Body Snatchers, Stiffs and Other Ghoulish Delights by Frederick Drimmer

Alternatively, a block and tackle might be rigged to raise the corpse through a trap door into a domed ceiling: “At the first sign of trouble, up went the corpse …. In some places a pulley was used to hoist the cadaver up the chimney. To evade detection by the authorities, school staff developed ways to spirit away their corpses at a moment's notice. They were frequently intoxicated and hence frequently caught. 2, 3 By contrast, English-speaking students tended to join bodysnatching expeditions more out of a spirit of daredevilry. Francophone students tended to be poorer than their anglophone counterparts and needed the money to pay for their education. 1 In Canada, bodysnatching was practised by both English- and French-speaking medical students, although with slightly different motivations. In doing so, they continued a longstanding tradition of their European counterparts for example, in early 18th-century Edinburgh, students at the Royal College of Surgeons were required to sign an agreement not to engage in grave robbing.

The robbers were usually medical students, who stole bodies for their own study or sold them to anatomy instructors. But the lack of legally available cadavers drove professors and students to obtain their raw material by clandestine means. By 1850 there were 42 medical schools in the United States and Canada, and with them had arisen a need for anatomical specimens. Canada's first medical school was established in Montreal considerably later, in 1822, but the days of “the resurrection men” were far from over. The nefarious practice of bodysnatching is probably as old as the study of anatomy, but on this continent it was roughly coeval with the founding in 1756 of the first American medical school, in Philadelphia.

Body Snatchers, Stiffs and Other Ghoulish Delights by Frederick Drimmer