It is understandable that even the most hardened of murderous criminals would blench at the prospect of being hanged and then recovering consciousness only to find that a surgeon was poised over them about to make the first incisions of the anatomical demonstration. This was no empty fear. It actually happened in 1740 to a rapist called Duell who had been hanged shortly before and then recovered consciousness just at the critical moment.
In 1751 William Hogarth (1697–1764) published his series of engravings called The Four Stages of Cruelty. This set of four pictures was intended by Hogarth to confront the contemporary popularity of activities which involved cruelty to animals. He does so by tracing the criminal career of his anti-hero figure, Tom Nero. His start on the road to perdition is shown in the first illustration where he tortures a stray dog held down by one of his friends. Other examples of the cruel abuse of animals are shown elsewhere in this animated but repellent scene. Nero’s career embraces further unedifying activities but is terminated when he is tried and found guilty of murder and then hanged. The final scene is called ‘The Reward for Cruelty’ and depicts Nero’s corpse lying on a slab in the lecture room of Surgeons’ Hall. The hangman’s rope is still round his neck and three surgeons’ assistants in aprons are working on different parts of his body. The lecturer is seated and demonstrating various points to his audience. He is identifiable as John Freke, a well-known surgeon and former friend of Hogarth with whom the artist had quarrelled, a common event in Hogarth’s life. Two skeletons stand in niches: one is that of James Field, a notable pugilist, the other being James Maclean, a ‘gentleman highwayman’ who was hanged at Tyburn in 1750.
Occasionally adventurous surgeons themselves went to burial grounds and obtained freshly-buried corpses, but the profession as a whole had its reputation to uphold. Generally they found others to do their dirty work and they had few qualms about the origins of the ‘subjects’ they bought or how they had been obtained. The field was open for the emergence of a specialist sub-stratum of the criminal fraternity. This was the ‘resurrection man’, ‘resurrectionist’ or ‘sack-’em-up man’ generally but somewhat misleadingly known as the ‘bodysnatcher’. Strictly speaking, bodysnatchers were the people who opportunistically seized unburied corpses and tried to sell them to the schools of anatomy. In addition, there were the ‘burkers’ who killed in order to obtain corpses for the same reason. Doubtless there were some who tried all three methods of making a living.
It was this form of criminal low-life that took the risk of punishment and the singular social disapproval attached to the whole idea of robbing graves and defiling the dead. They were true pariahs and frequently could only inure themselves to the horrors of their work by being permanently inebriated. However, the surgeons who bought the ‘subjects’, the fresh corpses, did so with total impunity. The learned men of science and the dregs of the criminal world united in a bizarre but mutually beneficial symbiosis. Both parties were widely loathed. However, as long as desecrated graves were restored tidily so that no offence was given or there was no threat to public health, official policy seems to have been to turn a blind eye to the surgeons and anatomists who bought the subjects – after all they were from a superior social class to the majority of the ‘subjects’ themselves.
During the heyday of the resurrectionists, in legal terms the disinterment of a body was a misdemeanour. It was defined as breaching ‘common decency’ and was punishable by a fine or a term of up to six months’ imprisonment. A human cadaver could not belong to anyone and was therefore not regarded as being property. This greatly offended public opinion because it meant that what was regarded as one of the most heinous of crimes was punished in such a trifling way. Additionally there was a perception that those who made and implemented the law were largely immune from the activities of the resurrectionists. In modern society, the law has always tended to be more rigorous and comprehensive in the defence of property than the person. It seemed an insulting anomaly that the theft of a shroud, for example, was regarded as a felony while taking a body away was merely a misdemeanour.
Gravediggers, sextons, the drivers and porters of hearses and general handymen in hospitals frequently either provided ‘insider information’ about ‘subjects’ for which they were paid. Sometimes, because it was a very lucrative criminal activity, they became resurrectionists or bodysnatchers themselves. Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities has a character called Jeremiah Cruncher who is an apparently respectable bank porter by day but a resurrection man by night.
Resurrection men needed an unusual combination of skills if their careers were to prosper. They had to be physically strong, they required strong stomachs and they needed to be able to ignore the normal human fears and taboos concerning the dead, burial places and darkness. Nauseating and noxious gases were released on those occasions when resurrectionists accidentally broke open older coffins while engaged in their nefarious handiwork. A sharp eye had to be kept for any items that might have been specially placed on or around the grave to provide clues as to whether the contents had been disturbed. Equally, they wanted to ensure that they would not fall foul of any of the booby traps, such as spring guns, that might be set up in order to deter their activities. Sometimes relatives of the deceased might guard the grave or pay watchmen to do so. In an understandable state of nervousness given the place, the time and the task they were engaged in, it was all too easy for them to loose off at random with any firearms they might have. It was also handy if the resurrectionists possessed effective negotiating skills in order to get a good price for the cadavers they obtained.
