B O D Y S N A T C H E R S played important role in MCV’s early days

Long before computer simulations, 19th-century medical students learned about the human body the only way they could: by studying bodies they stole from local cemeteries.

To celebrate Halloween, education services librarian Shannon Jones discussed Tuesday the practice of “body snatching” at the Tompkins-McCaw Library. About 30 VCU students and local residents attended the talk and accompanying tour of VCU Medical Center campus. Jones detailed the deeply intertwined business of stealing corpses and the history of the campus then known as the Medical College of Virginia.

“Generally there were few legal means to obtain adequate cadavers,” Jones said of the human corpses used to teach MCV students about human anatomy and contemporary surgery practices. “As a result, medical professors and students turned to illegal, unethical and certainly unsavory practices to snatch bodies for the dissecting room.”

Those who capitalized on the economic demand for bodies were called grave robbers, “sack-’em-up men” or “resurrectionists,” Jones said.

Jones discussed the beginnings of human dissection during the European Renaissance. She focused on Great Britain and the United States, particularly the city of Richmond, in the 1800s. Jones’ PowerPoint presentation featured black and white photographs of resurrectionists, the cadavers they uncovered and the students who ended up dissecting the bodies.

Jones pointed out that many class photos involved creatively arranging the cadavers with cigars in the mouths of male subjects and roses in the hands of females.

Krista Burns, an international studies major, said she enjoyed hearing about doctors breaking the law.

“It just surprised me that you see a doctor, someone that you think has an ethical obligation, doing something illegal like that to get cadavers,” she said.

While most grave robbers typically took only recently dead bodies from cemeteries, some went further. From 1827 to 1828, William Burke and William Hare suffocated 16 to 30 people and secretly sold them to the Edinburgh Medical Center to satisfy the growing need there for cadavers. Ironically, after Burke was caught, tried and hanged, his body was publicly displayed and then dissected by medical students.

“To this day, the word ‘burking’ means, ‘to suffocate or strangle in order to obtain a body to be sold for dissection,’ ” Jones said.

“Although the disinterment of bodies was a crime, 19th-century medical men maintained detailed records concerning their acquisition of cadavers,” she said.

The men took bodies from cemeteries from October to March, the time period during which professors lectured. Bodies were generally taken a day after burial.

“A resurrectionist disguised as a hunter might walk the cemetery during the day under the pretext of hunting small game, only to be taking note of newly dug graves,” Jones said.

During reconnaissance missions, grave robbers also disguised themselves at funerals as mourners. Once a target body was found, a team of three men in a wagon would arrive at the cemetery with two tarps, a dark and shaded lantern, a crowbar and wooden shovels to muffle digging sounds. They dumped dirt on one tarp; they dumped the body onto the other.

“Clothes and burial shrouds were returned to the coffin so that the resurrectionists would not be charged with stealing property,” Jones said.

After detailing the methods of the grave robber, Jones talked about the history of MCV.

Disappointed by the lack of subjects for dissection in Charlottesville in the early 1800s, University of Virginia anatomy professor Augustus Warner proposed the relocation of the university’s medical department from Charlottesville to Richmond, Jones said. When the U.Va. Board of Visitors voted down his proposal, Warner resigned and moved to Richmond. He founded in 1838 the Medical College of Virginia, then under the charter of Hampton-Sydney College.

For the next 46 years, illegal grave robbing was the only means of attaining human corpses to instruct MCV students on human anatomy and contemporary surgery practices.

By the 1850s, dead bodies rose in price at MCV to an average of $10, which went to the body snatchers. Because of the lack of dead bodies in the more rural and less populated Charlottesville, U.Va. purchased 27 cadavers from MCV from November 1858 to March 1859. The cost at U.Va. rose to $13, which included an extra $2 to cover railroad transportation and $1 to pay a doctor to inject the body with zinc chloride to help retard decomposition.

At one point, U.Va. anatomists requested that cadavers be sent in baggage cars of the mail trains after several cadavers, arriving in leaky barrels, were too decomposed to use. The Virginia Central Railroad refused the request.

Grave thefts eventually made a strong impact on the public, Jones said.

“By the late 1850s, the rumor in Richmond was that the MCV infirmary patients that had the misfortune to die would wind up as cadaver specimens on the medical school’s dissecting table,” Jones said.

Jones said a Richmond Dispatch editorial from the time said among most blacks “prevails a superstition that when they enter the infirmary, they never come out alive.”

By the 1880s, Richmond newspapers frequently noted missing bodies. Because of the increasing press coverage of and public concern over body snatching, the Virginia General Assembly approved on Jan. 28, 1884, an act allowing the legal use of cadavers for medical schools. The legislature also created a board of anatomy and surgery professors that oversaw the distribution and delivery of bodies.

Grave robbing continued to be a felony, but carried a new jail sentence of five to 10 years. By the turn of the century, with legal methods to acquire bodies, grave robbing had faded into obscurity, Jones said.

Since then, she said, scientists have discovered that most bodies used for dissection in the 19th century were those of either slaves or blacks who were freed after the Civil War. In Richmond, most grave robbings occurred in the cemeteries around Oakwood, where mostly blacks and poor whites were buried.

Around the 1880s, Jones said, the black press published editorials arguing that as long as grave robbing occurred, it should have equally targeted the predominantly white Hollywood Cemetery.

In the 1970s, an old well was discovered outside VCU’s Egyptian Building as construction workers were clearing the block on Marshall Street that now includes the Hermes A. Kontos Medical Sciences Building. Human remains, which had been thrown away after class dissections, were found in the well and were recovered and analyzed. Like those uncovered in a similar well at the Medical College of Georgia, the bones primarily belonged to blacks.

The abundance of black cadavers startled one attendant.

“It was surprising, but I guess in a way it should not be,” said Renee Knepper, a French and international studies double major. “That is the way blacks were treated when they were alive, so it makes sense that they were treated as less than whites when dead.”

After the talk finished, Jones led the group on a tour around the Medical Center, noting cadaver facts and telling ghost stories about the White House of the Confederacy, the Egyptian Building and tunnels that ran underground in downtown Richmond.

When Jones finished her talk, one attendant asked where bodies are now prepared for dissection at the Medical Center. Several audience members and medical center workers debated the question.

One man asked, “How much money do you get if you become a cadaver?”

Jones said it was a popular question, but she did not know.