Disturbing History - The Resurrection Men in America

Episode Date: May 8, 2026

For most of the nineteenth century, American medicine had a problem nobody wanted to talk about. The medical schools needed bodies. There was no legal way to get them. So a quiet trade grew up in the shadows of every major American city, and for nearly a hundred years, the foundation of American medical education was built on graves that had been emptied in the dark. This episode walks through the full arc of the Resurrection Men in America. We start in 1788, with the Doctors' Riot in New York City, where a careless medical student waving a severed arm at a child sparked a three-day riot that left as many as twenty people dead and forced the state to pass one of the country's earliest grave-robbing laws. From there we move into the actual mechanics of the trade — who did the digging, how they did it, what they were paid, and how the bodies traveled. We meet William "Old Cunny" Cunningham of Cincinnati, who supplied the Medical College of Ohio for sixteen years and ended up posed as a wired skeleton in the school's own cabinet.We meet Grandison Harris, the enslaved man purchased in Charleston in 1852 by the Medical College of Georgia for seven hundred dollars and forced to rob the graves of his own community at Cedar Grove Cemetery for more than fifty years. And we meet the unnamed Frank, the University of Maryland's principal body snatcher, praised in a faculty letter as a man of whom a better never lifted a spade.We talk about who was vulnerable and who wasn't.Black graves, both enslaved and free, were targeted across every region of the country at rates that vastly exceeded their share of the population, because Black families had almost no legal recourse and the white press rarely covered crimes that took place in their cemeteries. Poor whites, immigrants, paupers, the institutionalized, and the unclaimed dead made up most of the rest. Respectable middle-class graves, by unspoken rule, were left alone — until 1878, when the system slipped, and the body of John Scott Harrison, son of one president and father of another, was found dangling on a rope in a chute at the Ohio Medical College, less than a day after his funeral. The scandal that followed cracked the trade open in a way nothing else had.The episode also covers the Bathsheba Smith case at Yale in January of 1824, the Lebanon Cemetery scandal in Philadelphia in 1882 that brought down anatomy professor William S. Forbes at Jefferson Medical College, the Burke and Hare murders in Edinburgh in 1828 and the shadow they cast over American attitudes, the Harvard Spunkers Club whose members included Samuel Adams Junior and a future governor of Massachusetts, the Parkman-Webster murder of 1849, and the eighty-two-year arc of state anatomy laws that finally brought the trade to an end. We close with the defensive measures families used to protect their dead — mortsafes, watchhouses, cemetery guns, and the distinctly American invention of the coffin torpedo, patented by Columbus, Ohio artist Philip K. Clover in 1878 and credited with at least one fatal explosion in Knox County, Ohio, in 1881.This is not a story that ends cleanly. The bones are still being found. The Medical College of Georgia basement was excavated in 1989, and the remains of nearly ten thousand bones — more than seventy-five percent of them African American — were eventually reburied at Cedar Grove in 1998. Holden Chapel at Harvard gave up its own cache of dissection waste during a renovation in 1999. The questions these discoveries raise about consent, about whose bodies belong to medicine and whose belong to themselves, run all the way from the Resurrection Men of 1788 to the Henrietta Lacks case of the twentieth century to the body-broker scandals that still surface in the headlines today.Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner.

of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth.

If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by the disturbed. There's a particular kind of cold that settles into a graveyard after midnight. Not weather cold, something else. The kind that creeps in once the wind dies down and the lanterns in the nearest farmhouse have been blown out for the

night. Imagine, if you would, a small cemetery on the edge of an American city sometime in the 1840s. A church on one side. A wagon road on the other. The dirt over the newest grave is, still soft, still raised in that telltale mound that says someone here was loved and lost within the past day or two. There are flowers, maybe, a wooden marker because the family couldn't afford stone. Someone's mother, someone's brother, someone's child. Now picture two men coming over the wall. They've done this before. They know which side of the cemetery faces away from the road. They know which graves were dug today. They've been listening for the funeral bell since morning. of them carries a short, flat-bladed shovel. The other carries a sack and a length of rope.

They don't speak. They don't need to. They've fallen into the rhythm of this work the way a butcher falls into the rhythm of his cuts. They go to the head of the grave first. They never dig out the whole thing, because that takes hours. Instead, they break through the earth at the head of the coffin, expose the top third of the lid, and split the wood with a hooked iron bar. Then they thread the rope under the corpse's arms, and they pull. In about an hour, sometimes less, the body is out of the ground. The grave clothes are stripped and thrown back in, because in most states stealing the clothes was a felony, but stealing the body was only a misdemeanor. The dirt goes back, the flowers go back. By morning the family will visit, and they'll see exactly what they expect to see. A grave,

their loved one resting beneath it. Except their loved one isn't there anymore. By breakfast, the body is on a wagon. By mid-morning, it's been delivered through the back door of a medical college. By afternoon, it's lying on a wooden table in a dissection room, surrounded by young men in shirt sleeves with scalples in their hands. This is the world we're going into tonight. And I want to be honest with you up front about why it belongs on disturbing history. A lot of what we cover on this show falls into categories that, on some level, we expect.

War. Murder. atrocity, government overreach, the kind of darkness that, once you start studying history, you start to recognize as a recurring shape. But this story is different. This story takes place in cemeteries we've all walked past. It takes place in cities we still live in. It takes place under the floors of hospitals and universities that in many cases are still operating today. And it raises a question that I don't think most people have ever stopped to ask, which is this. Where did medicine come from? Not the ideas.

Not the textbooks. The bodies. The actual flesh and bone that taught generations of American doctors how a human being is put together. Where did those bodies come from? And who decided which graves were the ones that could be dug up? Because somebody decided, that's the part that should stay with you tonight. Somebody, or rather a lot of somebody's, decided whose remains were sacred and whose remains were raw material. whose families would be protected and whose families would not,

whose grief would be respected and whose grief would be invisible. What we're about to walk through is one of the longest-running, most widespread, and most successfully buried scandals in American history. It involved hundreds of medical schools. It involved thousands of bodies. It involved doctors, professors, students, sextons, undertakers, freelance criminals, and in at least one case, an enslaved man who was forced to rob the graves of his own community for decades. It involved President's families. It involved poor immigrants who came to this

country looking for a better life and ended up on a dissection table. It involved black men, women, and children whose graves were targeted because nobody in power was going to come looking. And it involved a quiet, persistent understanding among the people running American medicine, that this was simply how things were going to be done, until enough scandal piled up that the country could no longer pretend not to see it. The men who did the digging called themselves Resurrection Men. The doctors called them sack-em-up men. The newspapers, when they wrote about them at all, called them gulls. Whatever you want to call them, they were a fixture of American life for the better part of a hundred years. And the story of what they did, who they did it for,

and whose graves they preferred to visit, is a story that says a lot about who we were as a country. and frankly, a lot about who we still are. The fact is, we're going to spend some time tonight in places most people would rather not look. This is the Resurrection Men in America. To understand why this whole grim economy ever came into existence, you have to understand what was happening in American medicine in the late 1700s and early 1800s. And the short version is, American medicine was trying to grow up.

