THE RESURRECTION MEN

The first riot in American history happened in Manhattan, and it happened because of dead bodies.

In the book biz, we call that a “tease.” We’ll get there, we promise, but first you need to understand the perfectly respectable and not in any way creepy reasons that doctors are so desperate to cut up dead bodies—not to mention how people over history have felt about that completely reasonable desire.

Autopsies haven’t always been so controversial. In fact, the ancient Egyptians performed what were essentially autopsies way back in 2600 BCE, although the practice at the time was more about the ritualistic entombing of organs than any kind of education or forensics. Egyptian embalmers were the original anatomists, carefully removing a variety of body parts to be preserved while leaving the heart, eyes, and tongue in place for religious reasons. The challenges of extracting all those organs (especially the really slippery ones) led to the development of better surgical tools. Physicians of the time benefitted from those tools as well as learning a fair amount of anatomy from the embalmers, as demonstrated in ancient writings such as the Ebers Papyrus, the Edwin-Smith Papyrus, and the Kahun Gynecological Papyrus.

Everyone, I’d like you to meet my wife, who I suspect may be the only human on Earth that’s this excited about these specific medical papyri. Admittedly, the Kahun Gynecological Papyrus is a very excellent name and worthy of highlighting. Gentle ribbing withdrawn.

Before you get too impressed, keep in mind these docs also performed pregnancy tests by putting an onion in the patient’s vagina overnight, and thought that our arteries carried semen. So things weren’t, you know, all sewn up, as it were. But still, an impressive start!

CLASSICAL CUT-UPS

In Ancient Greece, bodies were dissected without ritual, for purely scientific reasons. Erasistratus and Herophilus, who lived around 300 BCE, are known today as the fathers of modern dissection. They and a number of other physicians and students dissected corpses regularly and published texts and drawings based on their findings. (This was before printing presses, so let’s spare a thought for the poor scribe who spent many icky afternoons copying their work.)

The practice wasn’t considered legal in the strictest sense at the time, but it was apparently tolerated, and thus provided the Greeks with a better understanding of anatomy as well as an appreciation for the importance of autopsies in medical education.

In comparison, the Ancient Romans were strictly anti-autopsy—and by the time of Galen, the most prominent physician alive during the first century CE, dissections were made illegal. This meant that Galen and others had to base their know-how on primate anatomy . . . and the work of their Grecian predecessors. (If that last bit seems hypocritical to you, we have to assume this is the first account of human history you’ve ever read and we’re so flattered that you’ve chosen our book to start with.) This reliance on secondhand information led to inevitable missteps and discord among physicians of the time, and for a millennium to follow.

Let this be a lesson kids: Always dissect your own corpses. You may think you can save a few bucks by looking over your buddy’s shoulder, but trust me on this one. You’ve gotta get your own scalpel in there and saw through the sinew yourse—you know what? Actually, I’ve yucked myself out.

CAN I HAVE THAT WHEN YOU’RE DONE WITH IT?

After a millennium or so of European physicians and scholars poking around with carcasses and arguing about old scrolls, things started to pick up right around the 13th century. History tells us that dissections were not only carried out by doctors, but actually condoned by the Catholic Church. That may seem weirdly progressive, but keep in mind the doctrine that the body exists only as a vessel for the soul—and once that soul vacates the premises, why shouldn’t scientists get a crack at the abandoned home?

AUTOPSIES FOR FUN AND PROFIT

At this point, dear reader, we’re sure you’re getting excited to learn what corpse dissection was like during the never-ending Insane Clown Posse concert that was Middle Ages. We’re thrilled to report The Rowdy Years did not disappoint, since that’s when autopsies became a spectator sport. Literally. As in, they were conducted in public and tickets were sold. Oh Middle Ages, thank you as always.

Dissections continued as the Middle Ages waned, though they tended to be more private … even occasionally secretive. For example, in the 15th century, Leonardo da Vinci covertly dissected people as reference for his popular Vitruvian Man drawing (just when you thought that thing couldn’t get creepier).

The Catholic Church even got in on the action every so often. In 1308, four nuns took it upon themselves to autopsy the recently deceased (and extremely holy) Sister Chiara of Montefalco, searching for signs of saintliness. According to the not in any way questionable amateur autopsy report, a crucifix was found in her heart, as well as three gallstones in her gallbladder which were thought to represent the Holy Trinity.

A couple centuries later they were still at it—in 1533, officials of the Church ordered the dissection of conjoined twins after their death, in order to determine if they shared a soul (in case you’re wondering, the verdict was no, since each girl had her own heart which, at the time, was thought to be where the soul was located).

Gosh, if there’s anything cuter than the church trying to do a science I don’t know what it is. Listen folks, that wasn’t quite science, but hey, don’t give up, you’ll get ’em next time!

