The body snatchers!
They have come
And made a snatch at me.
It's very hard them kind o' men
Won't let a body be!
Don't go weep upon my grave
And think that there I'll be.
They haven't left an atom there
Of my anatomy.
| ... anonymous |
|---|
There I was enjoying an afternoon stroll rooting around a local burying ground searching out engaging tombstone epitaphs when, without warning, a voice broke the perfect silence.
"That there grave is empty!" rasped the Voice.
The chilling words were uttered by a hunchbacked old man, ninety at least. As he pointed a hoary finger at the hollow in front of me and his yellowed watery eyes met mine. "Poor woman was snatched right out of her grave," the Voice rasped again, " Them medical students dug her up. I know, 'coz my own father helped pry open the coffin and haul her off. Tell you somethin' else...a good many graves in these parts are empty...always have been."
Before I could reply the Voice shuffled off over the ill kept Graveyard and vanished among ancient headstones leaning drunkenly this way and that.
'Grave robbers?' I mused... 'In North Carolina?
Pouring myself a generous single malt whisky, I settled in one appropriately stormy evening to dissect my pile of news clippings and old pictures. Rain swept past my widows in horizontal sheets whilst Boris Karloff's film classic 'The Body Snatchers' (on video) added dramatically to my pursuits on grave robbing by Carolina's own intrepid shovel artists.
Picture the scene; A dark, moonless night; A shadowy graveyard; A Hoot Owl whooot whooing in the trees; A gang of men, three or four at most, creeping silently in search of a recent burial, the ground still loose. They dig feverishly, soon striking the head end of the coffin. With a crowbar they pry the lid open, hastily fastening a rope to the corpse. Feverishly they haul it out and throw it onto a cart.
Replacing the dirt pell-mell, they scurry off in the inky blackness, a spooky prize destined for the dissecting table.
The North Carolina Medical College was founded in 1893 at Davidson and was the first chartered medical college in North Carolina with roots in Davidson's pre-medical program. The president of the college was Dr. John Peter Monroe, a Davidson College physician and professor. In 1896 Dr. Monroe bought a lot from Davidson College and built a three-story brick building for his college. In 1902, however, the clinical section of the college moved to the old Presbyterian Hospital on West Trade Street in Charlotte. Five years later, the rest of the medical college followed, setting up in quarters at the corner of Church and 6th Street.
Lauded as the school which opened the local medical path, the Old North Carolina Medical College operated at this location for 30 years. Later the Premises became the Churchill Apartments Hotel.
One wonders if old time residents ever knew their hotel basement once housed the college cadaver vats.? Or that on the third floor stood the anatomy room, described in a 1907 newspaper article as 'a large dissecting hall with concrete floor and well lighted'?
In the early days a student at Davidson paid $75 per year with board and lodging costing only $80. Entrepreneurial students could pay their fees by supplying cadavers...and, evidently, they did.
The Medical school student body had grown from just two in 1889 to eighty-three in 1904. There was an urgent need for "specimens" so more adventuresome students took to the nighttime sport of body snatching.
The DAVIDSONIAN carried a feature in 1960 in which retired local farmer and merchant Sam A. Thompson told a reporter: "I'm a ghoul, I was a grave robber." In his younger days, so Sam alleged, he helped medical students rob local African American cemeteries of fresh cadavers for the Old Davidson Medical College. Sam's nocturnal burrowings began in 1899, the Same year four medical students were boarding at his family home off Concord Road.
Sam would keep track of recent burials, then accompany the students to exhume bodies. They arranged for an African American with a mule- drawn carriage to deliver the corpses to the Medical College during the night. "We'd get them a couple of nights after they were buried," Sam admitted, "We never had any trouble, except for one time. There was this Negro with a big gold tooth, and we dug him up and took him over to the medical building and put him in the vat.
"A couple of days later they had him all stripped down when one of the janitors noticed that big gold tooth." The news spread to the victim's relatives and they made the college bury him again. "I think they sued the college for several thousand dollars."
Sam also recalled 'the night of the drunken stiff.' Most of the body- snatching went unnoticed, except for one dark night when their African American driver was surreptitiously delivering a corpse from the cemetery to the Medical Building.
As he drove past some men on the road, they spotted the body in the moonlight slumped in the back of the buggy. The quick thinking driver turned to the corpse, gave it as firm shake, and shouted loud enough to wake the dead "Come on and sit up now! You're not THAT drunk!" The men kept walking without looking back.
