Government officials tended to look the other way at graverobbing, for two reasons. First, most government officials were rich and powerful. Most bodies for dissection, meanwhile, came from the pauper class. Officials could therefore tolerate grave-robbing without the fear of their own loved ones going missing. Less cynically, authorities also knew that budding doctors and surgeons needed bodies to train on—and frankly, make mistakes on. Otherwise, the tyros would be learning anatomy on the fly inside live patients, making mistakes while elbow-deep inside their guts. Many government officials wanted to legalize dissection for this reason, but popular opinion prevented it. As a result, the British medical community fell into an uneasy truce when it came to procuring bodies. Don’t ask, don’t tell.
What finally broke the equilibrium was one man’s obsession. John Hunter was the William Dampier of anatomy, revered for his discoveries and reviled for his methods. Coarse and foul-mouthed, with hair so red you could light a cigar with it, Hunter was the tenth of ten children in his Scottish family, and he went into medicine in part because six of his siblings died young from disease. He also had a role model in his brother William, an obstetrician in London who was highly praised (and highly paid) for discreetly delivering the children of Important Men’s mistresses. William also taught anatomy on the side, but didn’t want to sully himself carving up bodies. So in 1748, at age twenty, Hunter moved to London to become his brother’s assistant dissector. He’d never cut into a body before that, but after the rush of that first incision, he basically never stopped.
Hunter’s obsession took two forms. First, he loved anatomy for its own sake, and not just human anatomy. He carved up thousands of animals, too, including outré bits like “sparrows’ testicles, bees’ ovaria, and monkey placenta”; he even collaborated with Henry Smeathman in dissecting his grotesque termite queens. Second, Hunter saw anatomy as a way to reform medicine. Medicine in that era paid lip service to things like observation and experiment, but everyday treatments still consisted of hoary nostrums like purging, bloodletting, and tobacco enemas—literally blowing smoke up someone’s ass. Hunter wanted to modernize medicine, and saw anatomy as the foundation of reform: to cure disease, doctors needed intimate knowledge of the body. To him, this included not just how the parts fit together but the feel and smell and even taste of different tissues. He once described the gastric juices of cadavers as “saltish or brackish.” More daringly, he reported that “semen . . . when held some time in the mouth . . . produces a warmth similar to spices.” Hunter even dissected and tasted an Egyptian mummy.
Whether in spite of or because of his unorthodox methods, Hunter made dozens of anatomical discoveries, including the tear ducts and olfactory nerve. He oversaw the first artificial insemination in humans and pioneered the use of electricity (from crude batteries) to jump-start the heart. He also charted the development of babies in utero and divined the modern classification of teeth into incisors, cuspids, bicuspids, and molars. Based on such work, (1) Hunter was elected to the Royal Society in 1767. Moreover, his practiced cutting hand and intimate knowledge of anatomy made him a celebrated surgeon. He eventually bought a house in London with a grand façade for receiving distinguished patients such as Adam Smith, David Hume, William Pitt, and Joseph Haydn.
Still, Hunter had his critics—especially for his dealings with grave-robbers. Most anatomists despised “resurrectionists” and “sack- ’em-up men” as lowbrow thugs. In contrast, Hunter’s vulgar manners actually made him a great favorite with grave-robbers. His majestic house even had a second, less wholesome, back entrance just for resurrectionists; it overlooked an alley, and at 2 a.m. they’d slink up and unload that night’s catch. As one student remembered, the rooms back there were distinctly “perfumed” with the scent of corpses. Robert Louis Stevenson used this Janus-faced house, and Hunter’s life in general, as models for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Grave-robbers usually worked in teams. Less sophisticated crews would poach from mass graves, the open pits that were left unattended until they’d filled with paupers’ bodies. The best crews had more elaborate setups. Many of them employed female spies—who attracted less attention—to linger near hospitals and workhouses waiting for people to die. The spies would then attend “the black” (thief cant for a funeral) and follow the wake to the “hospital crib” (graveyard) to note the location of the plot. Spies also kept an eye out for booby traps, such as spring-loaded rifles buried in the dirt and “torpedo” coffins that exploded if tampered with. Less drastically, some families would arrange twigs, stones, or oyster shells into a pattern on the surface of the plot, so they could tell if the dirt had been disturbed. The lady spies passed all this information on to the gangs for a cut of the proceeds.