Robbing graves was a complex and demanding operation and could only be done by a gang of at least three or four. The usual method of recovering the body was for the gang to start by removing the fresh soil with spades and mattocks which were usually made of wood and surrounded by sacking to muffle the sound. The soil was then placed carefully on sheets brought along for the purpose. When the coffin was exposed, the lid was broken in two with a special device something like a grappling iron. One of the gang went down into the grave and tied a rope around the neck of the corpse which was then unceremoniously hauled up to the surface. The corpse was stripped and the shroud and any other minor items that had been buried with it would generally be put back. This was done so that the resurrection men, if apprehended, could not be charged with stealing any burial items. The corpse was usually placed in a sack and the grave refilled with great care so as to make it look as if it was undisturbed. The body, suitably covered by sacking, would then usually be wheeled through the streets in a hand barrow. Such was the attention to detail with which this work was done that many grieving relatives visiting the grave the next day would have been unable to find any signs that it had been tampered with. The disinterment was almost always done at night with shaded lanterns and as quickly as possible. Perfectionists generally reckoned that they could remove the body and restore the grave to pristine condition in about half an hour.
It was indeed a lucrative enterprise for the resurrection men. In the early years of the nineteenth century there were about 300 students a year in London engaged in studies involving dissection of human corpses and a subject could be had for just one or two guineas. By the 1820s the number of students in London had grown to at least 1,000. A resurrectionist could expect to earn considerably more than a skilled working man. Demand rose and ‘subjects’, especially those that were fresh and showed particularly interesting evidence of disease or any abnormalities, could change hands for as much as fifteen guineas. Sometimes even an unusual arm or leg might fetch a good price. Foetuses were always in demand. Male corpses tended to be valued more highly on account of their musculature. Little interest was evinced in a corpse after putrefaction had set in. Teachers of anatomy and surgery reckoned that each student needed to have had exclusive practise on a minimum of two cadavers before he could be considered competent at surgery.
Sir Astley Cooper (1768–1841) lectured on anatomy at St Thomas�
� Hospital from 1789 and at the College of Surgeons in 1793. In 1800 he became Surgeon at Guy’s Hospital and in 1813 Professor of Comparative Anatomy at the College of Surgeons. Historians regard him as a crucial figure in the transformation of surgery into a science. In 1820 he removed a tumour from the head of King George IV. His career never looked back. Well-respected professionally and a darling of fashionable London society, enjoying the patronage of the rich and well-connected, Cooper at the same time was the ‘Godfather’ of the unholy alliance between the medical profession and the criminal underworld. He exemplifies the double standards whereby elite society ignored the complicity of their own in this partnership but stigmatised those who seized and sold the cadavers. Cooper spent much of his own money supporting the families of those resurrection men who worked for him but who had been caught, prosecuted and imprisoned. He did this not out of kindness but because he valued skilled resurrectionists and wanted to maintain good relations with them. On a personal level, like most other people, he despised them.
He was immensely self-assured and famously once told the Select Committee on Anatomy (see below) that the law was completely powerless to prevent him from obtaining any specific corpse once he had decided that he wished to dissect it. He enjoyed being in the limelight and provided the committee with lurid revelations about the unpleasantness of which the resurrection men were capable. He revealed that one gang leader, if and when he found rivals on his patch, would break into their headquarters and mutilate any corpses he found so as to render them useless for selling to the anatomists. If he was unable to gain entry to the gang’s premises, he would quickly whip up a mob eager to give vent to their collective hatred of the bodysnatchers. In one ‘turf war’, a gang got hold of a corpse in an advance state of putrefaction, chopped it into pieces and deposited these gory items in and around the premises used by their rivals.
A surgeon named Brookes who appeared before the same committee related how he once forgot to give a gang a tip and they responded by dumping two putrefying corpses near his house. In the darkness, two young ladies stumbled over these gruesome obstacles and their horrified screams precipitated a riot. The morality of the London mob, rough-and-ready as it may have been, required absolutely that the dead should be treated with reverence. Brookes had to take refuge in Great Marlborough Street Police Station to avoid the possibility of being lynched.
The deference and legal immunity extended to men like Astley Cooper is shown by the occasion one night when three hampers were on their way to Cooper’s premises in a cab. The driver suspected that the hampers contained dead bodies and he stopped to alert a watchman. Together they confirmed the grisly nature of the cab’s cargo. The watchman called at Cooper’s premises to warn him that he would have to report the matter to the Lord Mayor first thing next morning. Cooper was up betimes. He hurried to the Mansion House where the Lord Mayor went to great length to assure him that he had already been apprised about the matter and that his visitor could be certain it would go no further.
Professional surgeons in the teaching hospitals tended to look down on those who ran and taught in the private anatomy schools of which there were seven in London in 1825–6. An example of the latter was Joseph Carpue who ran his own school in Dean Street, Soho. Carpue caused a storm of controversy when he crucified the body of an executed felon so that an artist could provide a realistic portrayal of the way in which the body hung. It cut little ice with his critics when he assured them that the painting he had commissioned was a teaching aid. It should be mentioned that the private anatomy schools had no right under law to receive the bodies of executed felons for teaching and demonstration purposes.