For most of the colonial era, if you wanted to be a doctor in America, the path was apprenticeship. You'd attach yourself to an established physician. You'd ride with him on his calls. You'd watch him bleed patients and set bones. And at some point, he'd declare you ready, and you'd hang out your own shingle. There were almost no formal medical schools in the colonies, and the few that existed were small, underfunded, and generally inferior to their European counterparts. That started to change after the revolution. The new country needed doctors.

The population was growing fast. The cities were filling up, and the old apprenticeship model couldn't keep pace. Medical schools began to open, first in Philadelphia and New York, then in Boston, then in Baltimore, then westward into Lexington, Cincinnati, Louisville, and dozens of smaller towns. By the 1840s, there were medical colleges scattered across nearly every state, and many cities had two or three of them competing for students. And here's where the trouble starts. Because at the same time, American medicine was trying to professionalize,

it was also catching up to a European idea that had been transforming medical practice across the Atlantic for the past century. The idea was simple. To understand the human body, you had to dissect the human body. You had to cut. You had to look. You had to lift the heart out of the chest and turn it over in your hand and trace the path of every vessel by yourself with your own eyes.

This was a radical departure from older medical traditions, which had relied heavily on textbook descriptions, classical authorities like Galen, and a general squeamishness about touching the dead. The new generation of doctors, particularly those who had trained in Edinburgh or Paris, came back to America convinced that hands-on anatomical instruction was the foundation of any real medical education.

And they were right. They were absolutely right. You can't safely operate on a body if you don't know what's inside it. But here's the problem. To teach anatomy properly, every medical school needed bodies. Lots of bodies. A typical medical course in this period ran for about four months. And during that time, a class of 50 or 60 students would be expected to work in groups.

Each group dissecting at least one cadaver, sometimes two or three over the course of the term. That meant a school with 100 students might need 20 or 30 bodies in a single year. Multiply that across the country, and you're talking about hundreds of bodies a year, then thousands as the schools multiplied. And the question nobody in American government wanted to answer was, where exactly are those bodies supposed to come from? Because the legal supply was almost nothing. In some states, the bodies of executed criminals could be turned over for dissection,

but executions were relatively rare in the early 1800s, and not every state allowed even that. There were no provisions for using unclaimed bodies from poor houses or hospitals. There were no donation programs. There was no legal mechanism whatsoever for a medical school to acquire a corpse, except in a handful of states where executed murderers might be handed over. Meanwhile, the demand was growing every year. New schools were opening. existing schools were expanding their classes.

Anatomy professors were being hired at handsome salaries, and the schools that could promise the best dissection experience were the schools that attracted the most students, which meant the most tuition, which meant the most prestige. So you had a situation where the law said, you couldn't have what you needed. The public would have rioted at the suggestion of legalizing what you needed,

and yet every medical school in the country needed it just to function. something had to give, and what gave was the dignity of the dead. The medical schools, by and large, didn't dig up the bodies themselves. Some of them did, especially in the early days, when professors would lead their students out to the cemetery on a moonless night as a kind of grim ride of passage. But as the schools became more established, as the faculty became more respectable, that work was farmed out to a separate class of men,

men who weren't squeamish, men who needed money, men who didn't care or had stopped caring or had never cared in the first place. These were the resurrection men, and in city after city across the country, they became a recognized, if rarely acknowledged, part of the local economy. The medical school had a back door. The resurrection men knew where it was. The professor of anatomy had a discretionary budget for what was politely called demonstration material. And every fall, when the term began, fresh subjects started arriving on tables in the dissection

rooms, and nobody asked too many questions about how they got there. This was the system. It wasn't an accident, and it wasn't a few bad apples. It was the system, and it ran for the better part of a century, and almost everybody in American medicine knew about it. The first major American eruption of public anger over this system came in New York City in the spring of 1788, and the way of the it came is almost too perfect to believe. The story, as it was told and retold afterward, goes like this. A boy was playing outside the New York Hospital one afternoon when he noticed an open window on an upper floor. Curious, he climbed up onto a fence or a ladder, depending on which version you read, and peered inside. What he saw was a medical student in shirt sleeves

working at a dissection table. The student noticed the boy, and according to most accounts, decided to have a little fun. He picked up a severed arm and waved it at the boy through the window. In some versions, he shouted down something to the effect that the arm had belonged to the boy's mother. The cruelty of that joke would have been bad enough on its own. But the boy's mother had, in fact, recently died. The boy ran home and told his father.

The father accompanied by neighbors, went to the cemetery where his wife was buried. They dug down. The grave was empty. That was the spark. Within hours, a crowd had gathered outside the hospital. By that night, the crowd had become a mob. They broke into the hospital. They found the dissection rooms.

And they found, by various accounts, somewhere between half a dozen and a dozen bodies in various states of dissection, along with anatomical specimens preserved in jars. The mob destroyed everything they could lay hands on, then turned their attention to the doctors and students themselves, who fled. Several of them barely escaped with their lives, hidden by sympathetic neighbors or smuggled out the back of the hospital. The mayor called out the militia. The governor was eventually involved.

Over the next several days, the rioters roamed the city looking for doctors, hunting them through the streets, attacking the homes of physicians who were rumored to be involved in dissection. A number of prominent men tried to calm the crowd. John Jay, who would later become Chief Justice of the United States, was struck in their head by a rock and seriously injured. Baron von Stobin, the Prussian-born hero of Valley Forge, was hit as well. Several rioters were killed when the militia finally opened fire to disperse the crowd. Estimates of the death toll vary, but somewhere between three and 20 people were killed across the several days of unrest. When it was over, New York had had its first public reckoning

with what was happening in its medical schools. The state legislature prodded into action, passed a law in 1789 that made grave robbing illegal and allowed judges to add dissection to sentences of murder. It was one of the earliest such laws in the United States. It was also, in practical terms, completely useless. The supply of executed criminals was nowhere near enough to meet the demand. New York's medical schools kept growing, kept teaching, and kept needing bodies. So the resurrection men kept working, just a little more carefully than before. The New York doctor's riot wasn't the end of anything.

