Resurrection Then; OR, BODY-SNATCHERS IN SCOTLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume II, Issue 127, 4 August 1871, Page 6

Resurrection Then; OR, BODY-SNATCHERS IN SCOTLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO.

EVeryone familiar with the churches of central and southern Scotland must have observed, a small square building of great strength, and entirely destitute of windows, erected against the wall, and generally very near the gate of the churchyard. Such buildings are by no means universal, indeed in some districts they are altogether unknown, but occasionally it is difficult to find a graveyard without them. In those portions of Fife and Edinburgh shires adjoining the Frith of Forth they are especially common. There the dwellings of the dead are usually placed close to the sea, and at a considerable distance from the habitations of the living. The manse, it is true, sometimes overlooks the burial ground, but be yond this no other house occurs for two or three hundred yards—the peculiar abhorrence with which the " quick " too often regard the dead* preventing anyone from building in the immediate vicinity of " God's-acre." It is quite possible, however, that a stranger, ignorant of the customs and folk-lore of the country, might visit all the Fife graveyards and omit to notice the buildings in question unless his atteni ion were specially directed to them. Buf, if this were done, and if he were further informed of the ghastly purposes to which they at one time had been put, it is unlikely f liat their recollection would pass easily from his memory. Built dn ring the old "bodysnatching" period, these erections were simply eharnel houses, their great strengih being intended as a safeguard against the attacks of the resurrection men —those ghouls of science who desecrated the abodes of dead in the interests of living humanity. At that time it was the almost universal custom, prior to depositing a dead body in the grave, to interne the coffin containing it in one of these houses for several weeks, and thus render the deceased quite valueless as an anatomical " subject." And this, for all those at least who were averse that their friends should be "cut up by the doctors," was by no viaeaiis an unnecessary precaution. Before the passing of the Resurrectionist and Anatomy Act in 1832, body-snatching was pursued with wonderful avidity throughout the entire country, but particularly on the sea coast near Edinburgh. Indeed for a time it became a thriving and even a lucrative profession. The study of anatomy and surgery, which was then being pursued in the great medical schools of Edinburgh with surpassing zeal, necessitated a constant supply of fresh " subjects," and the demand ultimately became so great that three, four, five, and' even, in certain cases, as high as eight and ten guineas, was paid for a single body. The resurrectionists had their prices very often at their own making, and we accordingly read in the memoirs of Sir Astley Cooper, the famous English surgeon, that at the opening of a large medical school in London, a " snatcher" received no smaller a sum than £144 on a single evening for a dozen subjects with which he had supplied his employers.

This ghastly traffic naturally became the occasion of many curious adventures. The robbing of churchyards was resented by every class of the population with a degree of passion which can only be understood when we recollect the feelings, not merely of abstract veneration, but of deep love and longing tenderness with which all civilised peoples regard their dead kindred, those whose joys and sorrows have been afore-time a part of their very nature. But in spite of the danger to which they

exposed themselves, the greed of gain was so strong on the part of the thieves, that the nefarious calling was pursued under all kinds of difficulties, and in the face of an opposition of almost unheard-of virulence. In his recent " Life of Knox the Anatomist," Dr. Lonsdale supplies the following interesting sketch of these worthies : —" The resurrectionists personified drysalters, pork-curers, purveyors of animats for museums, even apple-dealers and hlacking-makers. Nothing was too base for them to do. Their countenances betrayed a sinister expression, and their dress, always shabby, neither resembled the artisan nor the lowest class of tradesman ; they were nondescripts in person as they were in character." The usual mode of their procedure on arriving at a graveyard was to ascertain whether they might, carry on their operations in perfect safety. This point settled, they then approached the grave —always a newly made one—and the position of which had been carefully surveyed before!iand —and cleared away the earth from the head of the coffin. As soon as a foot of the upper end of the lid had been laid bare, a strong crowbar was inserted beneath it, and it received a violent wrench upwards. This usually caused the wood which was held down by the earth pressing on the rest of its surface to snap asunder, and the broken piece being then pulled out, the head and shoulders of the corpse were exposed to view. These were at once seized, the body was drawn from its resting-place, stripped of its swathing clothes—which were thrown back into the empty coffin —and placed in a sack. The fc Tave was next filled with the soil, and the " snatchers," carrying off their plunder, completed the job. So expert did resum. ctionists become with long practice, that it has been estimated that, in the hands of a couple of adroit workmen, a grave might easily be rifled bf its occupant in fifteen or twenty minutes.

Among the more grotesque stories to?d of the period is one which, has for its scene the Fife coast of the Frith of Forth. In the winter of 1823-4, a small smack went down near Kinghorn during a heavy gale, and its entire crew, consisting, it was believed, of three men and a boy, were drowned. The vessel was a stranger, and consequently when she broke in pieces, a couple of days afterwards, the people of the district set themselves to collect what spoil they could from the salvage thrown up by the tide. But her cargo, as it seemed, was of wonderfully little valueOld deals and quantities of agricultural produce were the chief articles which came to land, and as the latter was greatly injured by the action of the water, the search for wreckage began to slacken after the first few days, and then ceased. All at once,- however, a rumor spread over the district that salvage of a- very valuable character had been recovered from the wreck. A farmer of the neighborhood, it was asserted, had been seen conveying home a tea-chest of great weight, which he had picked up on the sea-shore. This story, we may be sure, at once set numerous greedy eyes on the outlook for similar, plunder. Nothing was found for a day or two, but at last a pair of idle fishermen, while strolling among a cluster of rpcks within high water mark, discovered a square box, which, from its frayed sides, had. evidently been tossed about among the waves for a number of days. They immediately pounced upon their prize, and, notwithstanding that it was exceedingly heavy, carried it home. The news of their good luck spread like wilfh e, and the neighbors having turned out in a body to learn what had been found, the small " but" of their house was soon filled But the opening of the box was no easy matter. Besides being firmly nailed to- [ gether, it was clamped on the edges with

