Making A Living From Death In D8

Making A Living From Death In D8

“Most countries send out oil or iron, steel or gold, or some other crop,” declared the most famous man in the world on a visit here in 1963, “but Ireland has had only one export and that is its people.”

JFK was undoubtedly referring to the living, rather than the dead but in 1823, the year his great-grandfather Patrick Kennedy whose immigration paved his path to the White House for the 35th president of the United States, the export of corpses was big business in our capital, with much of the raw material coming from Goldenbridge and Kilmainham.

“Dublin became an important centre for the export of bodies, thanks to a thriving existing resurrection trade… plied on an industrial scale,” explains Alun Evans, Professor Emeritus in History at Queen’s University Belfast.

A growth in population generally from the 1750s, aided by new discoveries in medicine meant that by the early 19th century Dublin was home to a growing number of medical schools, many of them private enterprises. Since 1542 a surgeon was allowed a mere four cadavers a year from the ranks of executed criminals for anatomical research, but a significant drop in the numbers hanged turned doctors, desperate for examination subjects into grave robbers.

The Napoleonic Wars and the subsequent crash in trade and commerce increased demand even more as young men opted for a career in medicine, while the Apothecaries Act of 1815 made instruction in anatomy compulsory for trainees. So-called “resurrectionists” filled the void. Such men were sneaking around cemeteries in our capital since at least 1732 when Faulkner’s Dublin Journal reported that a grave digger in St Andrew’s Churchyard on Suffolk Street was jailed for turning a blind eye to those stealing corpses for dissection. Taking a body was at worst a misdemeanour – though making off with the shroud could be deemed theft – leading many of these despised “sack ’em-ups” to strip the corpse before bagging it.

At that Catholics were buried in Protestant sites, using the Anglican Book of Prayer rather than their own full rites leading the Catholic Associations, under the leadership of Daniel O’Connell to purchase land at Goldenbridge, Inchicore, and later the nearby Hospital Fields in Kilmainham (or “Bully’s Acre” as it was commonly called) in 1828.

James Macartney, Professor of Anatomy and Surgery at TCD, while advising his students not to engage in the practice also reminded them with a nod and wink that the actions of sack ’em-ups carried no likelihood of legal punishment, though the risk to life and limb from enraged mourners was real enough.

A maverick and former United Irishman (making him if not a resurrectionist then certainly an insurrectionist) Macartney consistently urged the authorities to allow people to donate their bodies to medical science after death, something O’Connell also supported, but the visionary surgeon was pragmatic.

“I do not think that the upper and middle classes have Understood the effects of their own conduct in impeding the process…Very many of the upper ranks carry in their mouths teeth which have been buried in the Hospital Fields,” he mused in one letter to the newspapers.

“Erinensis”, almost certainly TCD graduate Dr. Peter Hennis Greene using a pen name, argeed. A regular contributor to The Lancet, he praised resurrectionists, having been one himself, writing:
“—the most accomplished certainly of that much abused race have, I believe, done so much for our fame as all our surgeons together and Bullys’ Acre difussed our scientific reputation as widely among the civilised nations as our Dublin Hospital reports.”

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Teams would typically break open the top of a coffin, place a rope around the neck of the corpse and then haul the remains up from the ground, careful not to damage the mouths of “the things” as the grave robbers callously referred to the deceased, lest this lessen their value during the hour-long exercise. At a time of high child mortality youngsters were not spared such desecration, and unlike adults who commanded a fixed price their corpses were costed by the inch.

You might not face a noose for sticking bodies into a sack, but there was no hanging about either. Winter proved the ideal harvest time for things, and speed mattered.

“The attempt had to be made as soon as possible after the burial so that the earth was reasonably loose and the body had not begun to decompose,” according to eminent medical historian and surgeon Dr. John Fleetwood in an address to the Dublin Society in 1988.

It was dangerous work. “Fights often developed between rival groups of grave robbers, mourning relatives, watchmen and even military,” Fleetwood explained.

