Resurrection Men

More to fill undo 'weird things Dr. Revels researches,' I guess!

Because I want to play with the idea of a necromancer in my next novel, I decided to look back on the famous 'resurrection men' of late 18th and early 19th century. After all, if my bad guy is going to be calling up the dead, he needs some dead to 'practice' on. Maybe this is how he acquires his corpses.

Resurrection men were grave robbers. In this period, it was very hard for doctors and medical schools (many of which were private and just offered courses in anatomy) to find bodies to dissect. Today, we take it for granted that physicians study the human body and that many people choose to donate their bodies to science. But before the modern era, most people had a horror of dissection and religious objections to the practice. Therefore doctors and educators often were forced to stoop to dubious means of getting subjects for study. Ghoulish types learned that medical professors did not ask questions, and the 'fresher' a body was, the more money the doctor might pay for it. (Keep in mind that very few bodies were embalmed in this time and most funerals took place only a day or so after death, for very obvious reasons!)

It might astonish you to learn that it was not a felony to steal a body! However, if the grave robber was caught with any clothing or jewelry the body might have worn, that was a very serious crime. Not surprisingly, the resurrection men became quite skilled at digging down to the head of a coffin, breaking it open, and pulling the corpse out with a rope. They pitched the shroud back into the coffin and tossed the naked body into a sack. Then they hurried to the back door of an office or medical school and collected their cash.

Some of these ghouls were organized into gangs, and had a variety of tricks for scooping out the best (i.e. 'freshest') corpses. Often, they would employ a female accomplice to go to a funeral to note the exact spot of burial and whether any precautions were being taken. These people would also watch the poorhouses, and show up to claim any recent, friendless deceased.

Though most victims of the resurrection men were probably poor, the fear of having one's parent, spouse, or child resting on a dissecting table, rather than in peace, was a common fear among the middle class. A family might employ some friends to stand watch at the cemetery for a couple of nights after the burial; it was presumed that within a few days a corpse would not be worth digging up. Other families had iron cages placed atop graves as a deterrent.

Two of the most famous resurrection men, William Burke and William Hare, figured out that the best way to get a fresh body was not to wait for nature to take its course---so they started killing poor people, mainly residents of their boarding house, instead!

The Anatomy Act of 1832 helped bring an end to this practice, as it allowed for private donations of bodies and made corpses of deceased, unclaimed indigents available to medical schools. Doctors no longer had to pay for their most essential supply.

But there's one problem---my story will take place in 1897. That's more than 60 years after the act was passed. So will the idea that one character is suspected of this practice really ring true?

Guess I'll have to dig deeper....