Also called "resurrectionists," body snatchers, were careful not to take anything from the grave but the body--stealing only the corpse was not considered a felony since the courts had already said that a dead body had no owner. ("Burking"--i.e., murder--was the alternative method of supplying "stiffs" to medical schools; it is covered here as well). This book recounts the practice of grave robbing for the medical education of American medical students and physicians during the late 1700s and 1800s in the US, why body snatching came about and how disinterment was done, and presents information on: efforts to prevent the practice, a group of professional grave robbers, and the European experience.
At the beginning of the 19th century, physicians teaching anatomy in New England medical schools expected students to have hands-on experience with cadavers. As the only bodies that could be dissected legally were convicted murderers, this led to a lack of sufficient bodies for study. These doctors and their students turned to removing the dead from graveyards and cemeteries for dissection. The first medical school in Washington, D.C. was founded in 1825, headed by a Massachusetts physician convicted of body snatching, and made the practice commonplace in the area. This history of body snatching in the 19th century focuses on medical schools in New England and Washington, D.C., along with the religious, moral, and social objections during the time. With research from contemporary newspapers, medical articles, and university archives, topics such as state anatomy laws and their effects on doctors, students, and the poor--who were the usual victims--are covered, as are perceptions of physicians and medical schools by the local communities.
“Dictionary, n: A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.” Bierce’s groundbreaking Devil’s Dictionary had a complex publication history. Started in the mid-1800s as an irregular column in Californian newspapers under various titles, he gradually refined the new-at-the-time idea of an irreverent set of glossary-like definitions. The final name, as we see it titled in this work, did not appear until an 1881 column published in the periodical The San Francisco Illustrated Wasp. There were no publications of the complete glossary in the 1800s. Not until 1906 did a portion of Bierce’s collection get published by Doubleday, under the name The Cynic’s Word Book—the publisher not wanting to use the word “Devil” in the title, to the great disappointment of the author. The 1906 word book only went from A to L, however, and the remainder was never released under the compromised title. In 1911 the Devil’s Dictionary as we know it was published in complete form as part of Bierce’s collected works (volume 7 of 12), including the remainder of the definitions from M to Z. It has been republished a number of times, including more recent efforts where older definitions from his columns that never made it into the original book were included. Due to the complex nature of copyright, some of those found definitions have unclear public domain status and were not included. This edition of the book includes, however, a set of definitions attributed to his one-and-only “Demon’s Dictionary” column, including Bierce’s classic definition of A: “the first letter in every properly constructed alphabet.” Bierce enjoyed “quoting” his pseudonyms in his work. Most of the poetry, dramatic scenes and stories in this book attributed to others were self-authored and do not exist outside of this work. This includes the prolific Father Gassalasca Jape, whom he thanks in the preface—“jape” of course having the definition: “a practical joke.” This book is a product of its time and must be approached as such. Many of the definitions hold up well today, but some might be considered less palatable by modern readers. Regardless, the book’s humorous style is a valuable snapshot of American culture from past centuries. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.
A “marvelously macabre” (Kirkus Reviews) history of the bizarre afterlives of corpses of the celebrated and notorious dead. For some of the most influential figures in history, death marked the start of a new adventure. The famous deceased have been stolen, burned, sold, pickled, frozen, stuffed, impersonated, and even filed away in a lawyer’s office. Their fingers, teeth, toes, arms, legs, skulls, hearts, lungs, and nether regions have embarked on voyages that crisscross the globe and stretch the imagination. Counterfeiters tried to steal Lincoln’s corpse. Einstein’s brain went on a cross-country road trip. And after Lord Horatio Nelson perished at Trafalgar, his sailors submerged him in brandy—which they drank. From Alexander the Great to Elvis Presley, and from Beethoven to Dorothy Parker, Rest in Pieces connects the lives of the famous dead to the hilarious and horrifying adventures of their corpses, and traces the evolution of cultural attitudes toward death.
