Body Snatching and Being Buried Alive

[S]ome politician whispers to me, "The intelligent part of the community understands perfectly your professional necessity; and these penal enactments [against bodysnatching] are a dead letter - intended merely as an offering to popular prejudice. You doctors should set about overcoming that prejudice, and we statesmen will quickly remove such inconsistencies from the statute-book. If it was our affair, we could persuade the people that it is pleasant to be dissected, just as we so often persuade them that it is profitable for them that we should put our hands into their pockets." - JW Draper, An Appeal to the People of the State of New York, to Legalise the Dissection of the Dead (1853).

From Sappol, Michael (2002) A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth Century America.


I've been doing some research on nineteenth century bodysnatching in order to beef up (a bit) a portion of The Book. Essentially, the availability of legally-obtained cadavers for medical instruction was severely limited relative to the number of individuals receiving medical training. As an example, in one instance, approximately 400 cadavers would be necessary to train physicians at a medical school over a twenty-year period, in a location where perhaps 40 would be available legally (Shultz 1992: 15). The result was a black market for bodies, which had to be relatively recently deceased to be useful.

The topic is relevant to The Book, but not in a huge way... not in any way that I can justify the amount of reading I really want to do here. The problem is, I find the subject fascinating. I have to promise myself that, if I get my word count in today, that I can read more of these books, and not just the relevant bits I need to cite.

Sappol's book goes heavily into the social identity and meaning that people have had around cadavers, dead bodies, anatomy training, etc. and how issues of class, ethnicity, politics, money, &c. have played into that. He has also included lots of very interesting images. Fascinating stuff, and a worthy read for those interested in the history of medicine, death, cemeteries, identity, and embodiment.

I also have Suzanne Shultz' 1992 book Body Snatching: The Robbing of Graves for the Education of Physicians in Early Nineteenth Century America. Shorter than Sappol's book, this focuses much more closely on the snatching itself and on the snatchers (aka Resurection Men). This is an engaging and deceptively quick read, chock full of historical background, as well as anecdotes and individual stories.

The fear of having one's body snatched actually resulted in the manufacture and sale of burglar-proof coffins here in the US. Several patents were issued, and they appear in undertakers' catalogs at least through the 1890s. Burglar-proofing ranged from simple bands of iron encircling the entire coffin, to elaborate one-way latches, locks, and soldering.

On a related note, check out Jan Bondeson's 2001 book, Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear. Physicians and medical ethicists continue to argue about where the line between living and dead is. In the past, physicians readily admitted to being uncertain whether their patients were alive or dead, and there were examples of people being prematurely declared dead. This became the source of an hysteria in Europe in particular, where huge waiting mortuaries were built from the eighteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries (some surviving into the mid-twentieth century). The presumed-dead would be housed at these Totenhausen connected to an alarm system triggered by movement. Individuals were considered actually dead when putrefaction began. There is mention of a waiting mortuary in New York in the 1820s, but this particular phenomenon was largely European. There were, however, several American patents for coffins with alarm systems. Perhaps changing ideas in America regarding an actual, physical resurrection of the body in Heaven and the accompanying horrors of decomposition limited the acceptance of waiting mortuaries here. I don't know enough about changing ideas of death in Europe to say for sure...