The Grotesque (and Sometimes Amusing) Exploits of the 19th Century Grave Robbers Known as “Resurrectionists”
Grave robbing has probably been around for as long as people have felt the need to bury loved ones with their valuable keepsakes but by the early 19th century, the bodies themselves had become valuable enough to steal. The dissection of human corpses had been made legal in England in the 16th century and King Henry VIII had decreed that the corpses of those executed for murder could be set aside for dissection. This had always meant that the supply was short, as evidenced by the story of “Half-Hanged” Maggie Dickson whose execution resulted in a brawl between her family and a group who wanted to sell her body to an anatomist. They had both jumped the gun since she turned out to still be alive and was then set free since she had already been hanged for her crimes. Likewise, the demand for corpses allowed some men to sell their remains in advance to the highest bidder, resulting in the sort of windfall they could use to buy booze for their own send-off. By the turn of the 19th century, though, advances in medical science had created such a demand for corpses that grave robbing became a lucrative trade.
The price for a body varied from between £10–20 which comes to from $1,200 to $2,500 adjusted for inflation, for each corpse. Additionally, if there was something extraordinary about the body, the price could be much higher. It is said that the body of Charles Byrne, known as “O’Brien the Irish Giant” was sold to John Hunter for £500 ($65,000 today) and it was rumored that Dr. Robert Knox spent around £700 ($91,000) a year on cadavers. While $1,200 (or even $65,000) might not be enough to convince someone to go into grave robbing today, there was a curious legal loophole that made it all the more tempting to someone at the time. While disturbing a grave was a crime and stealing the clothing or jewelry on a corpse was definitely theft, the body itself was not considered property and so the activity of a resurrectionist existed in a legal gray area. By the time demand had pushed the price up to and above £20, this created an incentive for resurrectionists to ply their trade in Ireland and ship their wares across to Scotland where the bulk of the top anatomists and surgeons of the time needed them.
The types of people who went into this line of work varied. Probably the most famous were William Burke and William Hare, who sold suspiciously fresh bodies to the aforementioned Dr. Robert Knox. They began their exploits when someone who had been lodging with Hare died and Burke suggested that they sell the unclaimed corpse to Dr. Knox. Then, a second tenant became ill with a fever. Hare was frightened that once word got around that he had a sick lodger it would hurt his business so they killed her and sold the body to Knox. From that point on, they expanded their business, killing people on the streets of Edinburgh so that they could sell to Knox until eventually, a spectator in Knox’s surgical theater recognized one of the victims. The resulting scandal was one of the main forces behind the eventual passing of the 1832 Anatomy Act which would make it easier to legally obtain cadavers for dissection.
Not all surgeons farmed out their resurrections, however. Robert Liston is best known today for one of two things. He was a pioneer in the use of anesthesia in surgery, allowing for major advances in the profession. He was also rumored to have been the only person to have performed a surgery with a 300% mortality rate. Before the advent of anesthesia, a good surgeon was one who worked quickly so as to minimize the suffering of the patient. By this measure, Liston was an excellent surgeon but in one (possibly apocryphal) case, in his haste to amputate a limb, he accidentally removed three of his assistant’s fingers and when he switched blades, nicked a bystander. The patient did not make it, the assistant died from gangrene, and the bystander either contracted a deadly infection or died on the spot from fright, depending on the source. Liston was also known to have done his own “resurrecting,” most famously in the case of a young boy with hydrocephalus (image above) whose skeleton appears in Liston’s “Elements of Surgery.” Liston was rumored to have been disdainful of some of the unwritten rules of the resurrectionists. While rival groups of resurrectionists carved out territory, claiming certain graveyards as their own in an effort to avoid conflict, Liston operated independently and resurrected when and where he pleased.
Some of the more amusing anecdotes about the resurrectionists come from students who engaged in the practice. Such was the demand for fresh corpses at the time that medical students who could produce corpses for use by their professors could find themselves the beneficiaries of a grisly form of paid scholarship since their admission could be waived. There are several examples of students showing a youthful lack of foresight in their efforts as they realized that once they had stolen a body, they couldn’t just carry it back to the university through the streets. That meant they’d have to hail a “noddy,” a coach similar to a modern-day taxi, to transport it back. This method often relied on the discretion of the driver who may simply alert the police or, in at least one instance, drive the resurrectionists with their spoils right to the station to hand them over.
