A Sink of Atrocity: Crime in 19th-Century Dundee Read Online Free Page A

anyone to carry a dead body across the country in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and the passengers looked at their captive with mixed horror and disgust: he must be a Resurrectionist.
    At the beginning of the nineteenth century Edinburgh was one of the leading medical centres of the world. The University’s medical school was famous for teaching and innovation, but human bodies were essential to teach anatomy and the legal supply had just about dried up. In an era when religion was still important, people believed that the dead should be left undefiled so when God called them on Judgement Day they were whole. That notion, however, only applied to God-fearing folk; those who broke God’s word were unimportant, so there was some leeway for doctors of dissection. The law stated that babies who died before they were christened and orphans who died before they signed articles for an apprenticeship could be dissected, although the parents of the former probably raised some objections. In other parts of Europe deceased prostitutes could be legally dissected, and the Terror in France produced a crop of fresh corpses. Sometimes the dead were shipped from Europe and Ireland to Britain for dissection. Nevertheless, throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth the most common corpses in anatomy labs had been those of hanged criminals.
    Such a situation was fine and dandy as long as there was a healthy crop of condemned men, but the swinging old days of full gallows were past. By the 1820s there were few crimes for which hanging was prescribed, and unless Scotland was flooded with murderers and rapists, the noose would wait in vain for its victim and the anatomy table for its cadaver.
    To rectify this situation, medical students and strong-stomached entrepreneurs became Resurrectionists, scouring the graveyards of the countryside, watching for funerals so they could unearth the grave, remove the recently interred body and carry it to an anatomist. Stealing a body was reprehensible, but carried only a fine. Stealing the clothes in which the body was clad was worse, for clothing was valuable, so the Resurrection men would strip the corpse and run with a naked body. The most unscrupulous would even murder to obtain fresh meat: Burke and Hare were not the first in this trade. That dubious honour goes to a pair of women, Helen Torrence and Jean Waldie, who murdered a young boy as early as 1751 and were duly hanged for their pains. However, the rewards for body snatching, with or without the accompanying murder, were good. A prime body could fetch as much as £10, which was a small fortune at a time when a working man was lucky to earn £1 a week.
    The town authorities took what precautions they could to deter the Resurrectionists. Many graveyards had a watchtower in which men stood watch over their silent charges, shivering as cold moonlight cast long shadows on the ranked memorials of the town. Others had a mort house or dead house in which the dead were securely placed until they decayed to a condition unlikely to interest even the most avid of anatomists. Even after burial there were mort safes, heavy cages that could be hired to protect the coffin, but for those without funds, the best defence was to stand guard night after long eerie night, so dim lanterns often lit Dundee’s graveyards as the bereaved huddled over the graves of their departed. The young man who had carried the box on the Fife Commercial Traveller had obviously succeeded in circumventing any defences, but until he was questioned, nobody knew who he was or whose grave he had desecrated.
    Dragged back to Cupar, the county town of Fife, the Resurrectionist was closely interrogated until he admitted everything. He was a medical student and he had dug up the body from the burial yard of Dundee. There were two graveyards in Dundee: Logie on the Lochee Road, and the Howff beside Barrack Street and the Meadows. When the student finally confessed