In 1810 a roistering medical student at a private medical school attracted a hostile crowd when he climbed onto its roof brandishing a human leg which he then dropped down the chimney of a nearby building. There it fell into a cauldron of stew that was cooking on the hob. An outraged crowd only dispersed after the lecturer paid them to go away. In 1820 a surgeon had his house burnt down because the mob thought, wrongly as it happened, that he had mutilated or dissected the corpses of the Cato Street Conspirators.
Some bodysnatchers went to hospitals or the poor law authorities posing as the caring relatives of the deceased who simply wanted to take the body of the dear departed away in order to give it a good funeral. They made sure first that the deceased was unlikely to have any people who really cared for them. The officials were usually only too happy to get rid of the cadaver because it saved them the cost of a funeral. For this reason they tended not to be too fastidious in checking out the credentials of the ‘caring relatives’.
Those who obtained specimens for the surgeons by whatever means needed an effective intelligence network, an ‘ear to the ground’ as it were. They also needed to be audacious and opportunistic. In October 1831, a scapegrace by the name of Williams realised that the widow who occupied a hovel just off Hackney Road had popped out and would be gone for a few minutes. He broke in easily knowing that the house contained the body of her fourteen-year-old son who had died a couple of days earlier. He swiftly trussed the body up in a sack and made his escape. He was seen and arrested but he quickly managed to find an illicit buyer for the boy’s body.
The stakes were high in the resurrection game. The demand for cadavers was such that the resurrection men and bodysnatchers were to some extent able to dictate their own financial terms from the anatomists and they were not averse to playing dirty tricks on them. One ploy was to deliver a subject to the home of an anatomist, take payment and then return a couple of hours later to burgle the anatomist’s premises and carry the cadaver off to sell it to another anatomist. One surgeon took delivery of a subject in a sack one evening and retired to bed shortly afterwards only to be woken some time later by noises from his cellar. Upon investigation he found that the ‘subject’ was a severely confused man who had been sacked up while befuddled with drink.
Perhaps London’s leading resurrectionist was Ben Crouch. His business reached its peak from 1809 to 1813 when he had a virtual monopoly of the supply of bodies to the hospitals on the South Bank and to St Bartholomew’s. He was tough, aggressive and ruthless but he also possessed a sound business sense. His intention was to eliminate rivals and corner the London market for specimens so that he could dictate prices. Like the gangsters of the Prohibition in the USA in the 1920s, he built up a network of informers in privileged positions who had inside information and put them on his payroll. Rivals either joined him or risked violent measures when Crouch sent his enforcers to pay them a call.
The anatomists attached to the hospitals resented Crouch’s resourcefulness and tried to take him on by creating a cartel called the Anatomical Club, which in turn would be able to dictate prices. Their innate snobbery, however, meant that they could not bring themselves to include the private anatomy schools. Crouch exploited this weakness by delivering only to the private schools which meant that the hospitals were faced with a dire shortage of specimens. Any other gang trying to do business with the cartel was threatened with reprisals. An uneasy working compromise was eventually reached.
Josh Naples was a busy resurrectionist who kept a detailed diary of his activities in 1811–1812. This provides a unique insight into the ways in which the resurrectionists operated. Not the least interesting item in this diary is that describing the rivalry between Ben Crouch’s Gang and Israel Chapman’s Jewish Gang based in the Saffron Hill district close to Clerkenwell. This reiterates information elsewhere about the systematic bribery of officials, the emphasis on effective intelligence, surveillance of the activities of rivals and even working agreements between rivals to exclude those they considered outsiders.
Many people criticised the anatomists. Some thought that their work did nothing to advance medical science. Others favoured it in principle, just so long as the specimens used were not their own nearest and dearest. Some of those who objected to anatomisation, even ostensibly on religious grounds, seemed to have no objec
tion if surgeons dissected the imported corpses of foreigners. Even those people who thought that dissection was beneficial because it enhanced scientific knowledge demanded that the bodies be treated reverentially and be given the normal rites of passage when the anatomists had finished with them. In practice, cadavers were treated as commodities and teaching aids; reverence for the dead was never uppermost in the minds of those who had dealings with them. Surgeons had a habit of removing organs and preserving them and so a cadaver was unlikely to remain complete, even if it was eventually buried with due respect.
Thomas Hood (1799–1845) picks up on these concerns in his poem ‘Mary’s Ghost’:
’Twas in the middle of the night
To sleep young William tried;
When Mary’s ghost came stealing in
And stood at his bedside …
The arm that used to take your arm
Is took to Dr Vyse,
And both my legs are gone to walk
The hospital at Guy’s.
I vowed that you should have my hand,
But Fate gives us denial;
You’ll find it there at Mr Bell’s
In spirits and a phial …
I can’t tell where my head is gone,
London Page 4