It was just the beginning of a pattern that would repeat itself, in varying degrees, in city after city, for the next 90 years. Public outrage would erupt when a particularly egregious case came to light. The newspapers would howl. The legislature would make some gesture toward reform. And then the gesture would prove inadequate. The schools would go on doing what they'd always done and the cycle would reset. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

What 1788 made absolutely clear, though, was something the medical establishment would carry with it from then on. The public, given the chance, would tear them apart, not metaphorically, literally. So whatever they did, they had to do it quietly, and they had to do it in a way that wouldn't reach the front page of the local paper. That meant being selective. That meant choosing graves where nobody was going to.

to come looking. That meant building a quiet system that ran underneath the city, year after year, and depended absolutely on the silence of the people whose loved ones were being taken. So who were they? The resurrection men, the actual men who went into the cemeteries with shovels? The honest answer is that most of them are lost to history, because the work was illegal, the work was disreputable, and the men who did it didn't tend to leave behind diaries or memoirs. We know that mostly through court records when they were caught, through newspaper accounts when scandals broke, and through the occasional reminiscence written decades later by a former medical student who'd been involved in some midnight expedition during his school days. What we can say is that they tended

to come from the bottom of the social order. Some were sextons, the men responsible for digging graves and maintaining cemeteries, who had perfect knowledge of where the freshest burials were and could enter the grounds at any hour without arousing suspicion. Some were undertakers, or men who worked for undertakers, who had the same access. Some were simply criminals who had moved into body snatching the way other men might have moved into burglary, because the work paid, and the penalties, when you got caught, were comparatively light. In Cincinnati, one of the most famous resurrection men of the century was a man named William Cunningham, known throughout the city as Old Cunney,

and sometimes as the ghoul or old man dead. Born in Ireland around 1807, he was by every account that survives, a memorable figure. A heavy drinker, often filthy, with a temper that flared when he was crossed. He supplied bodies to the Medical College of Ohio from the mid-1850s until his death in 1871. He was so well known in the trade

that medical students at the college joked about him openly. Some of the more daring students went out with him, on his nightly rounds, partly to learn the craft, partly for the thrill of it. Cunney's reputation extended into something approaching local folklore. He had a particular method for working a fresh grave that he'd refined over the years. Instead of digging out the entire coffin, he would dig a small hole at the head of the grave, break through the upper end of the coffin lid, and pull the body out by means of a rope. He worked fast, often finishing a grave in well under an hour. By some estimates, he resurrected as many as a hundred bodies a season and supplied

not just the schools in Cincinnati, but customers as far away as Kansas. The story most often told about him is that, before his death from heart disease in late 1871, he made arrangements for his own body to be sold to the Medical College of Ohio. After he was dissected, his skeleton was wired together, posed sitting on a tombstone with a spade in one bony hand, and, and he was a dissecting and a pipe in his teeth and put on display in the college cabinet. He had ended up exactly where he'd spent so many years sending other people. Cunney was unusual mostly in that we know his name. There were men like him in every American city of any size.

Boston had them. Philadelphia had them. Baltimore had them. And the Baltimore men were considered among the most professional and best organized in the country. Supplying not just the local schools, but by some accounts, shipping bodies and barrels of brine as far as Charleston and New Orleans. Pittsburgh had them. Albany had them. New Haven, where Yale's medical school operated, had a particularly notorious gang in the early 1800s. The methods varied, but the basic technique

was remarkably consistent. The Resurrection Men worked at night, usually within a day or two of burial, before decomposition set in too far to make the body useful for instruction. They worked the head of the grave, breaking through to the upper portion of the coffin and prying it open. They removed the body, usually by means of a rope under the arms or around the neck. They stripped the shroud and the burial clothes and threw them back into the coffin, both because the clothes had no value to them and because, as I mentioned earlier, stealing the body was a misdemeanor in most states, but stealing the property buried with the body was a felony. The body itself went into a sack or a barrel. If it was a long carry to the wagon, a strong man could throw a corpse over his shoulder.

If the body had to travel any distance, it was packed in salt, or in later years, shipped in barrels labeled as something else. Pickled pork was a favorite cover. Whiskey was another, and the prices were not insignificant. In the early 1800s, a fresh adult body in good condition could fetch anywhere from $10 to $25 in most American cities, which in modern terms is hundreds of dollars at minimum, and considerably more during periods when supply ran short. A young, healthy specimen might bring more. A pregnant woman, valued for the rare opportunity to demonstrate the anatomy of pregnancy,

could bring substantially more, sometimes $50 or more. Children, particularly newborns and stillbirths, were also priced according to their utility for specific, demonstrations, and there's grim evidence that some resurrection men paid off midwives or hospital workers to obtain such specimens before they ever reached burial. For a man working at the bottom of the urban economy, where day labor might pay a dollar or less, the pay was extraordinary. A resurrection man who could deliver three or four bodies a week during the medical school session was, by the standards of his class, doing remarkably well. And that economic reality was a big part of

what kept the trade alive. Whatever moral horror the public felt about it, the math worked. The schools needed the bodies. The schools could pay. There were always going to be men willing to do the digging. What's striking, looking back at the available record, is how often these men became local fixtures.

Not respectable, certainly. Not invited to anyone's parlor, but known. The local police often knew exactly who the resurrection men were. The local newspapers occasionally printed thinly veiled references to their activities. The medical students, who were often well-connected young men from prominent families, knew them on site and sometimes bantered with them in the streets. There was in many cities a kind of unspoken understanding that these men existed,

that what they did was technically illegal, but practically necessary, and that prosecuting them would create more problems than it would solve. That understanding only broke down when something went wrong. When a particularly prominent grave was hit, when a body turned up somewhere it wasn't supposed to, when a family went looking and found, against all the odds, exactly what had happened to their dead.

And when that happened, all hell broke loose. But before we get to the cases that broke into public view, we need to talk about who it was, really, that the resurrection men were targeting. Because the popular image then and now is of cemeteries in general being plundered indiscriminate. And that's not what happened, not even close. The Resurrection men were professionals.

They worked in a system that depended on not getting caught. And the surest way not to get caught was to choose graves where nobody was going to notice. Or where, if they did notice, nobody with any power was going to care. The most vulnerable graves in 19th century America were black graves, without question, without exception. Across every region of the country, in every state where medical schools operated, the graves of black Americans, both enslaved and free, were targeted at rates that vastly exceeded their share of the population. This was true in the South, where the medical schools of cities like Charleston, Augusta, Atlanta,

Nashville, and New Orleans relied heavily on enslaved or recently emancipated black bodies. It was true in the border states, where Baltimore and Lexington and Louisville, drew much of their dissection supply from local black cemeteries. And it was true in the north, where Philadelphia, New York, Cincinnati, and Boston medical schools sent their resurrection men preferentially to black burial grounds. There's a reason for this, and it's a reason that says a great deal about American society in this period.

