|
Welcome
Taphophilia (dot) Com...
A repository of morbid curiosities:
Thanatology and Taphophile Issues, Cemetery,
Funeral Industry and Death Related News.
A Taphophilia Thank You...
Taphophilia (dot) Com would not be possible without the knowledge, experience and talent of DarkestWeb. From its conception and early development, DarkestWeb was faced with many challenges; from inspiring and motivating, to providing guidance and direction. The continued dedication and support has produced results greater than ever expected, and for this, I owe a huge debt of gratitude.
Announcements
Graveyards of Chicago:
The People, History, Art, and Lore of Cook County Cemeteries
By Matt Hucke And Ursula Bielski. Discover a Chicago That Exists Just Beneath the Surface - About Six Feet Under! Take a tour of Chicago's permanent residents! Please visit the Lake Claremont Press website to purchase your copy of Graveyards of Chicago today!
Green-Wood Cemetery Arcadia Publishing announces the release of Alexandra Mosca's historic account of one of New York's most famous cemeteries. Aracdia Publishing's Images of America series has an extensive catalog of many cemetery publications! Please visit Arcadia Publishing to purchase your copy of Green-Wood Cemetery and to browse other available titles!
Men of Mortuaries Calendar
To purchase your 2008 calendar, learn more about the KAMMCARES Foundation, or to be featured in the 2009 calendar, please visit Men of Mortuaries.
Epitaphs: The Magazine for Cemetery Lovers By Cemetery Lovers
For information regarding subscriptions, single issues, submission guidelines, deadlines, classifieds or advertising for future issues, please visit The Cemetery Club.
Guardians of the Soul: Angels and Innocents, Mourners and Saints, Indiana's remarkable cemetery sculpture
with photography by John Bower and foreword by Claude Cookman is now
available. Please visit
Studio Indiana for more information.
West Springfield Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone by Rusty Clark features information on early New England gravestone carvers with more than two hundred photos and illustrations. Please visit the Dog Pond Press website.
|
|
When medical students robbed graves |
|
|
|
|
Written by DeadGirl
|
|
Sunday, 26 June 2005 |
June 26, 2005
Mark Bushnell
The citizens of Hubbardton were hopping mad and with good reason. One of their own had been snatched from their midst. Certain who had done it, 300 men from town gathered at daybreak on Nov. 29, 1830, and marched behind the county sheriff on the five-mile trek south to Castleton.
There they surrounded the Castleton Medical School building and demanded to be let in. The men waited impatiently outside while the dean fumbled around for the key, which he claimed he'd misplaced. Once the door was finally opened, the citizenry swarmed into the building looking for the missing woman. They were about to give up, when one of the men noticed a loose nail in the wainscoting. (One version of the story says the nail was in the floor.) Prying open the wall (or perhaps the floor), they found the headless body of a woman.
This, they were sure, was the corpse of Mrs. Penfield Churchill. The Hubbardton men were outraged, though they didn't suspect the Castleton students or faculty of murder. They believed the medical school was harboring people nearly as loathsome as murderers, and far more common in those days: grave robbers.
The men demanded the body, and its missing head, be returned. After they agreed not to seek charges against anyone for the crime, the dean dispatched a medical student to retrieve it.
In their eagerness to search the building, the Hubbardton men hadn't noticed earlier when this same student had sauntered by with something hidden under his coat. Now he retraced his steps to the haymow in a nearby barn and returned with a bundle containing the woman's head, which had been removed in a vain effort to disguise the corpse.
The grisly incident, known as the "Hubbardton Raid," was not unprecedented in early Vermont. Towns near medical schools had reason to fear their graveyards would be plundered.
The physicians and students weren't after riches, of course. They wanted cadavers to study. And the law made them into criminals. It was impossible at the time to donate your body to science. According to English law, which governed the colonies and which became the basis of law in the new colonies, a dead body was not considered "property" as such, so it could not be bequeathed as other items could.
The only legal way to obtain a cadaver was if a judge, in sentencing a criminal to death, ordered that his body be given to a doctor for dissection. It was considered a way to add insult to injury. Unfortunately for New England doctors, the region executed few criminals, so they needed to make other arrangements.
During colonial times and for nearly two decades after the Revolution, New England states had no specific laws against grave robbing. The public, it seems, had no idea how much of it was going on. That seems to have changed in the late 1700s.
When, in 1796, Dartmouth College announced it would open a medical school, the New Hampshire Legislature sprang into action. Within weeks, it had passed a law against grave robbing. The law, which banned grave robbing within the state's borders, may have had the effect of persuading Dartmouth students to look across the river to Vermont when they needed a cadaver to study.
The University of Vermont started its own medical school in 1804. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Vermont Legislature outlawed grave robbing that same year. When doctors tried to start a medical college in Woodstock in 1827, the school only won its charter from the Legislature after the dean promised that the institution would not knowingly use cadavers that had been procured from anywhere in Vermont. That pledge provided cold comfort to people in nearby New Hampshire.
