Norman Adams

I recently heard that it is becoming difficult to donate one's body to science. So many people are using this as a means to avoid funeral expenses that the labs are being overwhelmed.

It certainly wasn't that way a few hundred years ago. In a society which believed in physical resurrection of the body, the sanctity of the corpse became a fetish. People wanted to be buried and to rest in peace.

But doctors had just as much need for cadavers to practice on. Or even more. First, they were not only studying physiology, they were trying to create the science. Second, they had no anatomical models or videos or other ways to practice. The only choice was actual bodies.

Hence the "resurrectionists" -- people who dug up corpses, or even murdered living people, and sold them to the "anatomists," the doctors who dissected them.

For some reason, the problem -- or at least the fear -- of resurrectionists was particularly strong in Scotland. This short book is an account both of how the population fought the resurrectionists and of how the anatomists tried to counter the problem. There are stories of riots. There are tales of the elaborate coffins used to guard bodies until they were too rotten to be useful. And there are tales of the worst of the body-snatches, such as the murderers William Burke and William Hare.

Chances are that the story of the resurrectionists will never fully be told -- it was too secret and silent a trade. Imagine trying to research the lives of, say, nineteenth century sewer workers. It would be very hard. This is even harder.

The lack of documentation in this book is somewhat troubling. It makes it hard to know what is real and what is hysteria. And it seems to wander away from its topic at times. A scholarly work it isn't. Still, if you want a good general overview of a peculiar eighteenth and nineteenth century problem, this is a good place to start.… (mehr)