The Lady and Her Monsters Read online

  James Graham, like most future doctors in England at the time, began his medical studies in Edinburgh, Scotland. But the curriculum did not include the new innovations in the medical sciences, so he traveled to the United States. He spent his early twenties in Philadelphia, where he learned about Benjamin Franklin’s experiments with electricity. The notion of using electricity for medical purposes struck Graham like a lightning bolt and convinced him that electricity could be the cure for all that pained humankind. It has been suggested that in reality he never truly believed that electricity was a medical cure-all. Nevertheless, it was important to him that others would believe it.

  When he returned to England, he was called upon by members of London’s upper class to administer bolts of electricity; they believed it would cure them of headaches, menstrual cramps, gout, and everything else in between. With his reputation bolstered, he sought out a place where people could make use of his electrical machines, and in 1779, he opened the doors to the Temple of Health.

  His clients were more than willing to pay the two guineas he charged for admission; once inside, their bodies and senses were immediately stimulated. To some, the opulent décor of the temple’s rooms seemed entirely obscene: the shimmering, imported silks; the strong furniture whose curvatures implied, in not-so-subtle a way, the female body; the mirrors in which one could see oneself in all manners of seductive poses. The delicate perfumes and welcoming scents of lavender and roses that were misted in the air immediately recalled a fine spring morning and played delicately on the senses. Music flowed from unseen corners of the room, and tall Greek statues of voluptuous women stood seeming to guard the place. To the men’s delight, scantily clad women frolicked among the statues.

  By the time the clients saw the electrical apparatus, their bodies and senses were already stimulated and ready for anything. And for an extra fifty guineas at night, if they so desired, patrons could make use of the infamous “Celestial Bed,” which had bolts of electricity crackling through it. Those who slept in the bed would be “blessed with progeny. Sterility and impotence would be cured.” Though the environment was erotic, it was the electricity that did the actual work. It ran continuously from the headboard across the length of the bed, “filling the air with magnetic fluid calculated to give the necessary degree of strength and exaction to the nerves.”

  The Celestial Bed and the Temple of Health appealed to people who had latent issues with their sexuality—husbands who wished to step out on their wives in a comfortable environment, and wives who sought that extra something their husbands could not provide. Existing under the guise of a respected medical institution gave it credibility.

  Caricature of James Graham (center). James Graham was called “the quintessence of quackism,” the highlight of his career culminating in the building of the Temple of Health. There he made use of electricity to cure his sexually depleted patients. Here he stands in between Gog and Magog, the two footmen at the entrance of the Temple of Health.

  Though many attested to the benefits of Graham’s electrical apparatus, others saw the temple for what it was: an upper-class bordello. Horace Walpole, who went to the temple for a session, described it as “the most impudent puppet show of imposition I ever saw, and the mountebank himself that dullest of his profession. A woman, invisible, warbled to clarinets on the stairs. The decorations are pretty and odd, and the apothecary, who comes up a trap-door (for no purpose, since he might as well come up the stairs), is a novelty. The electrical experiments are nothing at all singular, and a poor air-pump, that only hurts a bladder, pieces out the farce.”

  Faced with Graham’s legacy, Aldini had to be careful how he promoted and described his methods. Graham had tried to restore peoples’ depleted sexuality; Aldini wanted to restore life to the dead and to show that it was possible to do so with scientific methods. It was a highly dangerous move, impractical in a sense, and fraught with difficulties, not the least of which was the possibility of his experiments being undermined and of his being seen as a fool. He needed to do things precisely and in order.

  First, he needed the perfect subject to galvanize. Youth and health were priorities, but most people died of disease and malnutrition, so it would be hard to find a vigorous body in its prime. He could rely on the gallows, as most anatomists did, but English law allotted only ten or twelve bodies for anatomizations, and those came highly prized by the medical institutions, which clamored after them. He could have hired a “resurrectionist,” or a body snatcher, like most others in his position did, but they were expensive. Moreover, resurrection men were indiscriminate in whom they dug up—whether young or old, man or woman, healthy or diseased. The only requirement for a resurrectionist was a recent time of death, because then putrefaction would not have set in. Although Aldini needed a nonputrefied body, he would not stoop to employing a resurrection man to find one.

  Most anatomists were not as picky as he was. Up until the 1800s, most medical students learned surgical procedures by watching their teachers perform actual surgeries. But as the population grew, students and doctors realized a more hands-on method was needed, one in which each student could work on a corpse. This hands-on practice, called the Parisian method, gave them a chance to study how each organ, muscle, nerve, and bone operated. It was called the Parisian method because the law in France allowed surgeons to use the unclaimed bodies left in hospitals and death houses. However, in England the gallows were the only legal source from which to collect corpses.

