I was really curious about grave robbers, or "body snatchers" and "Resurrection Men," in the Victorian Era so I decided to do a bit more research. Like Dr. Renzi said in class, in the early to mid 1800s, bodies to use for educational and research purposes were scarce. An act was passed in 1751 (Murder Act of 1751) that prevented murderers who were sentenced to death from being given a proper burial. I suspect it was because of the waning land for the dead to be buried in, but that might just be a hunch. It mandated that only the bodies of executed murderers be used for dissection and experimentation in labs and in schools. I was surprised to learn that people weren't being executed left and right like I had previously thought, but actually as few as 55 people were executed each year, making bodies to experiment on extremely rare.
Digging up bodies and interfering with graves was just a misdemeanor offense and as long as the perpetrator didn't touch any of the jewels or other valuables buried with the body it wasn't a felony. It also didn't help that most local authorities didn't track down many of the resurrection men, thinking of their grave robbing as a "necessary evil." Soon the upstanding-citizen-by-day and grave-robber-by-night duality became expected. Families would stand guard over their newly dead day and night, before and after they were buried. Iron cages were placed over grave sites, called Mortsafes, but grave robbers found ways around them. One common method involved digging a manhole 15-20 feet away from the gravesite and tunneling down to the body. They would rip the top of the coffin open and pull the body behind them through the tunnel. They would replace the turf and no one, not even the family standing watch by the grave, would even know that they had visited.
As people became better at stealing the dead from their final resting places, a system started to fall into place. Women were hired to mourn the dead and to scout for possible issues the resurrection men would run into while stealing the body. The gang The London Burkers was formed, starting with stealing bodies from graves and then escalating to killing multiple people, selling their corpses to local hospitals. Two other men, Burke and Hare (West Point murders), killed sixteen victims by getting them drunk on whisky and suffocating them. They sold their bodies to a local doctor and were eventually caught and hanged. Some people who ran graveyards participated in the body snatching as well. They would charge outrageous prices for burial, assuring families that the bodies would not be touched, and then turn around and pay students to come in and dig up freshly buried bodies so that they could make a profit.
Eventually, there was an anatomical committee formed to work towards creating new legislation that would put an end to the bedlam that society had become. The Anatomy Act of 1832 was passed, putting into law much needed regulations for medical practitioners. First, the act made everyone who went into medicine become a licensed practitioner. These people would take careful notes and keep track of every body that came through their facility. There were four practitioners who reported to the Home Secretary and kept tabs on every body that was being worked on by these newly licensed doctors. The act allowed any body that was legally obtained to go under any scientific experimentation, as long as relatives of the diseased did not object. Furthermore, the act went so far as to ensure that any body that was left unclaimed after death, whether it was from lack of relatives or from incarceration, would go to experimentation in schools. The act was ultimately successful in ending the dark rein of the resurrection men and placing a large amount of bodies in schools for educational purposes.
Since the passage of the Anatomy Act of 1832 many adjustments have been made, the most recent making the official group in charge of cadavers for medical research in the UK the Human Tissue Authority (also, coincidentally, the owners of Kleenex*).
*not a real fact. Merely a pun.
If you've made it to the end of this blog post hopefully you'll come away knowing at least one thing. People will go to great lengths to further the human race, they'll even rip people out of their final resting places. As my fellow viewers of Breaking Bad will attest, as unfortunate as it is, that's science, bitches.
2 comments:
THIS IS SO INTERESTING. I don't think I was fully aware of how often this was occuring. However, I wasn't surprised at all to hear about how people were finding a way to make a profit off of this (Just like the guys at BIG TISSUE did with Kleenex*). Your post gets to a larger point, though, which is the idea that science can serve as a justification for these things that we may normally find atrocious. For example, Frankenstein's monster does some particularly horrific things, like murder people. But does the scientific progress that was made from his creation justify it? I would argue that, in a sense, it does. Of course, this is just a very minor aspect of the novel, but as I was reading, I couldn't help but weigh the pros and cons.
*Also not a fact. Just another pun. (A pretty bad one, at that.)
I definitely agree with what you're thinking. One of the reasons that I think Frankenstein has become almost part of the literary "canon" is because what Shelley is saying through the novel, or maybe what she is not saying, is that anything can be acceptable as long as we stick the tag "for science" on it. People are terrified of what they don't know but as long as it's being researched for science, we're fascinated by it. The ethical dilemma that comes along with it sort of takes a backseat until someone points it out. To me, Frankenstein emphasizes the battle between science and ethics. What is too far? Going along with what you were saying Cate, is cloning human organs worth the ethical battle if it saves lives? These are all extremely relevant questions even today and I think it's a very interesting way to view the text.
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