iron in a manner which, defied for a consi- | derable time all the efforts of the finders. ! At length the lid was loosened by the re* moval of two of the clamps, and then, to the horror of the beholders, it sprung open with great force, and a dead body, entirely naked, leaped up with a jerk. Of course' the women shrieked, and even the rough seamen fell back in astonishment at the ghastly nature of their prize. After the first shock of surprise an investigation of the affair was made, and it was found that the corpse had been rifled from a churchyard, bent in two, placed in a box, and shipped on board the unfortunate smack for Leith, thence to be conveyed to one or other of the Edinburgh medical schools. Several other boxes, of a like size and sh ipe, are said to have come ashore later, but, warned by experience, the fishermen buried them unopened on the spots where they were found.

Then the exploit of the Edinburgh pro- | fessor, in securing, in broad daylight, a hydrocephalic "subject" from Burntisland churchyard, is well known. Attended by a professional " snatcher," he drove up in a gig to one of the Burntisland host dries, on a summer afternoon, and requested that the horse might be baited for an hour. The order was taken at once, and the two gentlemen, both of whom were well dressed, walked off, one of them, as he did so, mentioning that ho expected a servant, who would be in livery, to call with a parcel, which would be deposited in the gig. This expectation was carried out to the letter. In a short time a man in livery appeared, carrying a bulky bag, which he placed under the seat of the gig. It was remarked that this individual was wonderfully taciturn, or was perhaps a little hard of hearing. At all events the inn people could make nothing of him, and when the two gentlemen returned at the end of the hour the secret of their business was yet intact. They at once drove off, but, as it seemed, not a moment too soon. The newest grave in the churchyard had been desecrated, and the body carried off in broad daylight, and the perpetrators of the outrage were easily identified as the gentlemen in

the gig. Bat it was not only the general public that the resurrectionists warred against. When the system of watching the graves became general, and the small, stronglybuilt charnel-houses, already described, were erected in the better known or more easily accessible churchyards, they then turned their attention against the doctors themselves. We have made one quotation from Lonsdale's " Life of Knox," and the following anecdote from the same volume will probably be read with considerable interest: —

" Two noted ' hands' called one night at Knox's rooms, and asked the assistant on duty if he would take an 'adult' which they had close by. He agreed to do so, and in ten minutes the body was brought in and paid for. Next morning Mr. Lizars' anotomical class was in great excitement on learning that a fresh 'subject' had been carried off during the night from the tables of their dissecting room. Lizars himself was in a terrible rage, and interrogated Peter, the janitor, very closely. ■•" ' You say you bolted and barred all the doors, and found them the same this morning?' " ' Yes, sir.* " ' Then, how the devil could the body be got away ?' "'Wall,' quoth Peter, 'I dinna ken, unless it was the deil's ain wark, for there's neither a chink in the door nor a flaw in the window for an imp to creep in by.' " But the burglary was in every way outrageous. A body stolen from the grave is sold to Lizars, it is rc-stolen from his dissecting room, and sold again within the hour. The villains netted £25 for

their work, and had no fear of indictment." It was plain, however, that the system could not last for ever. On the one hand the interests of science demanded a constant supply of " subjects," and, besides, the amour propre of the medical profession was engaged in keeping this constantly up ; while, on the other, the deepest feelings of all classes of society demanded that the bodies of the dead should be preserved sacred against the desecrating hands of men, even although these were laborers in that holiest of human causes, the alleviation of suffering and the possible preservation of life. We have said all classes of society, since, as there is ample evid- nee to show, no station, however high, was proof against the forays of the " snatchers." When before a Committee of the House of Commons on the subject, Sir A stly Cooper, on being asked whether the state of the law pi-evented the teachers of anatomy from obtaining the body of any person they were desirous of procuring, replied—

" The law does not prevent our obtaining the body of an individual if we think proper, for there is no person, let his station in .life be what it may, whom, if I were dispoi^rU l Q4Jh3t>p.t,..,]^.uiif t r'i I oT 00lain." After continuing in existence for upwards of thirty years, the profession of a resurrectionist was therefore b rough; to a final close by the passing of, the Anatomy Act in 1832. :Now,- as is well known, ample provision is made for the necessities of the medical profession by allowing the removal, of the unclaimed dead from workhouses and hospitals to the dissecting rooms of pur accredited'medical schools. It maybe that, at long intervals, ah isolated attempt is made by an enthusiastic student to obtain a body surreptitiously; but these attempts are so few in number that, even if successful, they attract no public notice. At the same time, the story .of the troubles which led to"the Anatomy Act Mill always be a chapter in medical history possessing a wide and keen interest, not only for members of the profession, but also for the general public.