At age eighty-three Sam journeyed to New York to appear on 'I've Got a Secret' - - His secret? "I was a grave-robber!"
Thompson was interviewed by a Davidson student in 1960, and although we may assume the information in the Davidsonian article to be true, no one else has ever supported (or disputed, for that matter) his story. As to the alleged lawsuit, "We have not found a record of such an action," said a Davidson College spokesperson.
Nor is there any evidence, one way or the other, relating to the tradition of the body in one of the four main columns, (hollow) from the old Chambers Building, which burned down in 1921.
Mr. W.C. Newell of Waynesboro is quoted in THE STATE of October 1976: Seemingly three (Davidson) boys, were being hotly pursued by the law. 'To avoid being caught with the body in their possession, they took it up to the attic of the Old Chambers Building and threw it down one of the huge columns that supported the front portico. There it remained until someone accepted the challenge of being lowered by a rope head-first to investigate.'
Elizabeth Silance Ballard of Jacksonville, NC. tells of three (Davidson College) boys who decided late one night to get a cadaver for themselves. Being in high spirits (of one sort or another!) , they rounded up a mule, wagon, and a crate of unknown origin and headed off toward Centre Presbyterian Church (North of the college) where there was to have been a fresh interment that day.
Coming into the graveyard they easily found that which they sought, placed it gingerly into the crate, loaded the crate onto the wagon, and set that mule to flying as if the devil himself was after them.
About half-way back to school one of the boys felt the call and so they halted the mule while he headed for the pine thicket. While he was gone, the other two decided to play a trick on their partner in crime.
Quickly they lifted their burden, placed it well off the road and one of them climbed into the crate. In a few minutes the other boy returned and jumped on the wagon, settling down beside the crate.
"Hey! Where's John?" he called as they moved down the road "Oh, forget about him." The other yelled. "He'll find his way back. We've got to get out of here before somebody catches us with this thing."
Now the fellow, trying to get comfortable, accidentally touched the body as he shifted positions."
"By God, this body is still warm!"
In the pitch blackness of the night came a voice from inside the crate, "You'd be warm too, if you'd been where I've been!"
Screeching like one possessed, the poor fellow leaped from the wagon and somehow managed to pass it and the mule as he sprinted toward Davidson!
Now it was told that the two in the wagon had a change of heart after their laughter was spent and their spirits had subsided and they took the cadaver back to its rightful resting-place. But we don't know. You never could tell about those Davidson boys.
By 1505 the Edinburgh (Scotland) Council, always at the cutting
edge of new innovations in medicine, allotted one executed criminal a year to
the anatomists for dissection, so that mediciners, (Surgeons and Barbers) 'knaw
anatomea and complexium of every member in manis bodi...for which purpose
(the surgeon) may have 'anis in the yeir ane condampnit man efter he be deid
to mak anatomea of quhairthrow we may have had experience ilk ane to
instruct the uthers, a sall do suffrage for the soule.'Ruthless surgeon's agents rushed to the jails to barter condemned prisoners a last meal or a few shillings for their relatives in return for their bodies. Many consented, able at least to purchase the customary decent apparel for their launch into eternity. The Edinburgh gallows, set half a mile below the castle on the Royal Mile, proved a source of cadavers once a year. The subjects were carved into ten parts and distributed to ten members for private dissection or instruction and enlightenment for apprentices.
During the 19th century Scotland gained international notoriety for ghoulish crimes in body snatching. Graveyards large and small became the scene of feverish nocturnal diggings and Robert Louis Stevenson took up pen to describe the heinous contemporary profession in The Body Snatchers, published in 1881.
Indeed there was an accepted 'sell by' date on cadavers, the fresher the specimen, the higher the price. Such medical urgency for fresh cadavers, and sheer laziness, convinced serial killers Burke and Hare, a couple of gruesome imports from Ireland, that it was less backache to invite some poor unfortunate to their dingy digs, get them drunk, then strangle them, than set out to battle heavy wet clay in some gale-swept graveyard. Not likely...not when they could comfortably perfect their new hobby - murder!
This grisly pair killed 16 people before they were found out. Hare wangled immunity in return for ratting on Burke, who was sent to the gallows on a freezing January morning in 1829. Before an angry mob, his body was dissected and publicly displayed. Hare died a penniless pauper in London in 1859. Dr. Robert Knox, who bought most of the bodies so willingly, was never prosecuted. Few doctors ever were.