Resurrection men determined not to bite off more than they could chew might carry clubs, swords, and even a blunderbuss, an early shotgun which could be loaded was everything from lead balls to broken glass. In February 1830 Saunder’s News Letter carried the following report of “A Resurrectionist and Tooth Merchant in Trouble” near Bully’s Acre.
“One of these fellows was in consequence of a close pursuit taken into custody and under his cloak was concealed a blunderbuss heavily loaded with slugs and in his pockets were found a great quantity of human teeth in the sale of which it seems he has been extensively engaged.”

The grave robbers’ backgrounds varied. Some were medical students, others criminals willing to turn their hand to a new trade, and a few porters like Christopher Dixon from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) who was caught by a mob in the pauper’s graveyard at Bully’s Acre and dragged to the Liffey, where he almost drowned after repeated waterboarding.

Writing of the resurrectionists 60 years later Sir Charles Alexander Cameron, a distinguished Fellow, Professor, President and Historian at the RSCI described the rooms of the anatomy school at his alma mater in earlier times as “a kind of warehouse for their ghastly goods”.

Sack ’em-ups would bribe or threaten sextons and watchmen in cemeteries to tip them off about burials, or to look the other way as they set about their grim work, while some were cemetery employees, moonlighting and bagging bodies themselves. All sorts of tricks were used to capture corpses. Wealthy students impersonated peasants and plied other funeral parties with laced poitín, switching the cheap coffin containing their dearly departed, grave robbers held mourners at gunpoint, or on other occasions placed an arm on either side of a freshly liberated corpse, brazenly carrying their prize along the streets pretending that the reanimated body was a buddy, a pal merely dead drunk rather than deceased, a friend in need rather than a victim of dastardly deed.

In the year John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s great-grandfather was born, William Fitzpatrick’s History of the Dublin Catholic Cemeteries carried an account of the death of John Kirby, son of the President of the RCSI, the young man reported to have been killed in a “resurrection battle” at Camden Row – ironic since his father was a recognised expert in the treatment of gunshot wounds.

Glasnevin Cemetery protected itself with high walls and watchtowers, employing armed guards to patrol with ferocious Cuban Bloodhounds, a now extinct breed as tall as a modern Great Dane but with the strength of a supersized Rottweiler. Boasting incredible speed and knowing no fear they were let loose by plantation foremen in the Caribbean to terrify and rip apart escaped slaves. Yet the sack’em-ups kept trying, with 60 shots fired during a gun battle on one dark, freezing night at Glasnevin in February 1830.

Tripwires linked to guns’ triggers were used in some cemeteries, and in 1823 subscribers of the Belfast Commercial Chronicle were astonished to read an account of a mourning father in Dundee who placed a homemade landmine in his child’s grave before the coffin was lowered. More commonly huge stones were laid over a plot, or “mortsafes” fixed, their thick iron lattice grill making the top resistant to resurrection mens’ wooden spades and prybars.

Edinburgh, a city with close cultural links to Dublin was another capital with medical schools in desperate need of corpses and they soon began importing ours, at cheaper rates.

At the beginning of the century a cadaver there fetched about two guineas (£2 10 shillings), which gradually rose to 14 guineas (£14 70 shillings) peaking at £42, more than many people earned in a year.

“The advent of regular steamships plying the Belfast to Glasgow route from 1818 and the burgeoning demand in the Scottish medical schools brought the traffic to a climax before the 1832 Anatomy Act put an end to it,” explains John Knott on attitudes to death and dissection at that time, published in the academic journal Labour History back in 1985.

However Resurrectionism prompted a fear that local supplies would disappear onto steamers, their mortal remains rammed into barrels marked as Irish cheddar or ham, and a concern that suppliers might simply stop digging and start swinging murdering the poor to fill order books, a chilling scenario predicted by the great utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham famous for arguing that “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong”.

Two Irish serial killers would proved the catalyst to change the laws.

