Resurrectionists and Frankenstein

 Raising the Dead in the Name of Science 

“A person who digs up a buried body to steal the things that were buried with it” is how Merriam-Webster defines a grave robber. Not mentioned in this definition is a similar disruption of the dead, which is taking the body itself. This was a less common practice before the earlier half of the 1500s, when Andreas Vesalius published the very first textbook on human anatomy (and the dissection thereof, more specifically). With the steady evolution of medical knowledge came a demand for cadavers, and thus, a very lucrative business was born (3). 

The need for cadavers for medical instruction and further advancement of science did not become a pressing issue until the end of the 18th century (3). In Protestant countries, there were no edicts that made it possible for human bodies to be dissected, unless they were the remains of executed criminals (2). By contrast, Vesalius, da Vinci, and Michelangelo were allowed their understanding of human form by an edict from Pope Sixtus in the late 1400s, which no longer forbade the practice of dissection and even offered methods of obtaining bodies. Without such a system in place, England and Scotland in particular (thanks to the rise of schools for medical instruction and an outpouring of requests from clinicians for more and more specimens) faced a new dilemma: resurrectionists (3). 

"Resurrectionists" lifting a body from its coffin (1).

Resurrectionists perfected grave robbing methods and lined their pockets with the money of surgeons for their illegal services. Bodies being snatched by these men became such a widespread issue that families began hiring guards for their newly dead relatives’ graves or taking point themselves if they could not afford to do so. (3) Common folk took many other measures to protect their loved ones, such as layering branches in with the soil when filling a grave so as to make digging more arduous, iron bands called “coffin collars” being put in place to secure a body in its coffin, and the invention of the “mortsafe,” which was an iron cage around the entirety of the coffin (2). 

In order to make up for the money lost by their profession becoming all the more difficult thanks to mort safes and night watchmen (3), some resurrectionists turned to a more reliable method of obtaining fresh corpses: murder. William Burke and William Hare are the most well-known of these killers, as in only a year (which ended in 1828, on the night of Halloween, ironically), they killed 16 Edinburgh citizens by way of suffocation while the victims were already unconscious, which left no incriminatory marks. In the end, Hare sold Burke out in court, and Burke was hanged. Post-mortem, his body was dissected publicly in the University of Edinburgh (1).

In 1832, the Anatomy Act was passed, which both lifted restrictions on the acquisition of corpses. Anatomists were given legal access to unclaimed bodies, and citizens were given the right to submit their own bodies or the bodies of their relatives to science willingly. This act all but ended most grave robbery in England, Scotland, and Ireland (3). 

Resurrection in Frankenstein 

            In order to craft his Creature, Dr. Frankenstein repurposed the remains of the dead, found in “charnel-houses,” “dissecting rooms and the slaughter-house" (4). Mary Shelley wrote her novel in the early 1800s, when grave robbery for scientific pursuits was at its peak in her home country of England. It’s hardly a leap, then, to suggest that her inspiration for the core of her most famous story came from the climate of her world. With so much fear and outrage surrounding the topic, I have no doubt that it was at the forefront of the public’s minds, and that Mary Shelley, who was known to have a fascination with the grave anyway, was not exempt from this. At the time, scientific discovery, especially that of human anatomy, was a business rife with death and the procurement of unwilling participants in it, and what else but that sits at the center of Frankenstein?

Works Cited

Browne, Hablot Knight. 1887. Smithsonian Magazine, https://www.smithsonianmag.com. (1)

Gorman, Martyn. “An introduction to grave robbing in Scotland.” BodySnatchers, 2010,        https://www.abdn.ac.uk/bodysnatchers/background.php. (2)

Nuland, Sherwin B. “Grave robbing.” American Scholar, vol. 70, no. 2, 2001, pp. 125-128. Art & Architecture Source, eds.p.ebscohost.com/eds/detail/. (3)

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: A Norton Critical Edition. Edited by J. Paul Hunter, 2nd ed., W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1996. (4)