Other students were more forward-thinking. In one story, the students brought their own transportation, pulled off the resurrection successfully, but knew that there was a toll-keeper who “had a horrid aversion to all resurrectionists.” In order to get past him, they propped the dead body between them and as one student paid the toll, the other pretended to tend to his “sick friend.” As he reassured his “friend” that they’d be home soon and he’d have breakfast on the High Street, the toll-keeper shined a light on him and remarked on how terrible he looked, urging the other two to “drive cannily home lads, — drive cannily.”
In another, slightly less successful example, three students were attempting to resurrect someone when it turned out that there were guards at the grave. It eventually became common to post guards, particularly at fresh graves because of all the resurrecting that had gone on in the first couple of decades of the 19th century. One of the students was shot and died before the other two could get him to a doctor. Ever resourceful, the two surviving students tied each of his legs to one of theirs and propped him up so that it appear they were simply escorting their very drunk classmate home after a particularly rough session that evening. They made it back to the university successfully, and it’s rumored that they sold their classmate for dissection in lieu of their original target.
All of this resurrection resulted in countermeasures being taken. Most commonly, guardhouses began to appear in graveyards all over Scotland and Ireland. The use of mortsafes, heavy iron grates placed over graves in order to deter thieves, also grew in popularity. One man claimed to have actually rigged his son’s coffin with an explosive device which he filled with gunpowder and set to go off just before covering it with dirt. Still, the easiest method of defense was to simply sit watch. Still, this came with its own weaknesses. Since this duty was generally woven into the larger grieving process, it was usually accompanied by a lot of drinking. On one occasion, a man sitting watch and attending to his bottle heard a commotion across the cemetery. Assuming that it was resurrectionists, he fired a shot only to discover that an innocent pig had made its way through a break in the wall.
The tendency to drink while on watch also opened the door for resurrectionists to take advantage. One story tells of a group of resurrectionists who brought a casket full of rocks with them and, pretending to be fellow mourners, shared their whisky with a group who were already on watch. The whisky was laced with opium and when they had all fallen asleep, the caskets were switched and the resurrectionists were on their way. Resurrectionists didn’t always get the upper hand, though. On one occasion, a group of youths either looking to make a buck or just to play a prank posed one of their friends in a casket and attempted to sell him to a local doctor. As they haggled with him and had trouble getting him to go any higher than £5, the youth in the casket piped up, “Don’t sell me too cheap, boys!”
By 1832, with public pressure at its peak after the story of Burke and Hare had created a national scandal, the Anatomy Act was passed. This allowed for the unclaimed bodies of the poor to be claimed by anatomists for dissection and for bodies to be legally donated for dissection by the next of kin. This didn’t completely fill the demand but the public perception of those who engaged in dissection was changing. Madame de Barry insisted that her estate would not be passed on to her next of kin unless they agreed to allow her body to be donated for dissection and her skeleton preserved in a museum. The Utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham not only donated his body for dissection but demanded that his remains including his head be preserved and dressed in his clothes and that they should be made available for inspection. He called this his “auto icon” and it was acquired by University College London in 1850 where it remains on display.
While the Anatomy Act ended the exploits of the resurrectionists, their mystique didn’t fade immediately. 40 years after the passage of the act, this poem appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine:
On a Resurrectionist
Here lies an honest man, my brothers,
Who raised himself by raising others.
Anxious his friends from soil to save,
His converse still was with the grave.
To rescue from the tomb his mission,
He took men off to the physician;
And strove that all, whom death releases,
Should rest, if not in peace, in pieces.
So here he waits his resurrection,
In hopes his life may bear dissection.
Sources:
“The Butchering Art” by Lindsey Fitzharris
“Art Macabre: Resurrectionists and Anatomists” by Reginald Magee from the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Surgery
“The Resurrectionists in County Antrim” by Joseph Skillen from the Ulster Journal of Archaeology
“Glasgow Resurrectionists” by S.W. McDonald from the Scottish Medical Journal
“The Irish Resurrectionists” by John F. Fleetwood from the Irish Journal of Medical Science
“Anatomical and Resurrectionist Activities in Northern Scotland” by G.A.G. Mitchell from the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
“On a Resurrectionist” from the British Medical Journal
