At Home - Bill Bryson [183]
A rich manufacturer named Oppelt died about fifteen years since at Reichenberg, in Austria, and a vault was built in the cemetery for the reception of the body by his widow and children. The widow died about a month ago and was taken to the same tomb; but, when it was opened for that purpose, the coffin of her husband was found open and empty, and the skeleton discovered in a corner of the vault in a sitting posture.
For at least a generation such stories became routine in even serious periodicals. So many people became morbidly obsessed with the fear of being interred before their time that a word was coined for it: taphephobia. The novelist Wilkie Collins placed on his bedside table each night a letter bearing standing instructions of the tests he wished carried out to ensure that he really had died in his sleep if he was found in a seemingly corpselike state. Others directed that their heads be cut off or their hearts removed before burial, to put the matter comfortably (if that is the right word) beyond doubt. One author proposed the construction of “Waiting Mortuaries,” where the departed could be held for a few days to ensure they really were quite dead and not just unusually still. Another more entrepreneurial type designed a device that allowed someone awaking within a coffin to pull a cord, which opened a breathing tube for air and simultaneously set off a bell and started a flag waving at ground level. An Association for Prevention of Premature Burial was established in Britain in 1899 and an American society was formed the following year. Both societies suggested a number of exacting tests to be satisfied by attending physicians before they could safely declare a person dead—holding a hot iron against the deceased’s skin to see if it blistered was one—and several of these tests were actually incorporated into medical schools’ curricula for a time.
Grave robbing was another great concern—and not without reason, for the demand for fresh bodies in the nineteenth century was considerable. London alone was home to twenty-three schools of medicine or anatomy, each requiring a steady supply of cadavers. Until the passing of the Anatomy Act in 1832, only executed criminals could be used for experiment and dissection. Yet executions in England were much rarer than is commonly supposed: in 1831, a typical year, sixteen hundred people were condemned to death in England, but only fifty-two executed. So the demand for bodies was way beyond what could be legally supplied. Grave robbery in consequence became an irresistibly tempting business, particularly as stealing a body was, thanks to a curious legal quirk, a misdemeanor rather than a felony. At a time when a well-paid working man might earn £1 in a week, a fresh corpse could fetch £8 or £10 and sometimes as much as £20, and, at least initially, without much risk as long as the culprits were careful to remove only the bodies and not shrouds, coffins, or keepsakes, for which they could be charged with a felony.
It wasn’t just a morbid interest in dissection that drove the market. In the days before anesthetics, surgeons really needed to be closely acquainted with bodies. You can’t poke thoughtfully among arteries and organs when the patient is screaming in agony and spurting blood. Speed was of the essence, and the essential part of speed was familiarity, which could only come with much devoted practice on the dead. And of course the lack of refrigeration meant that flesh began to spoil quickly, so the need for fresh supplies was constant.
To thwart robbers, the poor in particular often held on to departed loved ones until the bodies had begun to putrefy and so had lost their value. Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Classes of Great Britain was full of gruesome and shocking details about the