Black families, particularly enslaved black families, had almost no legal recourse if a grave was disturbed. They couldn't testify against white men in most jurisdictions, They couldn't bring lawsuits. They couldn't expect the local sheriff to investigate a complaint. And even if he did, no jury was going to convict a white doctor on the testimony of a black mourner. The grave of an enslaved person on a plantation was, from the resurrection man's point of view, an asset hiding in plain sight.

It belonged to no one who could fight back. Free black communities were only slightly less vulnerable. Their cemeteries were often located in less desirable points. less desirable parts of town, sometimes on land that wasn't formally consecrated, sometimes without fences or watchmen. They were rarely patrolled. The white press rarely covered crimes that took place in them, and the white legal system rarely took complaints from those communities seriously enough to act on. This pattern shows up again and again in the historical record, sometimes in the most chilling ways.

When construction workers in 1989 were renovating the old medical college of Georgia building in Augusta, they found the remains of nearly 10,000 bones in the basement. More than 75% of those remains were African American. They had been used for dissection, and then they had been dumped in pits and buried under the building, where they sat undisturbed for over a century until the renovation work uncovered them. The Medical College of Georgia had, throughout the 1800s, employed a single man as its primary supplier of bodies. His name was Grandison Harris. He was an enslaved man, purchased by the college in 1852 for around $700.

He was tall, strong, and against the laws of Georgia at the time, literate. He could read death notices in the newspaper and knew when a fresh burial was likely. Year after year, decade after decade, he was saying, sent out at night to Cedar Grove Cemetery, which was the segregated burial ground used by Augusta's black community, and he brought back bodies for the college's anatomy classes. An enslaved black man, owned by a medical school, sent to dig up the graves of his own community to be cut apart by white students, learning their trade. That's the system working exactly as designed. That's not a glitch. That's the design. After emancipation, Harris kept working at the college.

He had no other trade, no other source of income, and no other home. He stayed on as a janitor and continued, by all accounts, to procure bodies for the college well into the 1870s and possibly later. He died in 1911 and was buried in the same Cedar Grove Cemetery that he had spent decades plundering. Whether his grave was disturbed afterward is unknown. The Medical College of Georgia case is the most extensively documented, but it's not the worst. It's just the one we have the most evidence for, because of the bones discovered in the basement.

There were similar arrangements at virtually every major Southern medical school. The Medical College of South Carolina and Charleston had a comparable system, drawing on the bodies of enslaved people from the surrounding plantations. The University of Virginia, despite Thomas Jefferson's high-minded ideals, sourced cadavers in similar ways throughout the 1800s. After the Civil War, when the formal institution of slavery ended, the same medical schools simply transitioned to plundering free black cemeteries instead, often using formerly enslaved men, like Harris, as their procurement agents.

But it wasn't only black graves. The other major category of vulnerable burial in 19th century America was what you might call the indigent dead, the poor, the friendless. the people who died in poor houses and charity hospitals in immigrant tenements on the streets, people who had no family to claim them, or whose family was too poor to give them a proper burial, or who were buried in Potter's fields, the pauper sections of city cemeteries that were rarely visited and rarely watched. In Boston, in Philadelphia, in New York, in every major American city, the Potter's field was a known supply line.

medical schools cultivated relationships with the keepers of these fields, sometimes paying them outright, sometimes simply tolerating their participation in the trade in exchange for not turning them in. A body buried in a pauper's grave on a Tuesday afternoon might be on a dissection table by Wednesday morning. The keeper of the field, if questioned, would know nothing. The undertaker, if questioned, would know nothing. The grieving family, if there was one, would never know enough to ask. Recent immigrants were particularly vulnerable to this treatment. The Irish poor of Boston and New York, fleeing famine in the 1840s and 50s, suffered terrible mortality from disease and overwork in their new country. When they died, they often died in the public hospitals, and they were often buried in the

cheapest available graves, in the parts of the cemetery that were least visited and least guarded. There's a reason that the basements of Boston's medical schools in this period would have been filled disproportionately with the bodies of poor Irish men and women. They had crossed the ocean to die in a strange country. And then, after death, they were used to teach the children of America's professional classes how to be doctors. Executed criminals, where their bodies were legally available, made up a small but symbolically important portion of the supply. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. And here you start to see how the law itself participated in the system.

The state would hang a man convicted of murder, and then it would deliver his body to the medical school, with the understanding that this delivery was part of his punishment. Dissection was understood by the men who wrote those laws to be an additional indignity inflicted on the most despised members of society. The message was clear. If you are useful enough to society in life, your body will not be able to society.

not be touched. If you are useless enough or hated enough, your body becomes property. That logic, once you trace it through to its conclusion, tells you almost everything you need to know about how 19th century America thought about human worth. The graves that were safe were the graves of the respectable, the middle class, the white, the property, the connected. Their cemeteries had walls and watchmen and stone monuments. Their families could afford iron coffee, or vaults or paid guards. And if anyone did dig up the wrong grave, the local newspaper would howl about it.

The local police would investigate, and the medical school in question would have a serious problem. The graves that weren't safe were the graves of everyone else. Black Americans, poor whites, immigrants, the institutionalized, the unclaimed, the despised. Their cemeteries were in the wrong parts of town. Their families didn't have the resources to keep you. watch. Their disappearance, if anyone noticed at all, didn't make the front page. And that two-tiered

system of who got to rest in peace and who did not, was understood, accepted, and built into the foundations of American medical education for the better part of a century. Which brings us finally to what happens when the system breaks down. When a resurrection man, for whatever reason, makes a mistake. When the wrong grave is hit, and the wrong family comes looking, and the whole quark quiet machine is suddenly dragged out into the light of day. The case that did more than any other to expose the resurrection trade in America happened in the spring of 1878, and it began with a death that should have been completely uneventful. John Scott Harrison was a former congressman from Ohio. He was the son of William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States, and he was

the father of Benjamin Harrison, who would, a decade later, become the 23rd president. He was was, in other words, sandwiched between two presidencies. A Harrison of the Harrisons, a man whose name carried weight in the national press and especially in Ohio. He died on the 25th of May in 1878 at his farm at North Bend, Ohio, of natural causes. He was 73 years old. He'd had a long career in public service and a comfortable retirement. His funeral was held a few days later, and he was placed in the family vault at Congress Green Cemetery, near the tomb of his father. He'd had father, the late president. The Harrisons, being a careful family, also took precautions. They had heard, as everyone in their part of Ohio had heard, that grave robbing was a problem in

the region. So they reinforced the burial. The family placed three large stone slabs over the casket, covered them with cement, and hired a watchman to guard the grave for a month. Now, here's where it turns. At the funeral, the family was made aware that another local grave, that of a young man named Augustus Devon, who was a friend of the Harrison family, had been disturbed shortly after his recent burial. Augustus had died of consumption in mid-May, just days before John Scott Harrison. His grave in another nearby cemetery had been visited by what was clearly a resurrection party, and the family suspected that the body had been taken to a medical school in Cincinnati. So a day after the patriarch's funeral, a delegation from the family went into

