James Blake Bailey

“ In Great Britain the study of medicine and surgery was much hampered at this date by the [Pg 14] scarcity of opportunities by which the student might get a practical acquaintance with the anatomy of the human body. A knowledge of anatomy was insisted upon by the Corporation of Surgeons, as each student had to produce a certificate of having attended at least two courses of dissection. It is unnecessary to point out the wisdom of this condition in the case of men who were to go out into the world as surgeons, and, consequently, to have the lives of their fellow-men in their hands. ”

“ MORTSAFE IN GREYFRIARS CHURCHYARD, EDINBURGH.
Most of the disgraceful riots which took place in the burial-grounds, were not between resurrection-men and friends guarding a grave, but between two gangs of body-snatchers. In cases of this kind one gang would do all in its power to bring its rival into disrepute; the stronger party, after driving the weaker one away, would put the burial-ground into a most disgraceful state, and then give information against their opponents. ”

“ No doubt this provision much increased the dislike of the poor to any regulations by which the bodies of their friends might be given up for dissection after death. It was felt that dissection by the Surgeons was part of the sentence passed on a murderer, and therefore carried with it shame and disgrace. To make provision by law, therefore, for the dissection of the bodies of any other class of persons was, not unnaturally, distasteful, in that it partly put them in the same position as murderers. ”

“ By no class of men was legislation more earnestly asked for than by the teachers of anatomy; to them the system then in vogue [Pg 90] was not only degrading, but it meant absolute ruin.
There was at that time no property in a dead body, and a prosecution for felony could not take place unless some portion of the grave-clothes or coffin could be proved to have been stolen with the body. The resurrection-men were well aware of this fact, and generally took precaution to keep themselves out of the meshes of the law. ”

“ Friends and relatives often placed objects on the newly-made grave, such as a flower or an oyster-shell, so that they might be able to tell if the earth had been disturbed. These objects were generally carefully noted by the resurrection-men, and were put back in their exact places after the body had been removed and the grave re-filled.
In some burial-grounds, houses were built in which the bodies could be kept until they were putrid, and therefore useless to the resurrection-men. Such a house is still standing in the burial-ground at Crail. ”

“ The object in the expedition here recorded was, however, rather to obtain a valuable pathological specimen, than to get a body for dissection. Writers of fiction have made use of body-snatching, and have given a gruesome turn to their stories by making the body, when uncovered, turn out to be that of a relation or friend of some one of the party engaged in the exhumation. Such a tale is recorded in the Monthly Magazine for April, 1827; there a sailor is pressed into the service of some students who were anxious to obtain a body. ”

“ Baron Hullock said that, as conspiracy was an offence of serious magnitude, they should be satisfied, before finding a verdict of guilty on the former part of the indictment, that the conduct of the defendants was the result of previous concert.... If any of the defendants were in possession of the body under circumstances which must have apprized them that it was improperly disinterred, the jury would find them guilty of the latter part of the charge. The only bodies legally liable to dissection in this country were those of persons executed for murder. ”

“ With the rise and competition of the Medical Schools in London, the difficulty of getting an adequate number of bodies increased. The absolute necessity of having a good supply for the use of students, so as to prevent them from going off to rival schools, caused the teachers to offer large prices, and thus made it worth while for men to devote themselves entirely to obtaining bodies for this purpose. At first the trade was carried on by a very few men, and without any public scandal, but the inducements mentioned above enticed others into the business ”

“ The College of Surgeons also petitioned against the Bill. The Council felt that the appointment of Commissioners, who were to have complete control over all schools and places of dissection, would greatly interfere [Pg 106] with the privileges of the College. It was pointed out to the House of Commons that the establishment of a Board, such as that proposed by the Bill, was virtually placing the whole profession of surgery under the control of Commissioners, not one of whom need be a member of the profession, and the majority of whom must not be so. ”

“ This great man was an ardent admirer of the science of medicine, and his penetrating mind was not slow in perceiving that the safe and successful practice of the healing art entirely rests on a thorough knowledge of the natural structure and functions of the human body. ”

“ One correspondent gravely suggested that as prostitutes had, by their bodies during life, been engaged in corrupting mankind, it was only right that after death those bodies should be handed over to be dissected for the public good. Another correspondent proposed that all bodies of suicides should be used for dissection, and that all those persons who came to their death by duelling, prize-fighting, or drunkenness, should be handed over to the surgeons for a similar purpose. ”

“ Bentham, impressed with this idea, and thinking it unjust that the humbler classes of the community should alone be called upon to sacrifice those feelings which are cherished alike by the rich and poor, determined to devote his own body to the public good. ”

“ The men worked generally in gangs, and would do anything to spoil the success of their opponents in the business. If a body were bought by one of the teachers from an outside source, the regular men would sometimes break into the dissecting-room and cut the body in such a manner as to make it useless for anatomical purposes. If this could not be done, they would give information to the police that a stolen body was lying in a certain dissecting-room. Joshua Brookes, the proprietor of the Blenheim Street, or Great Marlborough Street, School, was a victim in this way ”

