Who is grave robber

Approved physicians would have been appointed to do postmortem examination in all cases deemed necessary, and Hopkins would have allocated dissection material to other schools. Although they would have benefited, its rivals howled in protest. Johns Hopkins destroyed his private papers so thoroughly that no credible biography exists of the Baltimore Quaker titan. Antero Pietila weaves together a biography of the man with a portrait of how the institutions he founded have shaped the racial legacy of an industrial city from its heyday to its decline and revitalization.

There in a section in the woods, simple pine boxes were laid out in open pits under a thin veneer of earth cover until a section filled up. Only then were the graves packed and sodded. The provenance of the early cadavers Hopkins acquired for dissection and distribution underscored how blacks were used a clinical material. Race also played a role in prosecutions for grave robbery, as can be seen in the case of a year-old black man named John T.

The term commemorates Edward Burke, who killed at least 16 people and sold their bodies to medical schools in Edinburgh, Scotland before he was hanged in She drifted to Baltimore at the age of 50, working as a dressmaker. An alcoholic, she became addicted to morphine and opium. She panhandled around Lexington Market and roomed with blacks in a house on Pig Alley in a section near the university called Pigtown because it was a slaughterhouse district. She owed back rent. She fell to the floor and then I jumped on her, and hit her again.

Then I stabbed her. An hour before the noose and black hood were placed on him, he expressed his sentiments in a verse that a fellow inmate penned for him:. Is it fair, kind Christians, In this land of liberty, That I alone must suffer, And the other two go free?

Bennett declared. One June night in , Dr. William T. Cathell, Jr. Clover of Columbus, Ohio, developed a device that was to "prevent the unauthorized resurrection of dead bodies. Buried underground, the torpedo would fire several lead balls into the thief. Clover received a patent for this device on October 8, Howell of Circleville, Ohio, received a patent for an exploding shell that was buried underground above a coffin.

If robbers tried to dig up the coffin, the shell would explode, injuring or killing the thieves. As Ohio's state government began to allow people to donate or sell their corpses to medical schools and as penalties became harsher for the thieves, grave-robbing declined in popularity. History has been slow to acknowledge the extent to which the bodies of African Americans were involuntarily used in medicine. Grave robbing is just one aspect of this.

Nevertheless, the dehumanizing of the dead in development of medicine demands recognition. JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. By: Allison C. August 24, February 18, Share Tweet Email Print. Want more stories like this one? Have a correction or comment about this article? Please contact us. Journal of Social History, Vol. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Vol.