Cincinnati to investigate. The delegation included John Scott's son John, often referred to as John Harrison the Younger, and a cousin named George Eaton. Their goal was to recover the body of young Augustus Devin and bring him home for a proper burial. They went with a search warrant and accompanied by Cincinnati police officers to the Ohio Medical College, which was one of several medical schools in the city at the time. They had reason to believe Augustus might be there, And what happened next is the kind of moment that when you read about it, you have to read it twice to make sure you're understanding it correctly. The search party went through the building. They found a chute, a kind of vertical shaft used to move bodies between floors.

There was a rope hanging in the chute, and on the rope there was a body. The body was nude. A cloth had been thrown over its head. They asked for the body to be lowered. It was. They lifted the cloth. It wasn't Augustus Devin. It was John Scott Harrison, the patriarch of the Harrison family, the son of one president, the father of another. The man who, a single day earlier, had been

laid to rest in a reinforced family vault, with the mourners assuring each other that no resurrection man would ever dare touch a grave like that one. The shock of that moment is hard to overstate. The family was looking at their patriarch's body, naked, dangling on a rope, in the back of a medical school in Cincinnati. The dirt of the grave was still under the corpse's fingernails. The whole journey from the family vault and North Bend to the shoot in the medical college building had taken less than a day. The story exploded in the national press. This wasn't some poor immigrant or some friendless black laborer whose disappearance could be quietly absorbed. This was a Harrison. This was American aristocracy, as much as the country

admitted to having such a thing. And the implications were obvious to everyone. If they could take a Harrison, if they could plunder the grave of a former congressman, the son of a president, who could possibly be safe. The newspapers, which had been generally restrained in their coverage of the resurrection trade until this point, dropped that restraint entirely. The Cincinnati Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Papers, all of them ran the story for days. There were illustrations, There were editorials. There were demands for prosecution. The medical school's janitor, a man named A.Q. Marshall, was eventually arrested.

The administration of the school disclaimed any knowledge of the body's presence, which was, of course, an absurd defense. The body was hanging in their building. Augustus Devon's body, by the way, was eventually located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where it had apparently been shipped to the University of Michigan's medical school. The interstate transport of stolen bodies, even across state lines, turned out to be a routine part of the trade. Bodies were commodities, and like other commodities, they moved on the market. The political fallout was immediate.

Benjamin Harrison, John Scott's son, who would go on to become the 23rd president of the United States a decade later, filed a civil suit against the medical college and was vocal and pushing for reform. Within months, Ohio passed a much stricter anatomy law that allowed unclaimed bodies from public institutions to be turned over to medical schools for dissection, on the theory that this would reduce the demand for stolen ones. Other states, watching the Harrison case from a distance, accelerated their own reform efforts. The trade did not end. It would not fully end for another decade or so, and some practitioners would continue working into the early 20th century. But the era in which the resurrection men could operate as openly as they had been was after 1878, effectively over. There's something else worth lingering on about the Harrison case.

What the family pointed out, both at the time and afterward, was that what had happened to John Scott Harrison had been happening to other families, families with no political connections and no public voice, for decades. The Harrison case was not unique. It was simply the case that finally got attention. because the Harrisons had the resources and the prominence to force attention. That's an important framing. Without the Harrison name, the story might have been buried as quietly as the bodies themselves.

It's also worth noting what the Harrison case reveals about American class structure in this period. The reason it was such a scandal, the reason it broke into the national press the way it did, was precisely because it violated the unspoken rule that had governed the resurrection trade for a hundred years. The rule was, you do not touch the graves of the powerful. You touch the graves of the poor. You touch the graves of black families. You touch the graves of the unclaimed, the immigrant, the friendless. You leave the Harrisons alone.

When the resurrection men or the medical school employees who hired them broke that rule, even by accident, the entire system was suddenly visible. The whole apparatus, the whole quiet exchange that had been running underneath American medicine since the revolutionary period was suddenly being talked about on the front page. And once it was being talked about, it could not be sustained in its old form. I want to walk through a few more cases briefly,

because they helped fill in the picture of just how widespread this was. Before we get to the cascade of smaller cases that filled out the picture, I want to spend a moment on a story from across the Atlantic that shaped how Americans thought about all of this. Because the resurrection trade in the United States, didn't develop in a vacuum.

The Americans who watched their cemeteries being plundered were also reading the newspapers. And the newspapers, in the late 1820s, were carrying a story out of Edinburgh that made the American situation look almost restrained by comparison. The story was Burke and Hare. William Burke and William Hare were two Irishmen living in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the late 1820s. They ran, or rather Hare's wife ran, a cheap lodging house in a house in a house in a a poor part of the city. The economics of medical education in Edinburgh, which was then arguably the

most prestigious medical school in the English-speaking world, had created exactly the same supply problem we've been talking about. The bodies were needed. The legal supply was non-existent. The price was right. Burke and Hare started, as far as anyone knows, almost by accident. An elderly tenant of the lodging house died owing rent. Hair, looking for some way to recover cover the money, took the body to a local anatomist named Robert Knox. Knox paid them seven pounds and ten shillings, which was a lot of money for two men of their station. Suddenly the wheels began turning. There were other tenants in the lodging house. There were other vulnerable people in the streets. They didn't have to dig anymore. They could simply

create the bodies they needed to sell. Over the course of about 10 months in 1828, Burke and Hare murdered 16 people. They lured them to the lodging house. They got them drunk. They smothered them in a method that left almost no marks, a technique that came to be called burking in the years afterward. They sold the bodies, fresh, to Dr. Knox, who paid in cash and asked no questions. When they were finally caught in late 1828, the case became one of the great public scandals of the century. Hare turned King's evidence and walked free. Burk was hanged in everything. Burk was hanged in Edinburgh in January of 1829 in front of a crowd estimated at 25,000 people. His body, by court order, was then publicly dissected, and his skin was tanned and turned into