The actual resurrecting took place at night. Sack-’em-up men had to become amateur astronomers, in fact, and chart the rising and phases of the moon to determine the time of peak darkness. Guards were little worry. If a graveyard even had one, the gangs either bribed him or got him so drunk he passed out. Then the thieves would tiptoe up to the fresh grave, disable any booby traps, memorize the pattern of sticks or shells, and start digging with their soft, quiet, wooden shovels.
The gangs rarely disinterred a whole coffin—too much work. Rather, they’d expose just the head of it, then jigger a crowbar underneath the lid and use the weight of the overlying dirt to snap the boards. A rope slipped under the arms of the body retrieved the prize. Brutally, they often disfigured the face at this point to prevent recognition. Before leaving, they stripped the shroud and any jewelry off the body and discarded it, since stealing gold or clothing would ratchet the deed up to a capital offense. Pros could empty a grave in fifteen minutes, and they were veritable Picassos when it came to recreating the look of an undisturbed plot. More than one gang snuck into a churchyard and started digging, only to find an empty grave below—the work of a more punctual rival. (2)
(Resurrectionists had other tricks for making money, too. Rather than sully themselves with digging, some went the confidence-man route. They’d visit an almshouse or hospital, pick out a body there, and start weeping and rending their garments as they claimed their dearly beloved “uncle” or “great aunt.” As a variation, some gangs would sell a body to an anatomist and then enlist a confederate to knock on his door an hour later, before dissection began. Posing as a relative, the confederate would demand the body back, on threat of calling the police—at which point the whole gang would walk down the street to another anatomist and sell the body again. Even more brazen, one gang wrapped their very-much-alive friend in a sack and sold him to an anatomist. They were apparently hoping the anatomist would set the sack aside overnight—at which point the friend would hop out, rob the house blind, and sneak off. The plan was thwarted when the anatomist realized the “corpse” was still alive.)
Gangs earned flat fees for adult bodies, around £2 in Hunter’s day—roughly what farm laborers made in a whole season. For “smalls” (children), gangs charged by the inch. (3) For rare specimens (e.g., pregnant women during their last months), prices might rise to £20 ($2,500 today). One industrious grave-robber once cleared £100 in a single night.
However lucrative, the work had its dangers. If caught, resurrectionists risked jail time or transport to the colonies. (4) And while the police often looked the other way, mobs didn’t: Grave-robbers regularly got beaten, shot, or whipped with metal wires. One horde, displaying a keen sense of irony, tried burying a grave-robber alive in the pit he’d just dug. Some anatomists acted like godfathers and looked after their most reliable resurrectionists, bailing them out of jail or providing for their families during stints in prison. But if anatomists double-crossed them, or bought bodies from a rival crew, the gangs had no compunctions about breaking into labs and hacking the bodies up, rendering them useless for dissections. It was straight Mafia tactics. Pretty little corpse you got there. Be a shame if something happened to it.
Hunter, however, rarely ran afoul of resurrectionists, mostly because he couldn’t afford to: all his research depended on them. Later in life he estimated that, during the dozen years he worked for his brother, he dissected or observed the dissection of two thousand corpses—one body every two days.
Given that nearly every one of those bodies had been stolen—sometimes by Hunter himself—this was bad enough. But month by month, corpse by corpse, Hunter also developed a moral callus, and pretty soon these former human beings became nothing but bags of bones to him. Probably the most disgraceful episode involved the Irish giant Charles Byrne.
Byrne was so tall—eight-foot-four, according to the tabloids— that people swore he could light his pipe from gas streetlamps without rising to his tiptoes. Scholars at the time ascribed his fantastic height to his parents having sex atop a haystack; modern doctors suggest a pituitary tumor that pumped out excess growth hormone. To earn a living, Byrne exhibited himself in county fairs across Ireland and England, wearing gigantic frilled cuffs and a three-cornered hat the size of a topsail. He had an audience with King George once, and the moment John Hunter laid eyes on Byrne, he grew obsessed with dissecting him.