  But the graveyards held a plentiful supply of unused corpses, and stealing them was not a serious crime. Actually trespassing was the grave robber’s biggest concern. If anatomists and their cohorts (mostly students) were found lurking in a place where they did not belong, say a cemetery, they could be arrested. They could also get in trouble if they were caught stealing objects—for instance, anything that belonged to the corpse, such as the clothes he or she had been interred with, any jewelry, shoes for the girlfriend, or mementoes, like portraits. To be careful, they conducted all transactions during the most absolute stillness of the night, and if the moon only rose to a sliver, so much the better, because too much light could be devastating. But some learned that too much silence could also cause problems, as it was hard to disguise the echo of their footsteps running down the street with a corpse bouncing off their backs.

  Snatching bodies proved a lucrative enterprise for the anatomists, though many found the actual digging of the bodies too stressful on their psyche. The general population thought it was disgraceful and gruesome. Doctors could have their reputations tarnished if they became known as grave robbers and body snatchers. Middlemen were needed to do the work for them.

  The money the resurrection men earned was appealing. A corpse could yield more than a week’s pay at any menial job. There was something in the forbidden act itself that was alluring to many as well. Christian Baroent described his work by saying, “The time chosen in dark winter nights . . . A hole was dug down to the coffin, only where the head lay—a canvas sheet being stretched around to receive the earth, and to prevent any of it spoiling the smooth uniformity of the grass. The digging was done with short, flat, dagger-shaped implements of woods, to avoid the clicking of iron striking stones. In reaching the coffin, two broad iron hooks under the lid, pulled forcibly up with a rope, broke off a sufficient portion of the lid to allow the body to be dragged out . . . the surface of the ground was carefully restored to its original conditions . . . the whole process could be completed in an hour, even though the grave might be six feet deep.”

  Resurrectionist gangs sprang up all over the city of London and the suburbs, working, for the most part, during the winter season. Their favorite haunts were the burial spots of the poor, who placed their dead in pine boxes that were easy to break into. If the gangs got particularly lucky, they found mass graves where several people who had died in the same day were buried together. The corpses were unearthed, put in sacks (hence the resurrection men’s nickname “sack-
’em-up men”), and dragged to the waiting party, most likely a servant working for a well-known anatomist in a back-alley laboratory, who would haggle over the price of the corpse as if it were a barrel of fruit.

  Messr. Cruncher and his son, two typical men who worked as resurrectionists. These two were mentioned by Charles Dickens in his novel A Tale of Two Cities.

  Ben Crouch was the leader of the most famous gang in that period. He was a foul-mouthed former pugilist whose physical strength was an asset when it came to digging out corpses but also to bullying others intending to enter the business. He also was a crook who would wait until his mates were drunk before dividing the take. With the advantage of sobriety, he managed to keep a larger share of the profit without anyone being able to tell. If someone pointed out the fact, the muscular Crouch didn’t waste a minute but carefully landed a bejeweled fist (he was fond of wearing thick rings and bracelets) over the opponent’s mouth, as if engaged in one of his former fights.

  The other members included Bill Harnett; Jack Harnett; Tom Light; men named Daniell, Butler, and Hollis; and Joseph Naples, who might have been the only resurrection man who ever kept a journal that described all of their doings. It was not even a journal, but more of a log that told how many bodies they stole, where they removed them from, and where they sent them. Published under the title of The Diary of a Resurrectionist, it listed the gang’s doings from 1811 to 1812, often with such simple entries as “Sunday, 21st, Went to S. Thomas’s. Sent 1 to Mr. Tounton, 2 to Edinburgh S. Thomas’s took 6 of the whole this week, came home and slept at home all night.”

  Naples was described as “a civil and well conducted man, slight in person, with a pleasing expression of countenance, and of respectable manners.” He had learned to work briskly in the field and not to argue with Crouch, particularly when either one was intoxicated, which, according to the diary, was often.

  There was no pretense that the corpses themselves had led lives, however difficult or distasteful, prior to their deaths. They were, according to Ruth Richardson, who wrote extensively about resurrectionist life, “bought and sold, they were touted, priced, haggled over, negotiated for, discussed in terms of supply and demand, delivered, imported, exported, transported . . . compressed into boxes, packed in sawdust, packed in hay, trussed up in sacks, roped up like hams, sewn in canvas, packed in cases, casks, barrels, crates and hampers, salted, pickled or injected with preservatives. They were carried in carts, in wagons, in burrows, and steamboats; manhandled, damaged in transit, and hidden under loads of vegetables. They were stored in cellars and quays. Human bodies were dismembered and sold in pieces, or measured and sold by the inch.” They were classified according to size, small being “a body under three feet long; those were sold at so much per inch and were further classified as ‘large small,’ ‘small’ and ‘foetus.’ ”

  Sometimes the public became aware of a particularly gruesome and horrific case. In 1826, someone was shipping three containers labeled “Bitter Salts” from the port of Liverpool to Leith, on the vessel Latana. What happened next was printed on a broadside, which read in part, “The casks remained on the quay all night, and this morning, previous to their being put on board, a horrid stench was experienced by the mates of the Latana and other persons . . . this caused some suspicion that the crates did not agree with their super-inscription which was ‘Bitter Salts,’ a constable was sent to the quay, and he caused the casks to be opened, where eleven dead bodies were found within, salted and pickled.”