A Traffic of Dead Bodies enters the sphere of bodysnatching medical students, dissection-room pranks, and anatomical fantasy. It shows how nineteenth-century American physicians used anatomy to develop a vital professional identity, while claiming authority over the living and the dead. It also introduces the middle-class women and men, working people, unorthodox healers, cultural radicals, entrepreneurs, and health reformers who resisted and exploited anatomy to articulate their own social identities and visions. The nineteenth century saw the rise of the American medical profession: a proliferation of practitioners, journals, organizations, sects, and schools. Anatomy lay at the heart of the medical curriculum, allowing American medicine to invest itself with the authority of European science. Anatomists crossed the boundary between life and death, cut into the body, reduced it to its parts, framed it with moral commentary, and represented it theatrically, visually, and textually. Only initiates of the dissecting room could claim the privileged healing status that came with direct knowledge of the body. But anatomy depended on confiscation of the dead--mainly the plundered bodies of African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, and the poor. As black markets in cadavers flourished, so did a cultural obsession with anatomy, an obsession that gave rise to clashes over the legal, social, and moral status of the dead. Ministers praised or denounced anatomy from the pulpit; rioters sacked medical schools; and legislatures passed or repealed laws permitting medical schools to take the bodies of the destitute. Dissection narratives and representations of the anatomical body circulated in new places: schools, dime museums, popular lectures, minstrel shows, and sensationalist novels. Michael Sappol resurrects this world of graverobbers and anatomical healers, discerning new ligatures among race and gender relations, funerary practices, the formation of the middle-class, and medical professionalization. In the process, he offers an engrossing and surprisingly rich cultural history of nineteenth-century America.
Body Snatchers in the Desert reveals the events that really happened in the New Mexico desert in 1947 that birthed the Rosewell Myth. "RAAF captures flying saucer on ranch in Roswell region." Ever since this provocative headline appeared on July 8, 1947, conspiracy theorists have sincerely believed that the U.S. government has maintained an extensive operation of cover-up-and-denial regarding its knowledge of alien life. But there was, in fact, no UFO crash with dead alien bodies. What really happened on that fateful day is much more sinister. The persistent rumors surrounding the UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico, are part of a bigger conspiracy—one orchestrated and fostered by the government itself as a smokescreen to bury a truth that is much darker, and disturbingly, far more believable. Now, through never-before-revealed testimony from military whistleblowers, eyewitness intelligence reports, and an astonishing body of corroborative evidence, Nick Redfern lays out a shockingly plausible new theory on the Roswell incident: that the crash-site discovery of prototype military aircraft would expose a damning secret—a highly confidential, U.S. government-sanctioned program to conduct medical experiments on deformed, handicapped, disfigured, and diseased Japanese POWs, exploited as "expendable" victims by their captors. An important account that forces us to take a closer look at both the Roswell story and post-war American history, Body Snatchers in the Desert casts a startling, new light on a shocking conspiracy more than half a century in the making.
A true crime thriller -- the first book for teens to tell the nearly unknown tale of the brazen attempt to steal Abraham Lincoln's body. Reissued in Scholastic Focus, with an exciting new cover. The action begins in October of 1875, as Secret Service agents raid the Fulton, Illinois, workshop of master counterfeiter Ben Boyd. Soon after Boyd is hauled off to prison, members of his counterfeiting ring gather in the back room of a smoky Chicago saloon to discuss how to spring their ringleader. Their plan: grab Lincoln's body from its Springfield tomb, stash it in the sand dunes near Lake Michigan, and demand, as a ransom, the release of Ben Boyd -- and $200,000 in cash. From here, the action alternates between the conspirators, the Secret Service agents on their trail, and the undercover agent moving back and forth between them. Along the way readers get glimpses into the inner workings of counterfeiting, grave robbing, detective work, and the early days of the Secret Service. The plot moves toward a wild climax as robbers and lawmen converge at Lincoln's tomb on election night: November 7, 1876.A dynamic and thrilling tale from critically acclaimed author Steve Sheinkin.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is a low-budget science fiction film that has become a classic. The suspense of the film lies in discovering, along with Miles, the central character (played by Kevin McCarthy), who is "real" and who is not, and whether Miles and Becky (played by Dana Wynter) will escape the pod takeover. As the center of the film moves outward from a small-town group of neighbors to the larger political scene and institutional network (of police, the FBI, hospital workers), the ultimate question is whether "they" have taken over altogether. Although Invasion can be interpreted in interesting ways along psychological and feminist lines, its importance as a text has centered primarily on political and sociological readings. In his introduction to this volume, Al LaValley explores the politics of the original author of the magazine serial story on which the film is based, Don Siegel; and of its screenwriter, Daniel Mainwaring. And he looks at the ways the studio (Allied Artists) tried to neutralize certain readings by tacking on an explanatory frame story. The commentary section includes readings by Stephen King, Peter Biskind, Nora Sayre, and Peter Bogdanovich. A section of postproduction documents reproduced here (many for the first time) includes many written by Wanger and Siegel. The volume also contains two previously unpublished framing scripts written for Orson Welles. For students and individual enthusiasts, the contextual materials are particularly interesting in showing how crucial the postproduction history of a film can be. A filmography and bibliography are also included in the volume. Al LaValley is the director of film studies at Dartmouth. He is the author of many articles on film and editor of Mildred Pierce in the Wisconsin screenplay series.
