The students got a little drunk. They look at the bottom of bottles for something to give them courage, something to overcome their fears before setting off on an adventure. When night comes, they are determined to steal corpses. In Quebec, in the winter of 1882-1883, at least 15 cases of thefts of this type were reported to the authorities.
On January 13, 1883, two corpses disappeared from the mass grave in the Saint-Marc-sur-Richelieu cemetery. It was students, again and again, who did it; one of them, Joseph Fontaine, was arrested.
“Several testimonies indicate that body thefts occurred every winter,” explains Martin Robert.
A historian of medicine, this researcher associated with the Center for the History of Social Regulations at UQAM has spent years closely studying the practices of dissection in the training of doctors in Quebec. He has just published This necessary sciencea history of human dissections considered through medical training. The duty joined him in the United Kingdom, where he is a postdoctoral researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
A culture of the macabre
In January 1883, Joseph Fontaine was brought to be tried in Montreal. When he appeared in court, around 300 students came to support him loudly. They’re making a big fuss. Several of his comrades brought human tibias or femurs. They brandish them at arm’s length. The police get involved. A fight breaks out. Students are pushed onto the streets.
At the Place d’Armes, near the Notre-Dame basilica, one of these students speaks. He denounced, reported the newspapers of the time, the “tyranny of the authorities” in this case of body theft. That same evening, the students gathered to discuss it. Teachers encourage them. And all these beautiful people go back to show their discontent in the streets of Montreal, yelling and shouting. New clashes with the police ensued.
Medical students want to finally be given bodies to dissect without having to steal them.
In the archives there are numerous photographs where students are unceremoniously grouped around a dissected corpse, a skull or a skeleton. The practice of dissection generates a particular student culture, as macabre as possible. It fostered, at least in Montreal, rivalries between Protestant and Catholic universities.
“The bodies were stolen because medical studies required them” on a large scale, explains Martin Robert. The law did not ensure that universities could obtain them easily. Hence the fact that the theft of corpses, in the 19th centurye century, are multiplying. The students broke down the doors of the mass graves where the bodies, stored in winter while the ground was frozen, waited to be buried in the spring. These body thefts explain, at least in part, feelings “fundamentally hostile to medical culture” among the working classes, historians of medicine believe.
“In the 1870s, there was a widespread idea among the population that these students were participating in corpse trafficking to make money from it,” explains Martin Robert. The “resurrectionists”, as the body snatchers are called, are part of a sort of great medical robbery, many people readily believe.
The public authorities adopted a tougher law in 1883, following stories like that of the student Joseph Fontaine, in order to force — under control — the distribution of unclaimed corpses to educational establishments. An anatomy inspector regulates in principle the circulation and taking possession of bodies.
Hesitations and fears
Since the adoption of a first law on dissection in 1843, a body which was not claimed by its family or loved ones had in principle to be offered to science. But the institutions appeared very hesitant about the idea of ceding spoils in this way in favor of the teaching of medicine.
“The hospital nuns are particularly reluctant,” notes Martin Robert in an interview with Duty. For religious reasons? In part. However, the historian believes that the motives are more complex. “After all, these are patients we have treated…” It is not easy to imagine them being cut up with a scalpel by budding doctors. What if the public had to start thinking that as soon as you die, your body goes straight to be dissected…
In secret, Mgr Ignace Bourget (1799-1885) strived to make corpses available. Martin Robert found, in his correspondence, that he asked the Hôtel-Dieu that bodies be given in secret to medical classes. Why in secret? “There was a reputation to maintain. » The prelate defends the creation of a Catholic university for the teaching of medicine. In other words, Mgr Bourget knows very well that the College of Physicians requires its members to have been subjected to the practice of dissection. Future French-Canadian doctors therefore need corpses. So Mgr Bourget found a way to respond to this condition. Discreetly.
This will be the Longue-Pointe asylum, later known as the Louis-H hospital. Lafontaine, which will provide the greatest number of corpses to medical schools. For what ? Death rates are high there, notes Martin Robert. And since the establishment is far from the city and the bodies must be recovered 24 hours after death, many families simply cannot get there in time.
A social class problem manifests itself in the face of these deaths which allow the medical profession to flourish, to shine, to live. The corpses all belong to working class people. “In a small majority, it is men who are dissected,” observes the historian. They practice small trades, for what little we can know about them. On the women’s side, many are servants. None notable. Only people forgotten by society.
The punishment of the hanged
In the 19th centurye century, the practice of medicine took on a very important dimension in industrialized societies. In Quebec, before 1788, there were only around ten doctors of medicine and around 550 surgeons, the majority of whom came from France. Michel Sarrazin, the first doctor attached to New France, practiced animal dissection in 1699. Did he also practice on human corpses? We don’t know anything about it.
No formal proof of corpse dissection exists in New France, although we know that this practice had already existed for a long time in Europe. For a long time, it was mainly people curious about science who went to attend dissection shows in amphitheaters. Rembrandt’s famous painting Doctor Tulp’s Anatomy Lesson (1632) represents one of these anatomical lessons, perpetrated in this case on the body of a hanged man. The bodies of the condemned were often targeted for dissection.
In Quebec, the hanged are used as experimental material for medicine. Of the 49 hanged between 1761 and 1836 under the English regime, at least 24 were certainly given to medicine, and 7 additional were probably also dissected. A judge, in addition to ordering the death penalty, can sentence the body to dissection. Among the population, dissection is therefore related to an additional form of punishment, which goes beyond capital punishment.
In 1823, in Quebec, a man begged the judge so that his brother-in-law, condemned to death, would not also be dissected. He wants to be able to bury it. The judge does not waver: he will order the dissection.
However, the bodies of the hanged are absolutely not enough for the students; body thefts are increasing. In 1836, a widow complained about the disappearance of her husband’s body. The thief, Thomas Jolly, is found and imprisoned. But many such thieves run free. The population is gnashing their teeth. Doctors, including the famous Pierre de Sales Laterrière, claim to have attracted terrible hatred from the public by carrying out dissections.
“Some medical faculties have abandoned dissection today,” observes Martin Robert. The pendulum of time sometimes produces curious reversals. While no one wanted to end up on a dissection table in the 19the century, offer your body to medicine in the 21ste century “constitutes for many the ultimate way to still give meaning to their existence”.