For most of human history, medical science has been extremely mysterious.
Everything changed when doctors began to teach students on real human corpses, which made it possible to study the inner workings of the human body.
The demand for human bodies was quite high, and gradually turned into the so-called "underground industry", which helped many people to get out of poverty.
Many of us have heard the story of the Scottish body snatchers Burke and Hee, but there are many other interesting stories about their "colleagues".
Grandison Harris
Grandison Harris was a slave who belonged to Georgia Medical College. Purchased in 1352, it was officially considered a school porter and janitor. Unofficially, he was their body snatcher.
Like other people in the business, he was known as the "resurrected man," and his slave status gave him some strange advantages when it came to a second job.
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as a slave, he could not legally be held accountable. Harris devoted more than 50 years of his life to the excavation of recently buried bodies, which he supplied to medical college students for study.
His forward-thinking employers have provided Harris with all the tools he needs to perform well. They even taught him to read and write so that he could keep track of obituaries appearing in the newspapers.
Grandison had the skills of a florist, which were very useful to him when he needed to beautifully arrange funeral flowers after digging up the body. However, often this question was not even raised.
One of his favorite cemeteries was called Cedar Grove. The poorest people were buried on it in coffins that could easily be broken with an ordinary ax. After the Civil War, Harris became a free and educated person.
Grandison took up the position of a judge in a small town in Georgia, however, the students to whom he once supplied the corpses did not let him forget where he came from, no matter what power the man had at that time.
He continued his activities and entered into deals for the supply of corpses with colleges, albeit on more legitimate terms: now the corpses were purchased from prisons and hospitals. He spent the last years of his life teaching his son the subtleties of desecrating graves. The son eventually replaced him in college.
In 1908, Harris gave a speech to the youth about how successful he was as a "resurrected man." He died in 1911 and was buried in his favorite cemetery, where he spent so many sleepless nights.
Probably as a precaution, there are no markings on the grave, only a monument.
Steal the body of Abraham Lincoln
Not all of the body snatchers worked for medicine, some did it just for themselves. In the 1870s, Chicago was home to a gang of counterfeiters led by "Big Jim" Kennaply.
Everything went well until the leader lost one of his best engravers, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison. However, Jim was not going to put up with the fact that his man should serve time.
Then Kennaply and his gang came up with the idea to steal the body of Abraham Lincoln and keep it until the authorities agree to a ransom: $ 200,000 + release from custody of his man.
For some unknown reason, Kennaply hired two men who had absolutely no experience in the field to carry out the plan. The men, the owner of the bar and the metal worker, decided they needed help and hired a third person on their team.
Unfortunately for them, the third person to join the team was from a subsidiary of the Secret Service. Thus, every detail of the plan was reported to the government.
When day X came, the gang came to the cemetery, cut off the lock at the entrance to the crypt, since no one knew how to open it. Here they stalled for a while, because they came across a concrete slab that sealed the coffin.
The secret service planned to arrest them suddenly, but suddenly someone's pistol accidentally fired, and the would-be robbers were thus warned of an outside presence. Fortunately, the kidnappers were not professionals. They were detained when they intended to go to the bar of one of the members of the "gang".
Dead Body Snatcher London Hospital was just one of many places in Britain that used actual corpses as a teaching tool for a student. Recent archaeological excavations have uncovered countless piles of bones buried in the college's backyard in an unmarked grave containing the remains of approximately 500 people. Many of them died in hospital, and then, when their bodies had already passed all the medical research, they were simply disposed of. Indeed, the fact that the huge number of people who passed through the London hospital and died there speaks to the unusualness of the place.
It had many more bodies for them to use, so the hospital was likely selling bodies to other institutions. It might seem like a smart way to make extra money, but it was illegal.
Because of this, all the action took place at night, and a man named William Millard is most likely an example of banal failure.
In 1832, he was arrested right at the burial site of the hospital and was accused of being a body kidnapper.