To this end, Hunter approached Byrne one day in London and offered to buy his corpse pre-posthumously. To Hunter, the offer was an honor. Who wouldn’t want to be dissected by the world’s leading anatomist? (No hypocrite, Hunter later had his own assistants carve him up after his death.) But Hunter’s obsession had blinded him to the fact that most people considered dissection an abomination, and Byrne practically shrieked at the offer. After sending Hunter away, the giant gathered his friends and made them swear to God above that they’d dump his body in the sea when he died, to keep it out of the anatomist’s clutches.
Sadly for Byrne, death came sooner than expected. Pituitary conditions can cause arthritis and bad headaches, and he reportedly started drinking to blot out the pain. (Hunter learned this through a spy he’d employed to tail the giant from pub to pub.) It would have taken prodigious amounts of booze to get Byrne sozzled, and his liver eventually sputtered out. He finally drank himself to death in June 1783, just twenty-two years old.
As one newspaper reported, anatomists began circling Byrne’s house “just as Greenland harpooners would an enormous whale.” Byrne’s friends ordered a coffin the size of a schooner and, figuring that Byrne had exhibited himself when alive, put him on display in death and began selling tickets. True to their word, however, no one got the body. After four days of cashing in, they and an undertaker began a seventy-five-mile march to the sea to fulfill the dearly departed’s last wishes.
Unfortunately, the mourners had more in the way of good intentions than good sense. Lugging a giant coffin around was hard, sweaty work in the June heat, so the Irish lads began stopping every few miles to refresh themselves with ale and toast their friend. Being responsible fellows, they always tried to bring the coffin inside the tavern with them to watch over it; when it didn’t fit inside, they made arrangements to keep it safe. At one tavern, for instance, the door was too narrow for Byrne’s bier, so they took the suggestion of the undertaker and stored it in a nearby barn he knew of. Eventually this nomadic wake reached the coast past Canterbury, where they engaged a local bark and rowed out to the deep. There they pushed the coffin of the Irish giant off the prow, and watched it sink to the bottom of the sea.
The Irish giant’s body, meanwhile, was back in London. Before the wake had set off, Hunter’s spy had approached the undertaker with a £50 bribe for his cooperation. The undertaker, sensing desperation, soon drove that offer up to an incredible £500 ($50,000 today). Hunter couldn’t afford that, but his mania got the better of him and he agreed. The undertaker then steered Byrne’s friends to the tavern above with the narrow door, knowing the coffin would never fit. He’d already bribed the owner of the nearby barn to let him hide some tools and men among the straw inside, and while Byrne’s friends made merry, the undertaker’s crew unscrewed the lid, hid the giant in the straw, and replaced him with a precisely measured weight of paving stones. Afterward, the coffin went one direction, the body another. By dawn the next morning, Hunter was dragging the giant through the Mr. Hyde entrance of his home.
Strangely enough, he never dissected Byrne. Had he, his trained eye might have spotted the pituitary tumor and connected it to gigantism, a link that remained undiscovered for another century. (5) Hunter, though, was scared enough of Byrne’s friends to abandon his plans. Instead, he focused on boiling the body down to preserve the skeleton. He used a huge copper vat to do so, skimming off the fat like so much soup and picking out the giant’s bones. Hunter eventually opened a museum of anatomical oddities in London (one writer called it “Hunter’s collection of human miseries”), where the seven-foot-seven-inch skeleton served as the centerpiece. Against the giant’s wishes, it’s still on display today.
Hunter left behind two conflicting legacies. There’s no question he was one of the great scientists of his day, making dozens of new discoveries about how our bodies work. And beyond any specific findings, he inaugurated a new spirit in medicine, dragging it out of the realm of bloodletting and tobacco enemas and emphasizing observation and experiment, a big step toward scientific respectability. He also inspired countless students (Edward Jenner and James Parkinson, to name two), and enrollment in medical schools boomed after his death in 1793.