America's history in getting bodies for dissection were not unlike those in Britain. Problems finding specimens were the same. Colony records indicate the first dissection took place in New York in 1750.
Dr. William Shippen was the first to offer organized medical instruction in the colonies in 1762, but three years later he was the target of a mob riot protesting his activities. There were similar were riots, too, in Baltimore in 1789 and 1807.
One amusing anecdote concerns the riot in New York in 1788, after a thoughtless student left a leg hanging out of the dissection room window to dry. Five people were killed and dozens injured in the two-day tumult which followed.
Oddly body snatching was not an offense in Britain. The body was not regarded as property, and, once dead, could not be owned or stolen. Occasionally the body snatcher would be whipped, on unclear legal grounds. Only if property - such as a shroud was removed, was the robber a thief.
Unpopular with the populace both here and abroad, riots followed cadaver procurers, chasing and beating them as they tried to make off with someone's father, mother or child. As late at the 1820's two Carlisle, England, were hounded by a maddened mob, friends of the condemned man, after dissection his body. One surgeon died and the other was shot in the face.
About the same time, after Charlie Graham, a Gypsy from Fife, was executed, his wife, to foil the body snatchers, buried his body in hot lime and sat, inebriated, on his grave until enough time had passed that no one would want his body.
Although the trade of grave robbing is a vanished profession today, it is still within living memory. "My grandfather was about 14 when his father, my great-grandfather, died." Recalls James Hendry, an old drinking pal of mine from Scotland. "Granddad and his brother spent two weeks taking shifts night about in the Tollcross graveyard with a shotgun across their knees to protect his father's grave.
My grandfather was born in 1860, so this would have happened about 1875 maybe...that's personal...I knew the man!" James revealed. "It took about two weeks for a body get really 'high'. They reckoned that after a couple of weeks no one would want to dig them up... past their 'sell by' date!" he laughed, "Unless of course it was a cut price job!"
Mankind has always been fascinated by the inner workings of the human body. The first written documents hail from around 4000 BC in which clay tablets from Ninevah recording inventories of warehouses, laundry lists and the insides of men's and animals bodies, opened in a form of fortune telling - trying to predict the future.
During the Roman occupation of Palestine, Talmudic scholars dissected the body of a woman executed by Roman authorities to discover its anatomical structure. Thirteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor Frederic 11 decreed that two executed criminals be delivered every two years to medical schools for an Anatomica Publica, all practicing and would-be physicians being ordered to attend. Around AD 53 Roman legions had doctors following behind them eager to dissect the bodies of fallen barbarians in battle.
In these pioneer of medical science, an era when doctor's never their hands until after an operation, human anatomy was an infant practice. Aspiring medical student were lucky if they had a cat or a dog to dissect to gain the rudiments of knowledge of the workings of muscle, cartilage or bone.
Religious condemnation and ignorance fueled hysterical abhorrence of dissecting a human body. Anatomy professors were fortunate indeed when they might scavenge the odd body of a nameless pauper or, better - fresher, too. That of a newly executed man, woman or child. Children were hung for stealing an apple back then.
Modern technical advances boast computer 'dissection software,' allowing surgeons to slice and paste, even see the presumable results of an operation before ever heading for the O.R.
"MMS's ( Multimedia Medical Systems) is a new clinical visualization technology enables enhanced imaging and image guided procedures." explains Bennie Warshaw, president of WebPro International in Charlotte.
"MMS provides 2-D and 3-D viewing stations for diagnosis, treatment planning, and intraoperative navigation, as well as educational simulation. They have developed an extensive software "toolset" that is able to differentiate tissue type in medical images. These procedures are an intuitive user interface that facilitates physicians who use these systems. The result is faster, less invasive surgical procedures, which minimize collateral tissue, damage and yield better outcomes."
Ah, the joys of electronic wonderland! Somehow hijacking a floppy disc from a medical school's computer lab will never replace the fun of good old surreptitious body snatching.
Progress? Bah!
Now, where did I leave my lantern, shovel and rope?
Sincere thanks to Molly Gillespie of Davidson College Archives, Sheila
Bumgarner and Rosemary Lands of Charlotte's Public Library for their valued
assistance with this obsession, also to Renfrow's Hardware Store of Matthews
for shovels, ropes and lanterns ... essentials for my new hobby.
Jim Leggett is an international photojournalist based in Matthews, N.C.
13915 Double Girth Court
Matthews NC 28105 USA