There really wasn't any evidence of his involvement, but it didn't really matter. In the end, he died in prison, however, his wife tried to prove his innocence for a very long time after his death.
According to her, he was there to pick up some "extra" bodies from the hospital and give them to the buyer. She argued that his only fault was that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, doing what the hospital might have authorized but did not want to go public.
John Scott Harrison
John Scott Harrison was the son of US President William Henry Harrison and the father of another president, Benjamin Harrison. He also found himself at the center of one of the worst body abduction stories ever.
A beloved Congressman and father, he died at the age of 73 and was buried in the Congressional Cemetery, next to Ohio State College of Medicine. When the family was burying their beloved patriarch, they noticed that the integrity of the grave of the recently deceased nephew of John Scott August Devin was broken, and the body itself was gone.
After the funeral, John Scott's son John Harrison came with a local police officer and a search warrant to the nearby medical college to find the young man's body.
They found only a few bodies there, nothing looked suspicious, only the local janitor was noticeably nervous. John would most likely have turned around and left if he hadn't accidentally seen something suspicious: a rope and a row of pulleys leading down to another level of the building. When John came downstairs, he found a body, but not the one he was looking for.
It was the body of his father, John Scott, recently buried and exhumed. It was terribly disfigured and had a lot of damage. The younger John, after the discovery of his father's body, launched a campaign against the college, however, everything threatened to escalate into lynching.
The college defended its right to use the bodies for autopsies, saying that they were not aware of where the bodies were coming from.
As a result of the investigation, it was also possible to find the body of August Devin, decomposing in a vat along with 40 other bodies. Both John Scott and August were reburied, and two local body snatchers were arrested.
Bishop, May and Williams
Sometimes cemeteries did not have the required number of fresh bodies for autopsy, and did not have time to keep up with demand. John Bishop had been working as a body snatcher for about 12 years when he and his partners decided to stop stealing corpses and start making their own.
In November 1831, Bishop and his associates presented their latest creations to anatomists at King's College London. Scientists had no doubt about the re-use of the bodies, however, they began to suspect that something was wrong after seeing the body of a young boy with serious wounds on his head.
After detaining Bishop on the pretext that they must find change from £ 50, the scientists called the police.
As a result, it was established that the gang "worked" with street boys and beggars. Even though the body snatchers began pointing fingers at each other, denying they knew anything about the crimes, John Bishop, John May, and Trmas Williams were ultimately convicted of the murder of 14-year-old Carlo Ferrari, 10 -year-old Cunningham and a 35-year-old woman.
In addition to selling the bodies of their victims, they also knocked out their teeth in order to get extra profit from the dentists.
Before Bishop was hanged, he proudly stated that he was responsible for handling transactions for approximately 500-1000 bodies.
This story inspired the young writer Charles Dickens, who used the plight of the boys-and-mouths in several of his novels. The body snatchers were hanged, and their corpses were handed over to medical students for study.
University of Maryland & Frank
As an ad for the University of Maryland School of Medicine said, the school was "Paris America where subjects are plentiful." Objects meant, of course, corpses, and the abundance of dead bodies was the work of "Frank."
His last name is unknown, but Frank's skill in finding and supplying corpses was well documented in a series of letters exchanged between professors and college staff.
One of his favorite places, according to the letters, was Westminster Cemetery, from where he stole so many bodies that they were plentiful at school. According to the letters from Dr. Nathan Reno
Smith, the bodies were sold to other schools, and in order to prevent them from decomposing, the bodies were "packed" in whiskey.
It was rumored that when the bodies reached their destination, students who did not understand why they should translate the fine whiskey simply drank it. In other versions, Frank himself poured used whiskey and sold it to bars.
Not everyone was a fan of the use of human bodies to teach medical students. Therefore, by 1831, Frank began to fear for his life. Local residents have long opposed what the school was doing. One of the buildings of the medical school was once attacked by an angry mob and set it on fire.