“ Truth and fiction often agree. There is a case on record of a child who had died of scrofula, and whose body was brought to St. Thomas’ Hospital by Holliss, a well-known resurrectionist. The body was at once recognised by one of the students as that of his sister’s child; on this being made known to the authorities at the hospital, the corpse [Pg 17] was immediately buried before any dissection had taken place. ”

“ An example of this character, emanating from a person so talented, so influential, and so esteemed, is calculated to operate a most beneficial effect on the public mind, and I cannot refrain from considering the dissection of the body now before us as an important era in the progress of anatomy, as it is one of the first that in this country has been employed for the purposes of science, under the direct sanction of the individual expressed during his lifetime ”

“ Tom Light seems to have had a happy knack of escaping justice; on p. 92 will be found an account of his being acquitted, even when taken with the bodies in his possession. He does not seem to have worked regularly with Crouch’s gang; at Hatton Garden Police Court he appeared as T. Light, alias John Jones, alias Thomas Knight, in October, 1812, and it was stated against him that he had lately been convicted at the Middlesex Sessions of stealing dead bodies for dissection, but he had evaded standing his trial, in consequence of which the Bench issued a warrant against him. ”

“ If the men intended going to a certain grave at night, late in the afternoon a woman, in deep mourning, would walk round the part of the cemetery in which the grave was situated, and contrive to detach the wires from the guns. Loose stones were placed on the walls of the grave-yard, so as to make scaling the walls almost an impossibility; this [Pg 76] was useless when the custodian had a house with a window looking into the burial-place. ”

“ The building of the Surgeons’ Company was in the Old Bailey; there was, therefore, no difficulty in removing the bodies from Newgate. In 1796 the Company came to a premature end through an improperly constituted Court having been held. It was attempted to put matters right by a Bill in Parliament, but there was so much opposition from those persons who were practising without the diploma of the Corporation, that the Bill, after passing safely through the Commons, was thrown out by the Lords. ”

“ Spacious Apartments, thoroughly ventilated, and replete with every convenience, will be open at five o’clock in the morning, for the purposes of Dissecting and Injecting, when Mr. Brookes attends to direct the Students and demonstrate the various parts as they appear on Dissection.
“The inconveniences usually attending Anatomical Investigations, are counteracted by an antiseptic process. Pupils may be accommodated in the House. Gentlemen established in Practice, desirous of renewing their Anatomical Knowledge, may be accommodated with an apartment to dissect in privately.” ”

“ Ben Crouch, the leader of the gang, was the son of a carpenter, who worked at Guy’s Hospital. He was a tall, powerful, athletic man, with coarse features, marked with the small-pox, and was well known as a prize-fighter. He used to dress in very good clothes, and wore a profusion of gold rings, and had a large bunch of seals dangling at [Pg 129] his fob. He was tried for stealing cloth from Watling Street, but was able to successfully prove an alibi. Bransby Cooper states that Crouch was seldom drunk, but when he was in that state he was most abusive and domineering ”

“ John Loftas, the Grave Digger, committed to prison for robbing of dead corpse, has confess’d to the plunder of above fifty, not only of their coffins and burial cloaths, but of their fat, where bodies afforded any, which he retail’d at a high price to certain people, who, it is believed, will be call’d upon on account thereof. ”

“ Mortality was very high amongst infants, who were put into roda, or foundling cradles; the bodies of these children could be obtained without any difficulty. In Portugal the resurrection-man did not exist.
In Holland there was no lack of material for teaching anatomy, and for students to learn operative surgery on the dead body. The Dissecting School at Leyden was supplied from the civil hospitals at Amsterdam. There was no prejudice against dissection in Holland; in all the principal towns lectures on anatomy were publicly given, and dissected subjects were exhibited. ”

“ In Dublin there were several ancient burial-grounds, all badly protected; the poor were all buried in one part, and, as their friends were generally unable to afford watchers, their bodies fell an easy prey to the resurrection-men. In January, 1828, the detection of a body about to be exported caused a tumult in the streets of Dublin, and led to the murder of a man named Luke Redmond, a porter at the College of Surgeons. [18] The body-snatchers in Dublin seem to have done more damage than the men engaged in a like [Pg 88] occupation in London ”

“ And thus, gentlemen, did the last act of this illustrious man’s existence accord with that leading principle of his well-spent life—the desire to promote the universal happiness and welfare of mankind. ”

“ Two young ladies stumbled over one of these bodies, and at once raised such a commotion that, had it not been for the prompt assistance of Sir Robert Baker and the police, Brookes would have fared very badly at the hands of the mob which soon collected. The fact of his house being near to the Marlborough Police Court, on more than one occasion saved Brookes from the popular fury.
A subject was brought to him one day in a sack, and paid for at once; soon after it was discovered that the occupant of the sack was alive. ”

“ On another occasion two American gentlemen, who were looking at the Abbey of Linlithgow after nightfall, were mistaken for resurrection-men, and assaulted by the mob.
One of the witnesses, called “A. B.,” but who was probably Ben Crouch himself, stated that [Pg 70] twenty-three in four nights was the greatest number he had ever obtained. He added, “When I go to work, I like to get those of poor people buried from the workhouses, because instead of working for one subject, you may get three or four. ”