In 1801 a man named John Dorrance, a Justice on the Court of Common Pleas in Rhode Island, sued that state’s governor, Arthur Fenner, for slander and defamation over the matter of a corpse and a beaver hat.
Fenner had been telling people, according to the lawsuit, that Dorrance had been charged with overseeing the proper burial of a suicide victim who had no family but had instead given the body to two medical students for the purpose of dissection. Dorrance, according to the governor, received the beaver hat as payment—a hat that, quite indecently, ‟he had the impudence to wear … while he…officiated as Moderator of a Town-Meeting of the town of Providence.”
All but one of the jurors sided with Dorrance, finding that while the corpse had indeed been stolen, it had been done without Dorrance’s knowledge, and that he was not paid a hat for his participation. But his career was ruined anyway; the mere charge of body snatching was enough to tarnish his political reputation.
But whose body was snatched? In all the official documents of the case, the suicide victim’s name was never once recorded. In a court case involving two of the most important men in the state of Rhode Island, no one bothered to find out the name of the person at the center of it.
With the publication of Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica in 1543, the study of anatomy became focused on doctors and students looking directly at the body itself.
Vesalius’s landmark book foregrounded dissection starting with its title page, which shows Vesalius himself offering a dissected corpse for the reader’s inspection.In the wake of this groundbreaking work, it became clear that if one wanted to study anatomy, one needed bodies.
The only problem was, there were not enough bodies to go around.
It was not so easy to acquire a corpse for dissection, particularly in Europe. Christian belief held that in order to be included in the Resurrection, your body had to remain intact, so that you could rise up bodily upon Jesus’ Return.
Dissection, which literally destroyed the dead body, was thus reserved only for those who had been executed, as a further and final punishment.
A fate worse than death.
Vesalius himself relied on a sympathetic judge who kept him supplied with the corpses of executed criminals for dissection, but other anatomists and medical students weren’t so lucky.
For the next three hundred years in Europe, grave robbing would be a persistent problem without any real solution. So-called “Resurrectionists,” criminals who dug up corpses to sell to medical institutions, became rampant.
Wealthy people could afford so-called mortsafes and patent coffins: specially designed devices meant to prevent resurrectionists from breaking into their graves.
Which meant, more or less, that if you wanted bodies, you took them from the poor, the marginalized, and the defenseless.
The graveyards of prisons and insane asylums were regularly plundered, but even the bodies obtained in this manner were often not sufficient.
Medical schools that could provide their students with a fresh supply of cadavers attracted foreign students from places where dissection was still taboo.
In 1831 the South Carolina Medical School began advertising its ready access to African-American corpses: ‟Some advantages of a peculiar character are connected with this institution,” ran one circular. ‟No place in the United States affords so great opportunities for the acquisition of medical knowledge, subjects being obtained among the colored population in sufficient number for every purpose, and proper dissections carried on without offending any individual.”
In Augusta, the Medical College of Georgia went so far as to acquire a slave for their body snatching needs. Grandison Harris had been purchased jointly by all seven members of the college in 1852, taught to read and write, and instructed to monitor newspapers for news of slave burials, and then to exhume the bodies of the recently deceased and return them to the school for dissection.
But though doctors in the American South routinely abused the bodies of slaves for dissection, by the late eighteenth century Europe had emerged as the premiere place to attend and participate in dissection.
Vienna’s General Hospital, for example, was innovative in offering free health care to those who couldn’t afford to pay for it, with the caveat that if you died while at the hospital, your body would be turned over to anatomy students.
As a result, Vienna became one of the main capitals of anatomical learning and medicine. In the years between 1851 and 1854, the Vienna General Hospital turned over 11,458 bodies to medical schools for dissection.
These were known as “study corpses,” “free-of-charge corpses,” and “failed corpses.” Medical students flocked from all over Europe and the United States to see and participate in dissections firsthand.
Countries and states that didn’t allow dissection were quickly placed at a severe disadvantage, since their own doctors could not learn basic anatomy without access to fresh bodies.
Massachusetts was among many places that prohibited the use of cadavers in dissection while at the same time requiring all its licensed doctors to have undergone a course in anatomy that included dissection—meaning that most of its doctors had to study abroad.
“The number of students annually licensed in this Commonwealth, is about fifty. What portion of these are obliged to resort to Paris to complete their education cannot be ascertained, but it is known to be a very considerable portion.”
It wasn’t until the 1830s that laws in England, the United States, and elsewhere codified the use of cadavers and made dissection legal and accepted.
Prior to the passage of those laws, though, doctors and medical students flocked to wherever there was a ready supply of cadavers.
These centers of learning, populated by a variety of professionals from all over the Western world, facilitated an exchange of ideas that led to rapid advances in medicine.
It was not necessarily that these places were more progressive in their attitudes towards the dead body and the afterlife.
Rather, they were usually places where there were large populations of the dispossessed who were in no position to complain when their bodies were anatomized.
Which is to say that a great deal of medical knowledge we take for granted today we owe to the lives—and the bodies—of the poorest and most defenseless.
Text by Colin Dickey.
Colin Dickey is the author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius, and Afterlives of the Saints: Stories from the Ends of Faith. He teaches creative writing at National University, and is currently working on a book about ghosts.
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