In Need of Cadavers, 19th-Century Medical Students Raided Baltimore’s Graves

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In Need of Cadavers, 19th-Century Medical Students Raided Baltimore’s Graves

With a half-dozen medical schools and a shortage of bodies, grave robbing thrived—and with no consequences for the culprits

 
By Antero Pietila, Zócalo Public Square
smithsonian.com
 

Railroads changed everything. The formation in 1828 of the nation’s first common carrier, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, revolutionized transportation, altered people’s sense of time and place, and knitted America together into a nation.

Among the many unforeseen consequences of this transformation was this peculiar note: Body snatchers digging up graves could quickly ship corpses to medical schools needing dissection material. The story of how grave robbing flourished in Baltimore for more than 70 years reveals both the dysfunctional underside of medicine in a place that liked to call itself the “Monumental City,” as well as its racial fault line.

Baltimore became a center of “resurrections”—as grave robbers referred to their business—because a half-dozen medical schools in the city needed a steady supply of corpses. It also helped that the Maryland’s largest population center was located in a temperate zone that often allowed digging in winter when the ground in New England and in the Midwest froze solid.

Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/in-need-cadavers-19th-century-medical-students-raided-baltimores-graves-180970629/#VhSf3A4IzSqaBdxy.99