Sydnee’s Fun Medical Facts

Though the Catholic church was generally pro-autopsy, Pope Boniface VIII did muddy the waters a bit with one edict. The background is that from the 9th to 13th centuries, it was common for bodies to be dismembered and sometimes boiled until nothing remained but bones for transport and burial. The practice probably began as a convenient and relatively sanitary way to return the remains of soldiers who died far from home. However, by the 1200s there was a veritable fad amongst nobility for having their bodies divided up and buried all over the place. Richard I of England probably had the most complex burial in 1199—his heart, brain, blood, entrails, and the rest of his body were all buried in different places.

Pope Boniface VIII, meanwhile, found this whole practice disgusting, and in 1299 passed a papal bull threatening excommunication for anyone who assisted in this practice, stating that anyone who had requested such dismembering would be denied a church burial (or seven).

This bull may have led to a chilling effect for scientific autopsy at the time, but the edict was not aimed at scientific dissection. That said, it was too weird a story not to share.

BODY OF EVIDENCE

By the time of the Enlightenment, dissection fever was sweeping the Continent. Operating theaters became a popular way for students to observe medical procedures—and were also open to the paying public. (We’re retroactively sorry about giving the Middle Ages a hard time.) This was a little ghoulish, but it also indirectly led to the one Seinfeld where Kramer drops a Junior Mint into that guy mid-surgery, so . . . that’s a wash?

England lagged behind the rest of Europe when it came to dissection, forbidding the practice outright until the 16th century. After autopsies became legal, only ten were permitted per year and only certain members of the Royal College of Physicians and Company of Barber Surgeons could attend. This was obviously a tremendous limitation for anyone wanting to study medicine, and there was plenty of outcry from doctors, students, and natural philosophers (aka scientists).

JUSTIN VS SYDNEE

SYDNEE Protests from the medical community inspired Parliament to pass the Murder Act of 1752, which allowed physicians to dissect the bodies of murderers after they were executed. It was, in fact, an added punishment for certain crimes deemed “punishable by dissection.”

JUSTIN And thus ends the most death-metal paragraph it has ever been our privilege to write.

EVERYBODY WANTS SOME BODIES

The Murder Act no doubt helped a bit, but like an unstoppable zombie horde, physicians still craved more bodies. Some were even desperate enough to get a little . . . creative. Creative like grabbing a shovel and heading for the graveyard—or more often dealing with middlemen who did just that. The peak season for grave robbing was November to March when it was cold and the bodies were better preserved. Corpse traffic at one time was so brisk that medical schools had secret entrances constructed for receiving the bodies discretely.

Over time, people got wise to these practices and began to take precautions. Families would hire grave guards, stand watch themselves, or build a cage around the grave called a “mortsafe.” Sometimes a family would keep the body at home until it was too decomposed to be worth stealing.

The poor were at greater risk, but everybody was fair game. No, really, everybody: At the Ohio Medical College, the stolen body of U.S. Senator John Scott Harrison (son of President William Henry Harrison) was discovered by visiting dignitaries . . . his son and nephew.

DIY CADAVERS

The corpse business was in so profitable, it should come as absolutely no surprise that opportunists eventually wised up, and started creating the cadavers themselves. The most famous such criminals were William Burke and William Hare of Edinburgh, who killed sixteen people and sold their bodies to a Dr. Robert Knox before they were caught and turned into a feature film starring Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis. Oh, and also hanged. Burke was not just hanged, but dissected and displayed as a crime deterrent after. In addition, his skin was made into a purse which is still on display at the Police Museum in Edinburgh. But hey, a movie!

Febreeze, if you’re out there and ever want to get hardcore with your marketing, I just came up with an amazing pitch. I know, I know, it may seem extreme, but we’re gonna keep it real tasteful. I’ve even got a slogan all picked out! “Febreeze: Save the Memories, Ditch the Stink.” . . . Fine, I’ll workshop it.

In an attempt to stop this creepiest of crime waves, Great Britain passed the Anatomy Act of 1832, which allowed all executed and dead criminals (even nonmurderers) to be used as anatomical dissection specimens. Similar laws had already been passed in the United States during the late 1700s, allowing for dissection to be added as a punishment for murder.

With all this, grave robbing persisted in the United States as the growing country desperately needed doctors, who had to dissect the human body to finish training. Tension between doctors and wary patients and their families built until 1788 and the Doctors’ Riot.

I PREDICT A RIOT

In the late 1700s, Columbia College housed New York City’s only medical school. It was also near the Paupers’ Cemetery, where the poorest New Yorkers were interred, sometimes several to a grave, as well as a cemetery reserved for slaves. In the winter of 1787–88, the number of grave robberies reported in the press rose sharply. There had been calls, especially among the poor and freed slaves, for corpse-theft laws to be more strictly enforced. It was in this contentious environment that medical student John Hicks, Jr. found himself dissecting a body in his lab at New York Hospital. When he noticed some kids playing outside trying to peek into the lab, Hicks picked up the cadaver’s arm and waved it at the kids to scare them. He took the joke a little too far when he added that it was their mother’s arm he was holding and he’d slap them with it if they didn’t scram.

