Over My Dead Body

The human body has been a commodity for centuries. In the crudest form of selling the body, prostitution has been around since the ancient Greeks borrowed it from the Fertile Crescent (where it was somewhat ironically called “sacred prostitution”). Even today, economies are sustained as labor produces goods and services are traded. But it’s not only living bodies that can be commodified. Dead bodies, despite the taboo attached to them, were hot items in nineteenth century Scotland. The Enlightenment brought with it a fervent passion for learning and discovery, and nineteenth century Scottish anatomy schools had a particularly hands-on approach. How else were the pioneers of surgical training, John and William Hunter, to train their students? Even the Murder Act of 1752, which held that the bodies of murderers were to be dissected and anatomized, simply could not meet the insatiable demand for fresh dead bodies.

A lecture at the Hunterian anatomy school, Great Windmill Street, London; Wellcome Library

So the “Resurrection Men” took to the graves of those recently buried. The corpses were exhumed and taken “Up the close and down the stair” as the Scottish ditty goes for preparation and use by the students of anatomy. In order to prevent the theft of corpses, some folks even employed mortsafes to serve as sort of protective cages around the graves. William Burke and William Hare even started killing people to provide popular anatomy lecturer Robert Knox with the bodies he needed to teach (Knox subsequently had to relocate to London).

A Mortsafe lock on a Scottish grave to prevent theft

As I learned more about the lengths people took to ensure a proper burial, I was struck by how dedicated people were to being forever contained in a wooden box until your flesh gives way to decomposition. I understand the religious aspiration of wanting to meet one’s Maker intact for ultimate judgment, but surely any benevolent Maker can see the merits of using one’s body to serve those still alive. Similarly, a benevolent God would surely accept all honorable souls into heaven in their most beautiful form--- not simply the one you’ve got at the Gates.

At some point, preserving your body in its pristine state when you can no longer use it must become selfish. During the Scottish Enlightenment, there was a huge demand for corpses so as to better learn surgical techniques and understand the underlying physiology. Certainly, the training of surgeons (and perhaps even modern day organ donation) is a noble enough to warrant the donation of an otherwise useless body. And what happens to the soul? Does the soul not remain intact even if the body mutilated? What exactly does it mean to be made in the “image and likeness of God?”

I admit that the personal detachment I hold for the generic dead body gets a little murkier when I think of loved ones’ corpses, but I still think there is something to be said for self-sacrifice for posterity’s sake. The Enlightenment failed to sufficiently delineate the mind from the vessel that carries it. This notion is particularly noticeable in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: “Our ideas reach no further than our experience.” No offense Hume, but surely my imagination and uniquely human ability to empathize mean that my ideas do indeed expand beyond personal experience.

David Hume, the father of modern Skepticism

In this way, the human body becomes more horcrux-like. Once the ability to think and reason is lost, so is the most important facet that makes us human. There’s only potentially a religious soul left, whose judgment should not depend on a pristine carrier. So why not leave the empty vessel behind for the pursuit of knowledge?