Protecting the dead

On our way home from France I made a small detour, to Luncarty in Perthshire, to indulge my interest in grave robbing, and means of preventing it.

There has long been a demand for human corpses for dissection by anatomists and medical students. In Scotland, the involvement in anatomy and surgery goes back to 1505 when the charter granted to the 'Incorporation of Surgeons and Barbers in Edinburgh' stipulated that every candidate for admission should 'know anatomea nature and complexioum of every member of manis body'.

Prior to the Anatomy Act of 1832 the main legal source of bodies was that of convicted and executed felons. Indeed penal dissection was very much part of the punishment to be inflicted. For example, when William Gordon was found guilty of murder in the High Court, Aberdeen on the 10th April 1822 his sentence was hanging by public executioner and his body to be delivered to Doctors Charles Skene and Alexander Ewing, lecturers in anatomy and physiology in Aberdeen medical school for public dissection.

Inevitably, as the competing University medical colleges and private schools of anatomy in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow grew in number and size the demand for bodies for dissection far outstripped the supply. The shortfall was increasingly met by the activities of a motley collection of unsavoury characters variously known as grave-robbers, body-snatchers, resurrection men, sack-'em-up men, shusy-lifters, corp'-lifters, Burkers and noddies. They helped meet the demand for bodies by digging up fresh graves in the dark of the night and then selling the corpses to the local anatomists.

This large scale desecration of graves led, as one can imagine, to a bitter battle of wits between on the one hand the outraged local populace endeavouring to protect the bodies of their loved ones and on the other the body-snatchers hell-bent on snatching them. The burial grounds of Scotland still bear stark witness to these ghoulish events of long ago. In many a kirkyard one can still see the physical evidence of the increasingly sophisticated methods that were employed to help protect the dead until they were too corrupt to be of interest to the anatomists.

The most sophisticated means of protecting the dead was the mort-house. Mort-houses were exceedingly solidly built windowless vaults, with massive walls and heavy wooden and metal doors. Bodies were stored in these impregnable buildings until decomposed and were then retrieved and buried in the usual way. They are to be found mainly in the North-East, stretching from Crail in the South to Marnock in the North. This mort-house, at Luncarty, was built in 1832 and was to become redundant almost immediately with the passing of the 1832 Anatomy Act. The Act, provided for the needs of physicians, surgeons and students by giving them legal access to corpses that were unclaimed after death, in particular those who died in prison or the workhouse. Further, a person could donate their next of kin's corpse in exchange for burial at the expense of the donee.

If you want to know more about grave robbing in Scotland then take a look at my body-snatching site.