souvenirs, including a wallet that's still on display in a museum in Edinburgh today. Dr. Knox, despite the obvious complicity that the public attributed to him, was never prosecuted. His career was ruined, but he never went to prison. He died years later, having moved to London and quietly resumed a medical career. The Burke and Hare case was carried in American newspapers in detail, and it had two distinct effects on American attitudes. The first effect was a wave of horror. Americans who had vaguely understood that the medical schools were obtaining bodies through illegal means were suddenly confronted with a worst-case scenario in vivid, unmistakable detail. Burke and Hare had not just dug up the dead. They had created the dead on demand, and

sold them to a respected academic. The line between body snatching and murder had been crossed by men who were doing exactly what American Resurrection Men were doing, except more efficiently. The second effect was a new word, to Burke someone, became almost overnight, a common term for a particular kind of murder. And while the famous Edinburgh case did not have an exact American equivalent, the suspicion that American Resurrection Men might cross the same line was suddenly real, and it was very much alive in the public imagination. That suspicion was not entirely paranoid. There are at least a few documented American cases in which body snatchers were either suspected of

or charged with murder on the theory that a fresh, healthy corpse was more valuable than a recovered one, and that the temptation to expedite the supply might prove irresistible. None of those cases produced the kind of clear-cut conviction Burke received, but the rumor that American body snatchers had begun to burke their victims circulated in American cities throughout the 1830s and 40s, and it added a new layer of dread to the already grim atmosphere around the trade. The burke and hair case also produced in Britain, the first real legislative response to the body supply crisis.

The British Anatomy Act of 1832 abolished the legal use of executed criminals as the primary source of dissection material and replaced it with a system in which unclaimed bodies from workhouses and hospitals could be turned over to medical schools. The American anatomy laws that followed in the 1830s and beyond were heavily influenced by the British model. So in a strange and grim way, the murders Burke and Hare committed in Edinburgh helped shape the legal framework that decades later would finally bring some order to the American situation.

There's a small American story from this same era that's worth telling. because it shows how directly the New England public was confronting the same issues. In January of 1824, in a small Connecticut town called West Haven, just outside New Haven, a young woman named Bathsheba Smith died and was buried in the local cemetery. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. A few days later, suspicions arose that her grave had been disturbed. A search party, led by the local constable Erastus Osborne,

went to the Yale Medical Institution in New Haven. They found her body in the basement, hidden under a flat stone in the pavement, doubled up under her own grave clothes. The reaction was furious. A mob descended on the medical school. Windows were smashed. Property was destroyed. Local militia had to be called out to disperse the crowd.

A Yale medical assistant named Afram Colborne was eventually convicted of the crime and sentenced to nine months in jail along with a $300 fine. Many historians believe Colborne was a scapegoat for the medical students who'd actually done the work, and that the school protected its own by letting Colborne take the fall. The professor of anatomy, Dr. Jonathan Knight, who had a long and otherwise respectable career, was implicated by association, but not personally charged. The case became known locally as the New Haven Dissection Riot, and it shadowed Yale's medical reputation for years afterward.

What the Bathsheba Smith case showed, more than anything else, was how easily the system broke down when it touched the wrong family. Bathsheba Smith was not wealthy or powerful, but she was a respectable young white woman from a Connecticut farming family. She was in the calculus of 19th century New England, exactly the kind of person whose grave should have been left alone. The fact that she had been taken anyway, that her body had been quietly delivered to the basement of the most prestigious university, in the state, demonstrated to the public that the assurances they'd been given about the resurrection trade were in many cases, simply not true. There's another small piece of Harvard's history that's worth mentioning here, because it tells you something about how casually the medical establishment treated this work in the early years. At Harvard in the late 1700s, there was an

informal student society called the Spunkers, sometimes also referred to as the Anatomical Club. The Spunkers were medical students and aspiring physicians who, as part of their training and as a kind of fraternal pastime, went out into the cemeteries around Boston and procured bodies for their own anatomical study. They are not described in surviving documents as villains. They were considered in the loose understanding of the time, simply ambitious young men who wanted to learn their profession well. Several of them went on to distinguished careers, including John Warren, who would become the founder of Harbourn. medical school, his son John Collins Warren, Samuel Adams Jr., son of the founding father, and William Eustace, a future governor of Massachusetts and Secretary of War. The fact that they spent some of their student years digging up the dead was treated when it was

treated at all as a quaint anecdote rather than a moral problem. That casualness, that almost cheerful matter-of-factness about what was being done in the name of medical education, is, I think, one of the most disturbing aspects of this whole history. The men who participated in the resurrection trade, on the medical side, did not generally see themselves as criminals. They saw themselves as scientists, educators, professionals. The work was unpleasant, but the work was necessary, and in their minds the necessity justified the unpleasantness. The people whose graves they were emptying were, in some sense, not quite real to them. The poor were not quite real.

The black were not quite real. The immigrant, the indigent, the friendless. They were inventory. They were teaching AIDS. They were not in the daily working consciousness of the schools, fully fellow human beings whose families would mourn them and whose graves should be sacred. That moral blindness, more than the digging itself,

is what kept the system running for as long as it did. It was the precondition for everything else. In Philadelphia, in late 1880, A journalist for the Philadelphia press named Louis Magerjee broke open one of the largest body-snatching scandals in American history. Megherjee had been observing dissections at Jefferson Medical College, which was led at the time by an anatomy professor named William S. Forbes. Megarji began to suspect, based on the racial demographics of the cadavers he was seeing, that something was wrong. He followed the trail back to a place called Lebanon Cemetery, a five-acre black burial ground in South. Philadelphia. There he watched a team of body snatchers, including the cemetery's own superintendent,

loading freshly stolen bodies into a one-horse cart. Just before Christmas, he confronted them with a gun and a notebook, and the story broke wide open. In Pittsburgh, in the same era, the Western Pennsylvania Medical College was implicated in a series of grave thefts from local cemeteries, including the cemetery serving the city's black community. The pattern was identical to what we've seen elsewhere. Bodies disappearing. Families noticing. Investigations finding the missing relatives in the basement of the medical school. In New York, even after the 1788 riot, the trade continued for nearly a century. The College of Physicians and Surgeons, the various Bellevue programs, and other institutions in the city, all relied on Resurrection Men working the

