Skloot Body Thieves

Body Snatchers

In the late 18th and early 19th century, Englishmen later known as “resurrection men” provided fresh corpses to anatomists and inspired the kind of superstition of the “night doctors” discussed in Rebecca Skloot’s, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks; these “night doctors” also changed medicine and surgery forever.

Resurrection men were a group of individuals in England that provided fresh bodies for the anatomists and medical schools as they requested them. Doctors and medical students in the late 18th century were just scratching the surface about understanding how the human body functions, and they needed bodies to dissect to gain a better understanding. At the time, doctors were legally only allowed four to six bodies of

executed criminals a year to dissect, but they could illegally dissect as many bodies as they wanted. The need for bodies consequentially caused for body snatching to become a profession. A well-trained team of three body snatchers took about an hour to enter and exit a cemetery without getting caught (Breeden 323).

Grave robbing consisted of three distinct steps: learning an impending burial, reconnoitering the grave site during daylight, and resurrecting the body. The first man dropped off the other two men near the cemetery and came back to at a designated time to pick up the body and the other men. After the men located the grave site, they examined the grave to return all of the surviving family’s belongings exactly where they were before when they leave the site. They didn’t want anyone to suspect that their family member was taken. They then dug up the grave to reach the coffin. After they removed the lid of the coffin, the body was ready to be resurrected. There were two different methods that the resurrection men used. The first method consisted of the grave robbers using a five-foot-long iron bar with a blunt hoot on one end and a handle on the other. The hooked end was securely fastened under the chin of the corpse so that the men could easily pull the corpse out of the coffin. This method disfigured the body, so the men tried to stay away from using this method because it would cause the value of the corpse to go down. The grave diggers tried to avoid this method which resulted them using the second method. Instead, the grave robbers removed the corpse from the grave by using a harness that

strapped underneath the corpse’s arms. After the corpse was removed, the robbers removed the clothes off of the corpse, returned them to grave, arranged the back to the way it was before they get there, wrapped the body with a tarp, wrapped their tools in tarp, and waited for the wagon to pick them up so that they can sell the corpse (323). One body was worth a months pay, which resulted to the rise of this profession.
These “resurrection men” influenced men in America to become grave diggers for doctors and medical schools, which led to the superstitions of the “night doctors” discussed in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The “night doctors” were made up by Southern landowners to discourage the migration of Blacks from rural farming areas to Northern and Southern urban areas (Fry 171). They told horrible tales of doctors that would snatch them in the night and use them for research if they saw slaves out. Rebecca Skloot states that “the slave owners covered themselves in white sheets and crept around at night, posing as spirits coming to infect black people with disease or steal them for research” (Skloot 166). The psychological control that the landowners used kept most of their slaves at home and discouraged them from escaping north. They believed these heavily exaggerated tales because African-American literacy was still outlawed until the early twentieth century (Washington 118). These tales have been orally passed down generations to the people of Baltimore. The Lackses have even heard of the “night doctors”. Bobbette Lacks said, “You’d be surprised how many people disappeared in East Baltimore when I was a girl … [I wasn’t] allowed to go anywhere near Hopkins” (Skloot 165). The black residents near Hopkins have believed that the hospital was built near a poor black community to benefit scientists (166). In Susan Lederer’s Subjected to Science, Lederer states that “distrust of hospitals continue[d] to grow … until the public was assured that ‘the hospital is for man, not vice-versa” (Lederer 7). This may have been apparent in Henrietta Lacks’s case, but Johns Hopkins Hospital is one of the best hospitals in the country today.
The medical discoveries that these “night doctors” made has changed the way that doctors diagnose and treat patients.

Although these “night doctors” were a superstation, they really existed. They dissected and experimented on a countless number of both dead and alive African-Americans, but not all of the experiments had a horrible outcome. Dr. James Marion Sims’s use of slave women a cure for vesico-vaginal fistula (Savitt 344). By chance, he was treating three black servants with the same condition. He also so happened to be treating a white woman that had a malpositioned uterus and suddenly realized that by placing the women on their elbows and knees, he would be able to visualized the fistula and perhaps repair it (345). Once he made this realization, he then asked his subjects if he could experiment on them. They knew exactly what he was going to be doing to them. He didn’t have to force them to try this new procedure because they were desperate for relief. He then sent them home cured. Another example of successful outcomes is the performance of ovariotomies performed by Dr. Ephraim McDowell (346). After the first successful surgery, he perfected his technique on four black women. “The final example of the usefulness of black to physicians in the slave society was the performance of Caesarian operations on pregnant women” (347). The procedure was performed occasionally with few success; but over the years, doctors have perfected the procedure. Today, there are few cases

where a C-section didn’t work. The discovery of Caesarean operations has caused billions of babies to have a chance to live when their mother couldn’t manually give birth to them.
Not all “night doctors” are like the ones in the horrible tales that the landowners used to tell. Some truly had a heart to help humanity, not just exterminate parts of it.