Black Market Grey Area
A cartoon of a nineteenth century grave with a sign reading ‘grave robbers prohibited’
I recently caught a kid going through our garbage, searching for glassware to Return and Earn. I applaud his enterprise – we’ve thrown it out, after all - though times have changed. My first job was a paper round, a concept my children barely understand, and their children will need explaining at length. Newspapers were printed Nanna?
But I don’t see the harm in others profiting from stuff that’s worthless to the rest of us. We must all adapt or die. Or in some cases, adapt and die.
News recently came to light of a black-market racket in the States trading human body parts. In these rapidly changing times of economic uncertainty, this seems like a win-win solution. Setting aside the lack of consent (the people are dead after all) and questionable ethics, the former manager at Harvard’s Medical School morgue was indicted for stealing donated cadavers. Cedric Lodge, who sounds more Masonic Hall than body snatcher, took dissected body parts home – heads, brains, bones etc – and mailed them on to a lively network of buyers and sellers. One customer, owner of Kat’s Creepy Creations had an Instagram page promoting amongst others creepy dolls, oddities, and bone art. You’d be getting a pretty realistic experience for sure.
We must be thankful for the very real trade in dead bodies from Victorian times. Feeding this highly lucrative industry was a six-fold increase in doctors training in the second half of the nineteenth century. Body dealers mushroomed across London and into the provinces. Between 1832 and 1930, the Anatomy Act supported the trade of 125,000 bodies, and multiple thousands more transactions of body parts. Porters at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital would leave a large, wheeled wicker basket outside which was returned chock-a-block with corpses each night. This was pre penicillin after all and tuberculosis was rife, not to mention women who died in labour or had stillborn babies. All great fodder for research into miscarriages and childbirth abnormality.
More dubious was the work of the body snatchers, the underground (pun intended) trade which thrived as demand for cadavers outstripped supply. Interfering with a grave in Victorian times was a common law misdemeanour while dissecting bodies and theft of grave items was a felony punishable by transportation. Show of hands please for those of us with grave robbing forebearers.
The most murky tale of those times was that of William Burke, an Irishman who murdered sixteen people by sitting on their chest and pinching their nose, thus ensuring a perfect sellable corpse. Burke got his come-uppance when he was dissected himself after being hanged.
Relatives of Ecuadorean woman Bella Montoya should count themselves lucky there was no such market when Bella recently passed away, but if there had been her body would have been fresh indeed. So fresh, in fact, mourners at her wake were startled by her knocking on the coffin lid. She was hastily rescued and returned to hospital where she eventually died, again.
But back to Victorian England, where Cambridge University commissioned a ‘Dead Train’ from the port city of Hull blighted by poor sanitation epidemics. The twice weekly high-speed service was necessary in those days before refrigeration. You probably can’t get from Hull to Cambridge any quicker today. This grisly trade was at least legal, sort of, and we can all be grateful for it. In February 1896, the British Medical Journal published an early skiagraph of a child taken with machinery being trialled in Cambridge. (Skiagraphs are today’s X-rays, but don’t you love the name.) And it was an X-ray diffraction that led two Cambridge based scientists to recognise the double helix shape of DNA in 1951, which even the most non-sciency amongst us would recognise.
Alas, our friend Cedric Lodge was born in the wrong century and country for his side hustle to be legal. And I’m fairly sure that people sifting through our bins under cover of darkness are searching for Return and Earn glassware rather than body parts.