cemeteries of the city's poor. The Five Points neighborhood with its largely immigrant population, was a frequent source. So were the various potters fields that the city operated on Hart Island and elsewhere. In Massachusetts, the trade had been so persistent and so notorious that the state passed the first Comprehensive Anatomy Act in the United States in 1831, 50 years before most other states. The Massachusetts law allowed unclaimed bodies from state institutions, prisons, and almshouses to be turned over to medical schools, on the explicit understanding that this would reduce the incentive for grave robbing. In practice, it did reduce the incentive, but it didn't eliminate it. The schools continued to receive bodies through informal

channels for decades, especially when the official supply ran short. In Maryland, the University of Maryland's medical school was probably the most infamous in the country for its body procurement practices. Baltimore's Resurrection men were considered the most professional in the United States. They worked in organized teams. They had wagons and equipment. They worked the local cemeteries with such efficiency that some of them were said to be supplying not only the local schools, but also schools in Philadelphia, New York, and even further afield. Beginning in the 1820s, the university kept a janitor known only as Frank, whose last name has been lost to history, who served as the school's principal body snatcher for years. He was praised in the surviving correspondence of Maryland professors

as a man in their words, of whom a better never lifted a spade. The bodies he and his successors brought back were used to train an entire generation of physicians. Even Harvard, the most prestigious medical school in the country, was not immune. The Harvard Medical School in the early 1800s depended heavily on bodies obtained through irregular channels, including from local cemeteries and from the city's almshouses. The most famous case associated with Harvard in this period was actually a murder rather than a grave robbing. In 1849, a Boston physician named Dr. George Parkman, who had been a benefactor of Harvard's medical school, disappeared. His body was eventually found in pieces in the laboratory of John White Webster, a chemistry professor at Harvard's medical school, who had owed Parkman money.

Webster was tried, convicted, and hanged. The case is technically a murder case, not a body snatching case, but it tells you something about the culture that surrounded the medical school. The lab was a place where dismembered human remains were not unusual. The professor was a man who knew, professionally, how to dispose of a body. The prosecution had to actually prove that the remains in the laboratory were Parkman, because the lab routinely contained other human remains that had been obtained, presumably through the same kinds of channels we've been discussing.

In the western states, particularly Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, the trade flourished throughout the middle and late 1800s. Cincinnati alone, with its multiple competing medical schools, had so many resurrection men working at cemeteries that some sources claim every cemetery in the city was under some level of nightly watch by the 1860s. The Ohio River served as a kind of corpse highway, with bodies being shipped upstream and downstream,

depending on which schools were short. Louisville's Medical Department of the University of Louisville, Lexington's Transylvania University, and Cincinnati's various schools all participated in this regional traffic. In the South, beyond what we've already discussed about Augusta, the medical schools of Charleston, Nashville, New Orleans, Mo Bill, and other cities all operated on the same basic premise.

Black bodies, disproporated. unfortunately, were the foundation of medical education. After the Civil War, when the explicit ownership of black people ended, the practical exploitation of black graves continued. The schools that had relied on enslaved men to dig up enslaved graves, now relied on free black men, often impoverished, often desperate, to dig up the graves of free black communities. The pattern, region by region, school by school,

is so consistent that it's hard to read about it without being struck by the totality of it. This wasn't a few rogue institutions. This was American medicine. From the prestige schools of the East Coast to the tiny proprietary colleges and frontier towns, the system ran on the same fuel. Stolen bodies, taken from the graves of the people who were least able to fight back. Of course, the families who could fight back, and who knew how vulnerable their dead were, did fight back.

And the methods they use to protect their cemeteries are, in their own grim way, fascinating. The simplest defense was vigilance. In the 1820s and 1830s in many American cemeteries, families would camp out at the graveside of a recent burial for the first week or two, until the body was decomposed enough to be of no use to a medical school. They'd sleep in tents. They'd build small fires. They'd post-watchmen. In some communities, the church would be able to be in school.

Church or the Cemetery Association would hire a paid watchman during the medical school session when demand for bodies was at its peak. There are records of cemeteries with watchhouses, small structures where guards could shelter from the weather while they kept an eye on the grounds. A more elaborate defense was the Mortsafe, a kind of iron cage that could be lowered into the grave and locked over the coffin. Mort safes were imported from Scotland, where they had been developed in response to the Burke and Hare scandal of the 1820s, and they became fairly common in American cemeteries by the

middle of the century, at least for families who could afford them. The Mortsafe was usually rented for several weeks, kept in place until the body was no longer useful for dissection, and then removed for the next family to use. In some American cemeteries, you can still see the holes in the ground where the Mortsafe posts were anchored. More extreme defenses included cemetery guns, which were spring-loaded firearm set into the ground around a grave, rigged to fire if a tripwire was disturbed. These were dangerous to install, dangerous to remove, and occasionally killed people who wandered into a cemetery at the wrong time. They were used sporadically across the country, particularly in the 1830s through the 1850s. And then there was the most American of all the

anti-grave-robbing innovations, the coffin torpedo. This was an explosive or shotgun gun-like device, designed to be placed inside a coffin or just above it in the grave, that would fire if the coffin were disturbed. The most famous coffin torpedo was patented by a Columbus, Ohio artist named Philip K. Clover in 1878. The timing is not a coincidence. The Harrison case had broken in the spring of that year, and by the fall, an Ohio inventor had filed a patent for a device specifically designed to harm resurrection men in the act. A second inventor, a former Ohio probate judge named Thomas N. Howell patented a related grave torpedo, which worked more like a buried landmine in 1881.

There are a few documented cases of these devices actually killing or maiming grave robbers. The most often cited is an incident near the village of Gann in Knox County, Ohio, in January of 1881, in which three men attempted to, to rob a grave, struck a torpedo near the coffin, and one of them was killed while another had his leg broken. The third man, who had been keeping watch, escaped. For families who couldn't afford torpedoes or mort safes or paid watchmen, there were cheaper precautions, burying the deceased in a metal coffin, if possible, burying them deeper than the standard six feet, which made the digging more time-consuming and increased the chance of discovery, mixing straw or branches into

the dirt above the coffin to make it harder to dig through, even in some cases deliberately burying the deceased in a temporary grave for the first few weeks, then quietly transferring the body to its final resting place once the danger period had passed. But all of these defenses, you'll notice, were available only to families with some level of resources, awareness, and connection. None of them helped the family of an unclaimed laborer who died alone in a tenement. None of them helped the friends of a black man who'd been buried in an unmarked grave in a segregated cemetery. None of them helped the immigrants buried in Potter's Field. The defenses against grave robbing, like so much else in 19th century American life, were available primarily to those who least needed them. The people