The kids were obviously terrified, but the anecdote might have been lost to time if not for a few unfortunate coincidences. One of the children was particularly upset because his mother had, in fact, died recently. That prompted the boy and his dad to travel to Trinity Church graveyard where, by chance, they discovered her grave had indeed been robbed. (It’s perhaps also worth noting Hicks was studying under Dr. Richard Bayley, a physician originally from England who had been known to steal a body or two in his day and who regularly had his students, like young John, do the same. So it wasn’t wild for assumptions about his illicit activities to be reached.)

JUSTIN VS SYDNEE

JUSTIN And now you can buy a corpse on any street corner with no waiting period or background check. They’re often offered as complimentary gifts when you buy really fancy luggage. Heck, we’re drowning in the things over here, last summer we donated a bunch of them to a haunted house . . . Sure do miss those corpses.

SYDNEE Well, no, there’s still a—

JUSTIN You know what, Syd, I’m gonna go buy those corpses back. We’ll make room! What a time to be alive! And dead!

The boy’s father, now irate, went around the neighborhood stirring up a mob in response to this perceived atrocity, and they all marched down to the hospital to confront the doctor. Despite its noble intentions, the mob quickly spiraled out of control. Around a hundred men stormed the hospital and destroyed the anatomy lab. They also raided the home of a Dr. Sir John Temple, for no other obvious reason than that his name sounded like surgeon. As the crowd gained mass and momentum, they beat up as many medical students as they could find and, as a result, many doctors and students had to be jailed for their own safety. One medical resident hid in a chimney.

The next day, the mob had increased to 5,000 and they stormed Columbia College as well. They took off for the jail, wanting the students being kept there turned over to them. At this point, the Governor dispatched the militia. The mob was unmollified (again, a mob) until one of their number hit a baron who was trying to stop the riot in the head with a lobbed rock. At that point the shooting began; when the smoke cleared, as many as twenty people had been killed and several more wounded.

Luckily, there were a lot of doctors on hand.

THE AFTERMATH

This actually triggered riots in other major cities, seventeen in total, over the practice of grave robbing. Eventually the riots had the desired effect and some grave robbers were forced to stand trial (and face stiffer penalties). This crackdown also led to the passage of “bone bills,” improving methods for a student to legally obtain a corpse.

DO WE STILL DO THIS?

Well, if we’re talking about stealing bodies for dissection, thankfully it’s no longer necessary thanks to the generous individuals who donate their bodies for research. As a first-year medical student, there is no more humbling experience than your first day in anatomy lab. The tremendous gift given by these kind people is the cornerstone of my, as well as every other practicing physician’s, medical education.

Corpse theft, however, is still alive and well (pardon the pun) thanks to skeletons. Bodies donated for dissection frequently have the skeleton destroyed in the process, so there’s a brisk black market for intact skeletons. India has long been the world’s leading exporter of grade-A skeletons, despite the export of remains being outlawed in 2007.

STEAL A CORPSE THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY

An 18th-century physician hankering to dissect a body had a few extralegal options. You could grab a shovel and go the DIY route. You could take your chances with some no-name grave robber. Or you could hire the very best — which, in this case, meant the Resurrection Men. These snappily dressed corpse-thieving pros could snag a body in under an hour — so fast it barely had a chance to stop breathing. If you’re thinking that doesn’t sound so tough, you’ve clearly never taken the Resurrection Man Challenge. Which is good, because it’s illegal and gross. But if you were going shovel-to-shovel with the grave-robbing experts, here’s how it would go down.

1 You’ll need: A fresh grave, some attractive mourners to distract any passersby, a tarp, shovels, a hand drill, and a chain with a hook at one end.

Choose a nice fresh grave. The dirt will be easier to dig up and restore, but more importantly, fresh is always your go-to when exhuming bodies. All set? The clock starts when you spread a tarp near the head of the grave.

2 Carefully excavate just the top of the gravesite, shoveling the dirt onto your tarp. You just need to expose the first foot or two of the coffin lid. Now grab that drill and make a bunch of little holes in the exposed part of the lid to weaken it.

3 Whack the weakened portion to crack it open and use your chain-and-hook setup to grab the body by its shroud. (Shrouds were all the rage back then, conveniently enough).

4 Pull the body clear, lay it on the grass, and stuff the shroud back into the coffin. Now dump all the excavated dirt off the tarp back into the grave and pat it all back into shape.

5 Move the body onto the tarp, and check your watch. If this took you an hour or less, you’re ready for the big leagues.

PRO TIP If you need to take public transportation to your next destination, ditch the tarp and pass the stiff off as a drunk friend. That’s how the real-life Resurrection Men did it—like Ocean’s 11 with a Weekend at Bernie’s twist at the end.