Resurrectionists

Summer is here and since I am free from reading what is required by my classes, I’m free to read anything and everything—an apt description of how I select books.  I’ll read almost anything except romance and self-help books.  Currently, I’m finishing off a great little history book by Thomas Craughwell, “Stealing Lincoln’s Body”.

This is an excellent history of the decades immediately following the Civil War, when a group of counterfeiters had the somewhat strange little idea that they could secure the release from prison of their best engraver by stealing the corpse of Abraham Lincoln and holding the body as ransom.  The grave robbers had entered the tomb and had  removed Lincoln’s coffin from his sarcophagus before being chased off by a combination of  Pinkerton operatives and Secret Service agents.  I highly recommend the book.

The book got me thinking about the long history of grave robbing.  However, I’m not referring to the practice of disturbing burial sites for the treasure that was buried along with the deceased—that practice predates recorded history and probably started shortly—very shortly--after early man started holding funerals.  

Note.  Perhaps the most prolific grave robber in history was an Italian circus strong-man-turned-archaeologist by the name of Giovanni Battista Belzoni.  After England captured the stolen Egyptian loot of Napoleon, there was a popular craze for Egyptian artifacts in Europe.  Belzoni capitalized on this popularity by “acquiring” as many artifacts as possible and shipping them back to Europe.  Besides being the first man to enter the pyramid of Khafre, he also discovered and ransacked the tomb of Seti I (now ironically popularly called Belzoni’s Tomb).  Belzoni is also remembered for using high pressure water hoses to pulverize mummies to reveal the treasures concealed within the burial wrappings.  I have often wondered if Belzoni was the inspiration for René Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Someday, I’ll have to write George Lucas and ask him.

Grave robbing for treasure was prevalent almost everywhere, but particularly in Egypt.  Due to the large amount of valuable commodity included with the departed, it is generally believed that most of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings were looted within 100 years of their sealing.

In contrast, the grave robbing that I am thinking about is the practice of digging up fresh graves to steal the cadavers and sell them (usually to doctors or medical schools, but occasionally also to artists who wished to study anatomy).  One notable early instance occurred in the 3rd century BC, during the reign of Ptolemy I in ancient Egypt.  The Greek physician and anatomist Herophilus, who lived in Alexandria, reportedly dissected human bodies for medical study.  It's believed that the bodies used by Herophilus and other early anatomists were obtained through various means, including potentially through grave robbing or by other clandestine methods.

The practice of grave robbing increased dramatically with the rise of medical training.  The first fully documented case of this occurred in Belgium in 1319, when medical students, desperate to learn more about anatomy, disinterred a body less than a day after it had been buried.  The practice of disturbing graves for medical teaching grew as the field of medicine developed.  

Interestingly, this phenomenon occurred almost solely in Western Europe.  In Eastern Europe, there was a long history of authorities turning over unclaimed bodies or the bodies of criminals to doctors for research.  In Western Europe, though, unclaimed bodies were usually buried by the authorities. When the graves were disinterred, the crimes were usually ignored, with the few cases that were prosecuted being treated as misdemeanors.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, grave robbing became much more common in the United States, partially because the grave robbers could steal the bodies of Native Americans or slaves, which theft—though still technically a crime—was usually ignored by the authorities.  Since doctors or medical schools would pay from $5 to $20 dollars for a cadaver, this was considered a high reward for a single night’s work.

In Baltimore, grave robbing thrived for more than seventy years due to a shortage of bodies for dissection in medical schools.  The corpses were often shipped to medical schools in barrels filled with whiskey to mask the odor.  The grave robbers (who called themselves “resurrectionists”) preferred to remove the bodies of children because the smaller graves were easier to exhume and the cadavers were easier to conceal and transport.

Ironically, probably the most famous story of 19th century grave robbing (other than the tale of Doctor Frankenstein and his monster, that is) never actually happened and is included in what many people incorrectly assume is a book for children.  In the ninth chapter of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Tom and Huck take a dead cat to the cemetery in the middle of the night to perform a superstitious ritual absolutely guaranteed to cure warts.  While there, they see young Dr. Robinson and his two sidekicks, Muff Potter and Injun Joe, digging up a cadaver so the doctor can study anatomy.  A fight breaks out, and Injun Joe kills the doctor, framing Muff Potter for the murder.  Besides being a central point of the book, Twain’s inclusion of the story shows the prevalence of the crime in 19th century.

Just how prevalent was the practice?  There are no exact records, but when construction workers were renovating a 150-year-old building at an Augusta, Georgia medical school in 1989, they found over 10,000 human bones buried in the basement under layers of quicklime.  By all accounts, that would be evidence it was a common practice.

Eventually, it was the frequency of the crime that outraged the public and led to the enactment of stiffer punishments for it.  Some medical schools began modest payments for cadavers while others began accepting donated cadavers.  And while it is fascinating to reflect on how the noble and proud profession of Medicine once depended on sneaking into graveyards in the middle of the night to dig up the remains of the recently departed—even with 20,000 anatomical donations annually, are we really sure that the profession of the resurrectionists is obsolete?

I submit as evidence the arrest, less than a year ago, of the manager of a morgue at the Harvard Medical School…for the theft and sale of body parts.