who most needed protection were the people who couldn't afford it. That's the second tier injustice running underneath the first one. Not only were the graves of the poor and the marginalized targeted preferentially, but the means of protecting graves were rationed by the same wealth and status that protected the living. The two-tiered cemetery was a faithful reflection of the two-tiered country it served. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The reform of the resurrection trade, when it finally came, came piecemeal and slowly. There was no single federal law that ended it. The United States Constitution doesn't address grave robbing or anatomy education, and the regulation of medical practice has always been a state-by-state affair in this

country. Reform had to happen one legislature at a time. Massachusetts, as I mentioned, was first in 1831. The Massachusetts Anatomy Act allowed unclaimed bodies from state institutions to be turned over to medical schools, with the understanding that family members had a brief window in which to claim the deceased. Connecticut followed not long after. New York passed, a significant anatomy reform in 1854, after a series of scandals. Pennsylvania followed in 1867. Ohio, as I mentioned, accelerated its reforms in the wake of the Harrison case in 1878. Most other states followed in the 1880s and 1890s, with the last holdouts not passing comprehensive anatomy laws until well into the 20th century. The reform laws in most cases followed a similar

pattern. Unclaimed bodies from public institutions, prisons, hospitals, almshouses would be made available to medical schools after a certain holding period during which family members could come forward. If no family came forward, the body would be turned over for dissection. After the dissection was complete, the remains would be given a proper burial. The medical schools, in exchange for this legal supply, were expected to stop using illegal sources. But did they really stop? Mostly? Eventually. The economic incentive to dig up graves diminished significantly once the legal supply met most of the demand. The Resurrection men deprived of their primary customers drifted into other lines of work. The medical schools freed from the necessity of breaking the law to teach their classes, became more outwardly respectable institutions.

The trade did not end overnight, and there are scattered cases of grave robbing well into the 1890s and even in the 1890s and, even the early 1900s, but the systematic, organized, year-round trade that had defined the previous century gradually dissolved. But the consequences of the trade did not dissolve. Two consequences in particular remained, and both of them deserve serious reflection. The first consequence is that American medical education, the actual training of American physicians for a critical century in the development of American medicine, was built on the bodies of the country's most marginalized people. The doctors who treated patients in the civil war, the doctors who pioneered surgery in the post-war period, the doctors who built the great hospitals and medical institutions

of the late 19th century were trained on the bodies of black Americans, of Irish immigrants, of paupers, of the unclaimed dead. The skills they developed were real skills. The lives they saved later were really saved. But the foundation of their training was a system of theft from the the most vulnerable, and that fact is rarely acknowledged in the official histories of American medicine. The second consequence is that the legal disposability of certain kinds of bodies, once it was established as a norm in American institutional life, did not entirely disappear with the anatomy reforms of the late 19th century. The same logic, the same hierarchy of which bodies mattered and which did not, persisted in other forms. The Tuskegee Syphilis study

the unconsented sterilization programs of the early 20th century. The forced experimentation on prisoners. The Henrietta Lacks case. There's a thread that runs through all of these episodes, a thread that connects the Resurrection Man digging up a black grave in 1845 with the researchers withholding penicillin from black sharecroppers in 1945. The thread is the same. Some bodies belong to medicine.

Other bodies belong to themselves. I'm not going to pretend that I know how to fully untangle that thread. I don't. I don't think anyone does. But I think it's worth saying at the end of an episode like this one, that the resurrection trade is not just a strange and creepy chapter from the distant past. It's part of a longer story about how American institutions, including American medical institutions,

have made decisions about whose bodies count and whose don't. The methods have changed. The pattern has not always changed. Let me leave you with a few images before we close. A field outside Cincinnati in 1878. A reinforced family vault, freshly sealed. A wagon coming up the road in the dark with two men in it who are not afraid of vaults,

because they have learned which vaults can be opened and which cannot. A rope. A body dragged through cold earth. A shoot in a building downtown. A cemetery in Augusta, Georgia, sometime in the 1860s. an enslaved man named Grandison Harris, walking among the graves of his own community. Reading the markers in the moonlight, although by Georgia law he is not supposed to be able to read at all, choosing one, beginning to dig.

A potter's field in Boston, sometime in the 1850s, the last shovel full of dirt going into a pauper's grave, the keeper of the field watching the funeral leave, then turning and walking back to the office, and writing a small note that he will deliver later that evening to a man he knows from the medical school. A small house in Connecticut, 1824, a young woman named Bathsheba Smith, freshly buried in the West Haven Cemetery. A neighbor lying awake who hears a wagon passing in the dark, between midnight and two in the morning, headed in the wrong direction. And then, the next day, the discovery that the grave was empty, and the body had been carried into the cellar of the Yale Medical Institution in New Haven. These were real people, all of them. The thieves, the doctors, the families, the dead. They walked through the same American towns we walk through

now. Their cemeteries, in some cases, are the cemeteries we still bury our own people in. The institutions that profited from their bodies, in some cases, are the institutions our children attend. The resurrection men are gone. The medical schools have been reformed. The anatomy laws have been written and rewritten. The bodies that were taken without consent are mostly long since vanished, dissolved into the ground or burned. Their bones thrown into pits and basements that have, in a few cases, been rediscovered and quietly reburied.

But the question they leave behind has never quite gone away, whose bodies belong to whom, whose grief is sacred, whose graves are protected, and whose are not. Who decides? If you walk through an old cemetery sometime, particularly one that dates back to the early or middle 1800s, look at the graves, look at the iron rails around some of them, the heavy stones, the deep vaults. Then look at the unmarked corners, the sunken sections, the patches of grass where you can tell, if you know what you're looking for, that there used to be markers and there aren't anymore.

That's the geography of the system we've been talking about tonight. Some of those graves were protected. Some were not. Some of the people in them were allowed to rest. Some were not. And while it's tempting to imagine that this all belongs to the deep past, that it ended with Benjamin Harrison's recovery of his father's body and the wave of reform that followed. The truth is that systems like this one don't end cleanly. They get pushed underground. They change names. They shift their methods. The practices that we look back on with horror were in their own. time considered ordinary. The practices that future generations will look back on with horror are in our time also considered ordinary. The resurrection men are gone, but the questions they raised are still in their quiet way walking among us. That's why this story belongs on disturbing history.

Not because it's gory, although it is. Not because it's strange, although it certainly is. but because it's a story that tells us something true about ourselves and about the country we built and about the foundations underneath the institutions we still live with every day. Thank you for spending this time with me tonight. Take care of each other. Take care of the people you've lost. And the next time you walk past a cemetery,

give it a moment. There's more there than you can see from the road. Before you go, make sure you hit that auto download or subscribe button wherever you're listening. You certainly don't want to miss what's next.