  Bodies had become just objects and things. The living had very carefully removed all feelings associated with the dead. Abandoning all scruples, as soon as the dead were dealt with and the business with the living concluded, the men suddenly found themselves with money in their pockets. If they were working within a group, the money itself would not have been very much, and if diplomacy prevailed (which it almost never did), the earnings were split equally among all the members. Either way, the earnings were enough to pay for a pint at the local joint, likely the most famous gathering spot of all among resurrection men, the Fortune of War pub, epicenter of the resurrectionist’s life.

  This place just happened to be located near St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and Medical College, and not too far from the Old Bailey courthouse. If one was keen to do so, a line could be drawn between the courthouse, where the criminals were hung; the pub, where the body snatchers hung out; and the hospital, where eventually the corpses were dissected. The men who frequented the pub kept abreast of the latest convicts in the Old Bailey; they knew whose time was coming up. And they were also aware of the doctors working in the hospital across the street and of their particular needs, requirements, and preferences.

  The doctors had an uneasy relationship with the resurrection men. They needed their help to procure bodies, but they were appalled by their inhumane actions. Once they agreed to buy a body from a certain gang or resurrection man, they could not back down or change their mind. If the doctor was seen sneaking around searching for a better deal, the resurrection man would seek retaliation, and Ben Crouch and his gang were known to be quite vicious about their tactics. Sometimes they broke into dissecting rooms and destroyed bodies ready to be examined, or, more often, they called the police, ruining the doctors’ reputations.

  Joshua Brookes was one doctor who refused to follow the rules set up by the resurrection men. To his own detriment, he bought corpses from whoever offered the best deal. Gangs who expected loyalty often called the authorities to Brookes’s laboratory, where trouble arose. Once rotting bodies were left outside his house, where two young women walking by early in the day found them and screamed, alerting the neighbors to what had happened.

  Strangely enough, few of the doctors bequeathed their bodies to be used for dissections after they died. Several went so far as to purchase coffins that were being sold at enormous prices and were said to prevent the picks and shovels of the resurrectionists from breaking through. One such doctor, on the brink of death, imagined that his assistants would descend on his dead carcass like vultures and wrote a poem begging,

  And my ’prentices will surely come

  And carve me bone from bone,

  And I, who have rifled the dead man’s grave,

  Shall never rest in my own.

  Bury me in lead when I am dead,

  My brethren, I entrust.

  And see the coffin weigh’d I beg

  Lest the plumber should be a chest.

  Giovanni Aldini could have gone to the Fortune of War pub, or one like it, and engaged one of the resurrection men. He could have made his specifications known and perhaps one of them, in time, would have come up with the right subject, for a particular sum of money. But Aldini had another plan in mind. He not only wanted to find the perfect man to restore life to, but he also hoped to attract the right people who would back up his concepts, and possibly even pay for his stay in London. That’s when he approached the members of the Royal Humane Society.

  William Hawes and Thomas Cogan founded the Royal Humane Society in 1774. They were physicians who were concerned when they realized that a great number of people in the city’s hospitals were being taken for dead when they were still alive. To make matters worse, some of those still-living patients were being buried alive. This frightened doctors, as they were the ones to declare the actual time of death, and made patients fear going to sleep one moment and waking up the next in a pine box. The society was initially called the Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned, as restoring life to the drowned was their first order of business.

  Unlike other doctors, they found it necessary to push the new technique—an unproven one, no less—of resuscitation. They came up with a list of objectives the society would aim for. They agreed that people at large would help them, for why wouldn’t people support the art of resuscitation if it benefited them? Among their goals was the one they felt would attract the public the most: they would actually pay those who not only tried to bring someone ba
ck to life but actually managed to do so.

  Aldini approached the Royal Humane Society with a solution. Unabashedly suave in his demonstrations, he had come to realize, unlike his uncle, that his spectators came to view the experiments as much for the grand shows he provided as for the potential outcome. He also hoped the men of the society would provide him much-needed validation for his contraptions, as well as support, and introductions to the even more refined society of London. While the society members found his manners and his propositions a little unusual and his self-assurance almost bordering on conceit, they nonetheless agreed that his methods were worthy of a try. They also agreed to help with the more tangible issue at hand: finding the right corpse.

  When George Foster was arrested, he was “indicted for the willful murder of Jane Foster, his wife, and Louisa Foster, his infant child.” This had occurred on December 5, 1802, in a canal at Westbourne Green, in the city of Westminster. Despite the dire accusations, Foster believed a grave mistake had been made and he would soon be vindicated. Undaunted and ignorant in the ways the laws worked, he believed that the testimonies of his neighbors, coworkers, the people he had lodged with in the past, and the ones he was now living with would set him free.