Body snatching

One of the most fascinating books I have read in the past five or ten years has been "Stiff" by Mary Roach.  When I first brought it home, my husband was surprised and wondered why I had chosen to check this book out.  It seemed to be a little morbid-looking.  The front cover of the book has a picture of the bottom of two feet with the title "Stiff" on a toe tag.  It is about the "Curious Lives of Human Cadavers."  I don't remember who recommended it to me, but it was on my list of books to read.

My first time through the book was very educational and interesting.  Now I am going through it again to write this blog, and it is as amazing as I remember it.  The chapters range from body snatching to human crash test dummies.  I didn't find it morbid, but maybe just because I learned so much. 

There was a tradition in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to dissect only executed criminals.  The criminals didn't have a choice.  But the churchgoing masses believed in a literal rising from the grave, and dissection would probably spoil your chances of being resurrected.  Because of this belief no one donated his body to science.  Medical science was confined to the bodies of the criminals.

As the medical schools in America and Britain became more popular, the availability of cadavers remained the same.  Instructors in these schools found themselves backed into a corner.  They needed to come up with corpses or lose their students to anatomy schools in Paris, where there was more of an availability of bodies because unclaimed poor who died in city hospitals could be used. 

Anatomy professors resorted to extreme measures.  It was not uncommon to sneak into the graveyard and dig up a newly dead body to dissect.  This became known as body snatching.  It was distinct from grave robbing, which involved stealing jewels and heirlooms buried with the dead.  Being caught with a dead person's cufflinks was a crime, but being caught with the corpse itself carried no penalty.

It soon became a thriving business.  These body snatchers, or resurrectionists as they were also known, could make a living five to ten times greater than an unskilled laborer.  They wouldn't dig up the entire grave, just the top end of it, break the lid of the coffin, grab the body, and be done in under an hour.  Soon, people with money went to the trouble of making the graves harder and harder to break into, and poorer people were the ones whose bodies ended up on the dissection table.  Years later, this would have a devastating effect on children.

There is an organ in the upper chest, below the thyroid gland, called the thymus.  It was not understood to be a specialized organ of the immune system until 1961.  Before then, there were many ideas about its usefulness in the human body.  From the place where emotions were stored to an organ for saving room for growing lungs.  Many thought there was no functional importance to it.

In the early 1900's, when autopsies were performed on babies who were healthy and had unexpectedly died  (later called SIDS) it was noticed that the size of the thymus was larger than it should be.  It was believed that this was the cause of death, since no other reason could be found.   In 1920, the practice of  radiation on babies and children was begun on those whose thymus showed "an enlargement" through x-ray technology..  The thymus would shrink and parents and physicians were sure the right decision had been made.

In a 1945 text book, Dr. John Caffey, MD, was quoted as saying that irradiation was useless and dangerous.  The practice was mostly discontinued by 1960, though in some places it didn't end until into the 1970s.

The bottom line is that 20,000 to 30,000 deaths were caused from radiation-induced cancers.  Many were thyroid cancer and leukemia.  Later it was discovered that the thymus in these children was not overly large. Some of the information in the medical community had been gathered from these body-snatched corpses and was, in some cases, bad information.  The people were poor and often malnourished, and the size of the thymus in those bodies was smaller than it should have been. 

Now you have heard something interesting.