Elizabeth Ross
Despite the fact that the abduction of bodies is mainly a male world, there was still one woman who suffered the same end as many of her male colleagues. Elizabeth was convicted and executed, and her body was handed over to medical students for study. The woman was accused of murdering a tenant of her family.
According to court records, Ross was famous not only for her love of gin, but also for being a thief. She was described as a large, stout, masculine Irish woman who was strong enough to commit a murder, and then carry the body to sell to a London hospital.
However, Ross herself claimed that she last saw their guest alive in the company of her 12-year-old son and his father Edward Cook. The evidence against Ross was inconsequential, and it seemed that her son, who testified against his mother at the trial, was more interested in saving his father.
However, she was found guilty, since the city in which she lived knew firsthand what night grave robberies and murders were. It was also said that often the neighbour's cats disappeared near Ross's house, and people said that she was capable of anything for the sake of profit.
Whether she was guilty or not, Ross was executed for the crime, and her corpse ended up on the section table.
Abduction of bodies before burial
The traditional image of a body snatcher is a dubious figure in a dark, moonlit cemetery, digging over a freshly covered grave. However, the body snatchers were far from waiting for the corpse to be buried.
In 1830, the London police reported the theft of nearly 100 bodies, which were stolen directly from homes before the funeral. There is also a known case of the then "popular" body kidnapper Clark, who stole the corpse of a 4-year-old girl right from the nurse's house.
Clark had previously offered the nurse a drink in memory of the deceased child. And at night, sneaking into the house, he stole the girl's body, Clark was recognized by a police officer right at the time of the sale. The man was arrested and spent 6 months in prison.
In some cases, the stolen bodies were not sold "for medicine." Sometimes the families of the deceased were able to buy them back. The bodies of the suicides were stolen while bureaucratic issues were settled.
Often, body snatchers sold their wares to doctors or teachers, and then reported, naturally anonymously, to the police about the deal. The police took away the bodies to return to relatives. The “relatives” were the same body snatchers who did the same thing over and over again.
Saved by the body snatchers
In those days, in addition to the fear that your body would be in the hands of the kidnappers, people were still very much afraid of being buried alive. This is exactly what happened to John Machintire on April 15, 1824.
As John himself later said, he perfectly remembered how his family members gathered around him, how they said goodbye to him, how they grieved. Then the man told how he came to himself in a sealed coffin, but could not move, so he had to listen to the earth falling on the lid of his coffin.
And then … silence. He described the horror of nothingness, of the darkness around him. He could not move, and only imagined beetles and worms that would soon begin to eat him.
He then described how he was dug up. It all went rather unceremoniously, and he quickly ended up on the pathologist's desk. He heard the voices of students and doctors discussing in a lecture, an integral part of which was to be an autopsy.
After the knife began to cut through his chest, John was finally able to recover from his paralyzed state. Doctors, realizing that their "corpse" was not completely dead, were able to bring the person back to life.
How much did they earn?
The abduction of Bodies was not just illegal, it was unethical, immoral and anti-religious. Body snatchers, as a rule, for the most part represented the bottom of society, so almost everyone who found himself in this business did not have to fall too low.
So how many bodies did not find their final resting place in this way? And was the game really worth the candle? According to 1800s records, a typical adult corpse in London cost about £ 4 and 4 shillings. For today's money, it is $ 447.
The body mentioned in the above story about Bishop and May cost 9 guineas, which is roughly $ 1,469 today. According to information from those times, the demand for bodies grew significantly, and prices rose along with it.
For example, if, as a student of medical college, a person bought a corpse for two guineas (about $ 319), then when he became a teacher, he already bought bodies for 16 guineas ($ 2235).
As time went on, more and more universities began to use the bodies of the deceased for teaching. Educational institutions were forced to either pay the amount demanded by the kidnappers, or watch the bodies go to other universities.
In addition to selling the bodies, many of the kidnappers removed the teeth from the corpses in order to get money from the dentist. According to some reports, dentists offered £ 5 (about $ 560) for a set of teeth for one person.