When I read the book, the biography famous,

And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man’s life?

And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life?

(As if any man really knew aught of my life,

Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life,

Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections

I seek for my own use to trace out here.)

—Walt Whitman

During the nineteenth century public outrage over dissection continued. There were dozens of riots or ransackings in protest against medical school dissections and/or grave robbing. In 1807 in Baltimore a mob burned down the anatomy hall at the University of Maryland. In 1824 mobs rioted every night for a week against barricaded Yale medical students after a purloined body was found at the medical school. Rioters destroyed medical school buildings at Worthington Medical College in Ohio (1839), McDowell Medical College in Missouri (1844), and Willoughby Medical College in Ohio (1847). In short, the detested scourge of body snatching plagued every state with a medical school at some point during the period from 1807 to 1890 and often produced an outraged public reaction.

—Norman L. Cantor
After We Die: The Life and Times of the Human Cadaver