That said, Hunter’s lack of ethics gravely undermined his reputation. Condemning scientists in the past for not living up to today’s moral standards is unfair, but even in his own day, people despised Hunter. In a neat trick, he managed to make enemies of both patrician doctors, who recoiled at his rubbing elbows with body-snatchers, and the plebian masses, who resented being fodder for his research. Even Hunter’s fellow anatomists blanched when he stole Charles Byrne’s body. He’s a classic example of someone rationalizing his sins by pointing out all the good that resulted, as if ethics was merely moral accounting, with the good deeds canceling out the bad.
Worse was to come. More than anyone else, Hunter transformed grave-robbing from the wanton sallies of students into an industry, and the sheer number of bodies he bought distorted the market for them. The boom in medical-school enrollment further exacerbated the shortage of bodies and drove the price still higher, from roughly £ 2 in the 1780s to £16 (nearly $1,000) in some places by the 1810s—equal to what an average laborer made in five years. To be sure, Hunter was no monster. However flexible his conscience was, he at least had one. But the higher the price for bodies rose, the more that people without any scruples at all were tempted to jump into the game. People like Burke and Hare.
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(1) In perhaps his most clever discovery, Hunter settled a longstanding dispute about digestion. Many scientists back then argued that the stomach digested food either by applying heat to break it down or by mechanically churning it. But after noticing holes in his cadavers’ stomachs, Hunter argued for chemical digestion. After death, he reasoned, the body stops producing the protective mucus that lines the stomach, and the acid there begins to digest the organ itself. This explained the holes, which neither the heat nor mechanical theories could. We now know that mechanical churning does play a role in digestion, but chemical action is primary.
(2) People who died during the summer were lucky in that their bodies decayed faster in the heat. Hence, they were of less use to anatomists, who often took summers off. Wintertime deaths almost always meant a body-snatch. On especially cold days, when the bodies were still stiff, the resurrectionists didn’t even have to conceal them. They could simply prop them up in carriages like passengers and drive them right up to the anatomist’s back door. In other cases bodies were concealed in shrouds or sacks, or even shipped around in barrels labeled “pork” or “beef.” This might explain the line about “beef” in the nursery rhyme later in this chapter.
(3) Anatomists dissected infants and children whenever possible in part because they were eager to chart the course of human growth and development, a hot scientific topic at the time. More practically, infants made for handy teaching specimens. To study the nerves and blood vessels, anatomists had to pump colored wax or mercury throughout the body, sometimes by blowing it with a pipe. And it was a heck of a lot easier to pump fluids throughout a tiny child’s body than a full-grown adult’s.
Incidentally, anatomists dissected the bodies in a strict order, based on how quickly different tissues went putrid. The lower abdomen was first, since those organs turned foul fast. Then came the lungs (which were often black from London’s sooty air) and the heart. Muscles decayed more slowly, so they could be put off. Finally came the bones, which anatomists would sometimes wire together to form skeletons. Despite the rush to get through the putrid parts, dissecting rooms often reeked of rotten flesh—as did the anatomists. In order to keep them focused on their studies, medical schools often banned surgical apprentices from marrying, but given where they spent much of each day, you wonder whether the ban was necessary.
(4) Just to clear up some of the legal subtleties: Possessing a dead body wasn’t a crime; no one could technically own a body, and corpses weren’t considered property. That said, resurrectionists could still get nailed for violating a grave, which was illegal. And again, stealing clothing or jewelry on the body was definitely a crime, often punishable by death.
(5) The famed neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing finally opened up the Irish Giant’s skull in 1909 and found clear evidence of a tumor. Namely, he noticed that a structure called the sella turcica—a saddle-shaped notch in the base of the skull that houses the pituitary gland—was enlarged in Byrne, a common occurrence in giants.
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Excerpted from The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science, by Sam Kean. Published by Little Brown and Company. Reprinted with permission. Copyright 2021, Sam Kean. All rights reserved.
