Chapter five of
Underground,
“Resurrectionists,” is now available at
www.cmgbooks.com/5.html.
Have a read and pop back here to let me know
what you think!
Acknowledgments
My gratitude to the staff of the Bracken Health Sciences
Library of Queen’s University, for their help and patience in locating some
interesting books.
Thanks to everyone who helped pick out a suitably seedy
location for this chapter: Aaron, Erin, Jenn, Ron, and Steve. In the end, it came down to two
establishments: the Crown and Anchor and the Cushindall Inn. I chose the Cushindall, since the Crown and
Anchor sounded more like a soldiers’ haunt than a workman’s, and it was generally
members of the working class who moonlighted as resurrectionists.
Finally, as always, my thanks to the folks at Effective Editing,
for tidying up the final draft for me.
Some Notes on the
Chapter
The Cushindall Inn was a tavern owned by Alexander McKillop,
located on Johnson Street. I found it in the Kingston directory of 1865; there was no
directory for 1864. I could find no
photographs of the tavern, and the building in which it operated no longer
stands, so the description of the inn is entirely fictional.
Resurrectionists or sack-‘em-up-men were workmen who, for a substantial
fee, would rob fresh graves to provide bodies for medical students and
physicians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although the Anatomy Act of 1841 was intended
to curtail the need for grave robbing, reports of resurrectionists persisted in
Canada
as late as 1885, when an article in the Glob accused Queen’s medical students
of making off with yet another body.
Resources
If you’re interested in the resurrectionists, or in
nineteenth-century medical education, I highly recommend any or all of the
following:
Ball, James Moores. The
Sack-‘em-up-Men: An Account of the Rise and Fall of the Modern Resurrectionists.
Edinburgh:
Oliver and Boyd, 1928.
Bonner, Thomas Neville. Becoming
a Physician. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1995.
Neatby, Hilda. The
History of Queen’s University, Vol. 1. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press,
1974.
Sappel, Michael. Traffic
in Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America.
New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 2002.
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