William Burke and his compatriot William Hare were immigrant labourers originally from the north who’d moved Edinburgh to work digging the Union Canal in 1818, and a decade later began supplying corpses to Dr Robert Knox, a respected surgeon and the leading lecturer in anatomy at Edinburgh University. Records show Knox, a brilliant teacher who guaranteed to perform an anatomy every day needed 400 cadavers in 1828, and over 500 students were enrolled in his extramural class so he didn’t worry overmuch where these bodies came from and was also using supplies from Ireland to hit his quota.

Neither Burke or Hare were resurrection men, but immediately realised that their associates, who were infirm or prostitutes, and wouldn’t be missed could command good money post mortem. They plied the unfortunates with drink before smothering them, and bagging the corpses before carting them across to Knox (whom they never actually met) at the university. Their first victim yielded £7 10 shillings, and by the time the murderers were discovered in November 1828 the duo had killed 17 people.

Facing the noose Hare famously turned King’s Evidence, and Burke’s fate was sealed. He was found guilty the next day before being publicly hanged on January 28th, 1829 the huge crowd urging the hangman to “Burke him! Give him no rope!”, the killer’s surname already synonymous will smothering a victim to sell the corpse for profit.

Burke was then publicly dissected by the anatomist Alexander Monro III at Edinburgh University, a surgeon who was the polar opposite of his rival Knox, leading one of his former students, a young man named Charles Darwin to remark that the teacher “made his lectures on human anatomy as dull as he was himself”.

Bizarrely the anatomist penned a note for posterity in Burke’s own blood and removed his skin, which was turned into a notebook, a grotesque reminder still on public display in that city’s Surgeons’ Hall Museum, beside the headquarters of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.

Surgeon Knox? He denied all knowledge of his suppliers’ crimes and escaped Scot-free, continuing to lecture.

An outraged public demanded action, and soon a gang of “London Burkers” were also tried, hanged and dissected for murdering a 14-year-old boy in Bethnal Green close to where the Museum of Childhood now stands. In reality according to Dr. Thomas Wakley, the founding editor of The Lancet and a celebrated social reformer who campaigned against incompetence, cover-ups and nepotism, Burking was already a weekly occurrence in London by 1831.

When Charles and Agnes Clarke of Drumbo, Co Down were were tried and hanged on August 5th that year for killing a man named McConnell and trying to sell his corpse to Antrim Infirmary it was clear that the practice was to be found on both sides of the Irish Sea.

The Anatomy Act finally allowed the donation of bodies to medical science and gave surgeons access to the regular stream of men, women and children who died in the workhouses. Once more the poor bore the burden.

In recent years historian Nadja Durbach wrote that “the 1832 Anatomy Act bolstered the relationship between medicine and the state at the expense of the destitute”. It was a point accepted long ago by Sir Walter Scott, who was among the 25,000 strong crowd who watched William Burke shuffle off this mortal coil.

“Our Irish importation have made a great discovery of Oeconomicks (Economics), namely, that a wretch who is not worth a farthing while alive, becomes a valuable article when knockd on the head & carried to an anatomist and acting on this principle, have cleard the streets of some of those miserable offcasts of society, whom nobody missd because nobody wishd to see them again,” said the famous writer.

Political decisions eventually ended the careers of the sack ’em-ups, though as late at 1858 the body of Ralph Westropp Brereton, a Royal Navy veteran and former sheriff of Limerick, was taken from it’s grave in Drumcliff in Clare and the fat carved off, probably to make candles. Smoke from the horrific products was believed by some to help cast a spell which rendered the holder invisible, a handy trick for superstitious burglars in an era when the courts relied heavily on eyewitness testimony for convictions.

John Fleetwood reminds us no records show that Burking had taken place in Dublin, but is it possible that our capital’s murderers had simply enjoyed the luck of the Irish and not been caught before this city’s most macabre export was buried in the darker pages of history?

It’s a question that will live long in our minds, and which continues to this day; an ethical dilemma we must face as medical transplant techniques improve beyond the immagination of science fiction writers over coming years.