Much of what is known about grave robbing in Vermont comes from Frederick Waite, who taught embryology and histology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. After retiring to New England, Waite researched and wrote about the subject extensively during the 1940s. Waite estimated that based on the number of medical students in Vermont, the state's medical schools (in Burlington, Castleton and Woodstock) would have required at least 400 cadavers between 1820 and 1840.
The odd thing Waite found was that during that period authorities only issued seven indictments for grave robbing. They involved four separate incidents. So, if you accept Waite's estimates, nobody was charged in 99 percent of the state's grave robberies. In many cases, the robbers may have been so deft that their crime was never detected. As a result, unbeknownst to most Vermonters many graves in the state lay empty.
In his research, Waite found, not surprisingly, that most grave robberies occurred near the medical schools. Remote cemeteries were the most often hit. A village cemetery was too close to prying eyes. Once someone at the school learned of a nearby funeral, a team of robbers would set to work. First, a scout, disguised as a hunter, was often sent out to locate the grave exactly. The robbers would be returning at night and need a precise location.
On the night of the robbery, almost invariably the night of the funeral, since bodies were not then embalmed, a team of three men would travel by wagon to the cemetery. The men, often referred to as "resurrection men," were usually laborers hired to do the job, Waite theorizes, since most medical students wouldn't have been up to the physically demanding job.
Two of the men would hop out at the cemetery and carry their tools to the grave. If the cemetery were near a well-traveled road, the third man would drive off, only to return at a set time. A wagon sitting at night by a cemetery would have been a sure tip-off.
Though the men were in a hurry, they were carefully. Working by the dim light of a shrouded lantern, they would study the surface of the freshly dug grave for any pattern of sticks or leaves that might have been left there by a friend of the deceased to detect grave robbing. They would map how any such items lay and then set to work.
To speed things up, according to Waite, they would not excavate the entire grave. Instead, they would dig a roughly 3-foot-by-3-foot hole at the head of the grave. All the dirt would be placed on a tarpaulin to avoid letting it fall onto the surround grass, another telltale sign of robbery. Once they reached the casket, which was usually down about 4 feet, they would drill a series of holes into it with an auger, an ax or saw being too noisy for the job.
After part of the casket lid was removed, they would lower a hook connected to a chain and long metal bar into the grave and place it under the chin of the corpse. Then the two men would haul the body out and place it on a second tarp. They would remove any clothes from the body, which would just have to be disposed of later, anyway, and toss them into the open grave.
Then they would carefully replace the dirt in the grave. Fearing they might leave a tool behind, they would count them as they placed them onto a tarp before lugging the tools and the corpse to the waiting wagon. A competent team could do the job in about an hour.
The two Daggett brothers were apparently not a sufficiently competent team. In 1834, the pair were arrested in Burlington on the suspicion of grave robbing after two graves were found empty. The fact that one of the men, John F. Daggett, was a student at the Clinical School of Medicine in Woodstock, surely worked against them.
The incident so outraged the people of Burlington that 125 of them wrote to the medical school's faculty, seeking the return of one of the bodies, that of a Mrs. Holbrook.
"(T)he disinterment of her remains has occasioned to her relatives a distress which you can properly appreciate," they wrote, "and is universally regarded as a vile outrage which will not be submitted to unless the laws have lost their power to punish."
The writers said that they had information that "the dissecting Knife" had not been used yet on Mrs. Holbrook, so the faculty still had time to act. They may have, because soon after the letter was sent the state's attorney decided to drop one of the charges against each man. However, they were still convicted on a second charge of grave robbing and sentenced to the minimum term, three years in prison.
The Legislature eventually saw the bind doctors and medical students faced if they wanted to become competent in anatomy. Lawmakers tried to ease the situation by passing a law allowing overseers of the poor and superintendents of public institution to donate bodies to physicians. The 1884 law, however, allowed exemptions for unknown persons, military veterans and anyone who did not wish to have their body donated to science or whose family preferred burial.
The changes didn't provide enough bodies to dissect, so the grave robbing continued. UVM medical students who graduated in the 1870s recalled the school obtaining cadavers from nearby cemeteries.
In other states that were less strict in how corpses could be treated, businesses sprang up that sold cadavers. This was particularly true of southern states, which shipped the bodies of blacks north to medical schools.
The practice of shipping bodies had its drawbacks, though. One UVM student remembered a body arriving from New York packed in brine in a barrel labeled "onions." The person, the students learned to their chagrin, had died of smallpox. As a precaution, all the students were vaccinated the next day.
It wouldn't be until the turn of the last century that New England states loosened their so-called anatomical laws. The new regulations helped keep doctors on the right side of the law and the deceased in their graves.
http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050626/NEWS/506260318/1013 |
|
