Such horrible business

Cambridge Junction, Michigan. Men constructing a church found an unholy mess — smears of blood, tufts of hair, signs of heavy objects being dragged across the floor. In the graveyard in back, they found heaps of fresh earth next to empty graves.

The sheriff went straight to the University of Michigan, where medical students handed over the missing corpses and shrugged. After all, they hadn’t dug up any bodies. The medical department was simply the terminus of an illicit supply chain as indispensable to medicine as surgical stitches and scalpels.

In the mid-1800s, such incidents were common wherever instructors taught medical students how to save lives.

By then, physicians took it as fact that one must study anatomy to practice legitimate medicine. And books were not enough. The medical student had to take apart the organs and bones of human bodies. As the Scottish anatomist William Hunter had pointed out, dissection “informs the head, guides the hand, and familiarizes the heart to a kind of necessary inhumanity.”

But the scientific material was hard to come by. Anatomists were battling Christian tradition, which regarded the human form as the temple of the soul.

Still, if the dead were sacrosanct, how could surgeons learn to save the living?

Well into the 1800s, surgeons were scarce, so the few cadavers needed could be acquired legally from poorhouses and prisons when a pauper died with no family to pay for burial.

But by 1850, when U-M opened its medical department, surgical training was becoming more common. After the Civil War, the specialty took off. That meant pressing problems for Michigan’s two professors of surgery, Moses Gunn and Corydon LaFord. As their classes swelled, so did the demand for bodies.

The professors hired assistants, often recent graduates, to help with instruction in anatomy and surgery. By day, these “demonstrators” showed students what to do in the lab. By night, they acquired cadavers. When the legitimate supply dried up, they stole them, sometimes alone, sometimes through men willing to rob graves for money.

Soon after arriving at U-M, Gunn began a running war with the Regents over his proposal to move the medical department to Detroit, where there would be many more patients to treat than in backwoods Washtenaw County.

Eventually, Gunn decamped to a new post in Chicago and made off with 40 cadavers. When the Regents threatened legal action, Gunn called their bluff. He said they would never pursue him for fear of exposing that U-M was trafficking in the dead. He was right. The Regents backed down.

The task of resupply fell to La Ford, a quiet fellow who “feared nothing more than to do wrong,” as a friend said. But he now needed 125 cadavers a year at a cost of $20-$30 per specimen plus $5-$10 for transportation and $2-$3 for preservation fluids.

La Ford’s demonstrator was forced to search all over the Midwest. “He must find men willing to undertake such illegal and dangerous work, La Ford confided to a Regent. “After a body is received, it must be boxed, carted, and transported. All by unreliable persons who must be bribed!”

One demonstrator later wrote, “The law was peculiar. I was a state officer charged with the duty of getting thematerial, but there was a statute consigning me to prison if I did my duty.”

That was true. The state required U-M to teach anatomy. But it forbade the illicit procurement of dead bodies for dissection.

In 1880, new public outrage over body snatching fell on the head of the current demonstrator, William James Herdman. He proposed reform.

Herdman wanted the state to require poor-houses and prisons to donate unclaimed bodies for anatomists. Other states had similar laws. Why not Michigan? “Now, I do not ... lack sympathy for the pauper class in our community,” he said. “But the pauper has been the ward of the State or County, he is maintained at public expense, he is attended in his last illness by medical skill at public expense ... Is it therefore asking too much that his body, unclaimed by friends ... be made to contribute to the welfare of his fellows?”

His plea struck home. The legislature soon directed that unclaimed bodies of persons who died in public institutions should be turned over to the U-M’s anatomical demonstrators, who would distribute them among the state’s three medical schools.

Michigan’s Anatomy Act of 1881, many times amended and improved, led to the modern rules by which bodies are donated (never sold). Annual memorials honor the dead. Today, many generous individuals donate their bodies each year to help U-M medical students, dental students, and many others to learn human anatomy. They are assured of respectful treatment and the opportunity to have their cremated remains returned to loved ones or interred in a special U-M burial plot.

Note: A longer version of this article appears in the University of Michigan Heritage Project. Although historical practices for supplying anatomy classes were often illegal and disrespectful, our current standards are rigorously ethical. At Michigan Medicine, our Anatomical Donations Program not only meets the highest ethical standards but also helps donors and their loved ones feel deeply appreciated for the educational opportunities they make possible. To get a better understanding of our current practices, you can read about how the Anatomical Donations Program offers transformative learning experiences for medical students.

Sources: The papers of the School of Medicine, Bentley Historical Library; Linda Robinson Walker, “Grave Subjects: The Birth of the University of Michigan Medical School,” Michigan Today (Fall 1999); Robert Kedzie, “The Early Days of the Medical Department,” and Henry M. Hurd, “The Medical Department in 1865,” Michigan Alumnus, February 1902; “Body Snatching,” Ann Arbor Local News and Advertiser,12/29/1857; Donald F. Hulked, “The History of the Department of Anatomy, the University of Michigan, pt. 1, 1850-1894,” U-M Medical Bulletin, January-February 1961; Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (1987); and C.B. Burr, ed., Medical History of Michigan, vol. 1 (1930).