The Uncertain Art by Sherwin B. Nuland

Author:Sherwin B. Nuland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588367235
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-05-20T04:00:00+00:00

ROBBING GRAVES

Her body stolen by fiendish men,

Her bones anatomized,

Her soul, we trust, has risen to God,

Where few physicians rise.

INSCRIPTION ON A TOMBSTONE IN HOOSICK, NEW YORK

The body in question belonged to a nine-year-old girl named Ruth Sprague. It had been stolen from its grave by a certain Roderick Clow on the night after she was buried in 1846 and then taken to the office of a local physician, Dr. P. M. Armstrong, where it was secretly dissected—anatomized—in the name of medical science. Along with the quatrain, the despised names of Clow and Armstrong were engraved on the tombstone for posterity to read, that their shameful deed not be forgotten. Also engraved there is the remarkable statement that “her mutilated remains were obtained and deposited here.”

Recovery of whatever was left of a clandestinely disinterred and anatomized corpse was a rarity, and there is no way of knowing just how the residuum of Ruth came to be buried in that place. Nor does there appear to be any evidence that either Clow or Armstrong was punished in any way for the theft or the dissection. They very likely went free, because only in the previous decade had anatomy laws been written to criminalize such desecrations, and even then their main objective was not to punish but to provide a steady supply of teaching material to medical schools. These statutes made available the bodies of the executed and the unknown, as well as those of people for whom no burial provisions had been made (certain paupers, for example), but the punitive measures against illegal disinterment went generally unenforced.

When Clow set out on his grisly mission that night, he was, whether knowingly or not, engaging in a line of work in which others had achieved a degree of dubious fame and even a kind of immortality. Not a few of his predecessors’ exploits appear like unsightly blots on the pages of medical history, staining the images of some of the greatest anatomists and surgeons of all time. Many prominent teachers of surgery not only sponsored these unsavory doings but led expeditions of corporeal salvage themselves. Robert Liston of University College, London, who did the first European operation using ether in the very year of Ruth Sprague’s postmortem dismemberment, was known to plunder cemeteries in the company of a notorious grave robber named Crouch. In one twice-told tale of Liston’s adventures, he and Crouch argued over the rights to a grave site with a young surgeon in training, Mowbray Thomson, who finally carried the field by pulling out a pistol and threatening to kill the powerfully built surgeon. Liston and his henchman wisely retreated, thus avoiding the possibility of joining the disputed corpse as supine subjects of Thomson’s scientific curiosity.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.