenal of antiresurrectionist products and services, affordable only by the upper class. Iron cages called mortsafes could be set in concrete above the grave or underground, around the coffin. Churches in Scotland built graveyard “dead houses,” locked buildings where a body could be left to decompose until its structures and organs had disintegrated to the point where they were of no use to anatomists. You could buy patented spring-closure coffins, coffins outfitted with cast-iron corpse straps, double and even triple coffins. Appropriately, the anatomists were among the undertakers’ best customers. Richardson relates that Sir Astley Cooper not only went for the triple coffin option but had the whole absurd Chinese-box affair housed in a hulking stone sarcophagus.
It was an Edinburgh anatomist named Robert Knox who instigated anatomy’s fatal PR blunder: the implicit sanctioning of murder for medicine. In 1828, one of Knox’s assistants answered the door to find a pair of strangers in the courtyard with a cadaver at their feet. This was business as usual for anatomists of the day, and so Knox invited the men in. Perhaps he made them a cup of tea, who knows. Knox was, like Astley, a man of high social bearing. Although the men, William Burke and William Hare, were strangers, he cheerfully bought the body and accepted their story that the cadaver’s relatives had made the body available for sale—though this was, given the public’s abhorrence of dissection, an unlikely scenario.
The body, it turns out, had been a lodger at a boardinghouse run by Hare and his wife, in an Edinburgh slum called Tanner’s Close. The man died in one of Hare’s beds, and, being dead, was unable to come up with the money he owed for the nights he’d stayed. Hare wasn’t one to forgive a debt, so he came up with what he thought to be a fair solution: He and Burke would haul the body to one of those anatomists they’d heard about over at Surgeons’ Square. There they would sell it, kindly giving the lodger the opportunity, in death, to pay off what he’d neglected to in life.
When Burke and Hare found out how much money could be made selling corpses, they set about creating some of their own. Several weeks later, a down-and-out alcoholic took ill with fever while staying at Hare’s flophouse. Figuring the man to be well on his way to cadaverdom anyway, the men decided to speed things along. Hare pressed a pillow to the man’s face while Burke laid his considerable body weight on top of him. Knox asked no questions and encouraged the men to come back soon. And they did, some fifteen times. The pair were either too ignorant to realize that the same money could be made digging up graves of the already dead or too lazy to undertake it.
A series of modern-day Burke-and-Hare-type killings took place barely ten years ago, in Barranquilla, Colombia. The case centered on a garbage scavenger named Oscar Rafael Hernandez, who in March 1992 survived an attempt to murder him and sell his corpse to the local medical school as an anatomy lab specimen.[6] Like most of Colombia, Barranquilla lacked an organized recycling program, and hundreds of the city’s destitute forge a living picking through garbage dumps for recyclables to sell. So scorned are these people that they—along with other social outcasts such as prostitutes and street urchins—are referred to as “disposables” and have often been murdered by right-wing “social cleansing” squads. As the story goes, guards from Universidad Libre had asked Hernandez if he wanted to come to the campus to collect some garbage, and then bludgeoned him over the head when he arrived. A Los Angeles Times account of the case has Hernandez awakening in a vat of formaldehyde alongside thirty corpses, a colorful if questionable detail omitted from other descriptions of the case. Either way, Hernandez came to and escaped to tell his tale.
Activist Juan Pablo Ordoñez investigated the case and claims that Hernandez was one of at least fourteen Barranquilla indigents murdered for medicine—even though an organized willed body program existed.
According to Ordoñez’s report, the national police had been unloading bodies gleaned from their own, in-house “social cleansing” activities and collecting $150 per corpse from the university coffers. The school’s security staff got wind of the setup and decided to get in on the action. At the time the investigation began, some fifty preserved bodies and body parts of questionable origin were found in the anatomy amphitheater. To date, no one from the university or the police has been arrested.
For his part, William Burke was eventually brought to justice. A crowd of more than 25,000 watched him hang. Hare was granted immunity, much to the disgust of the gallows crowd, who chanted “Burke Hare!”—meaning “Smother Hare,” “burke” having made its way into the popular vernacular as a synonym for “smother.” Hare probably did as much smothering as Burke, but “She’s been hared!” lacks the pleasing Machiavellian fricatives of “She’s been burked!” and the technicality is easily forgiven.
6
With the help of an interpreter, I got the number of an Oscar Rafael Hernandez living in Barranquilla. A woman answered the phone and said that Oscar was not in, whereupon my interpreter gamely asked her if Oscar was a garbage picker, and if he had been almost murdered by thugs who wanted to sell him to a medical school for dissection. A barrage of agitated Spanish ensued, which my interpreter summed up: “It’s the wrong Oscar Rafael Hernandez.”