They were called resurrection men, but their task was far from righteous. The only god they worshiped was money, and they served a class of esteemed medical men who would have never deigned to recognize them in public should their paths ever cross outside the midnight hours. Body-snatching was their business, and in those days, business was good. It was dirty work, to be sure, but it had its perks—people tended to be buried in their best clothes, and those fine fabrics, jewels, and gold teeth were yours for the taking (provided you could pry them off of their cold, stiff limbs). And the market was booming. Cadavers were in such short supply and such high demand that the resurrectionists could charge top dollar for their lightly decomposed wares, and besides, who were they to stand in the way of progress?
As with so very many other historical horrors, the resurrection men’s profession arose as a response to rapid scientific advancement. During the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the study and practice of medicine was finally beginning to professionalize. No one was washing their hands yet, but American medical schools had finally awakened to the necessity of providing their students with hands-on experience in human anatomy. As they began to formalize their curricula, the nascent medical establishment had to admit that their operating standards weren’t exactly the most rigorous. This was the age of the quack and the snake-oil salesman, when doctors blithely operated with filthy fingers and the widespread acceptance of germ theory was still decades in the future. Many of these early medical schools happily accepted just about anyone who could afford the fees, churning out “doctors” who were little better than these traveling potion peddlers.
Upon observing developments in their European counterparts—which were much more advanced than their American cousins—it was decided that the answer to the young nation’s medical professionalization problem lay in the dissecting room. Until then, medical students had been expected to learn all they needed to know by sitting in a lecture hall and craning their necks to watch a physician dissect a cadaver; books and wax models supplemented the experience, but were still a poor substitute for the genuine article. Relying on droning lecturers to educate a roomful of bored medical students, who would then be let loose upon an unsuspecting populace, wasn’t fully serving anyone’s interests. The only way to truly understand the human body’s inner workings was to, well, get in there. Beefing up their institutions’ anatomical training would deepen the next generation of physicians’ practical knowledge while also weeding out the dilettantes and aspiring fraudsters.
Of course, changing tack would require a significant investment in teaching materials—namely, corpses. At the time, the only cadavers that medical schools could legally access were those of convicted murderers, and the demand for fresh bodies far outstripped the available supply. That’s where the resurrection men came in.
In the dead of night, the plunderers would creep past the cemetery gates, the clinking of their metal implements muffled within heavy burlap bags. Crowbars, hooks, shovels, and tarps were the tools of their unholy trade, and depending on how well they’d timed their operation, the men wouldn’t have had to dig long. The fresher the grave, the looser the dirt was on top, and the easier it was to get to the body lying beneath. A few well-placed cracks and a few heave-hos could get the unlucky stiff out of their coffin and into the back of a waiting wagon before the sun rose. Once they had secured their corpse of choice, it was off to collect their blood money.
It was the literal embodiment of a back-alley deal, but this was no underworld outfit. No proper criminal was interested in such a ghoulish product. Instead, the buyers of those bodies came from highly respectable backgrounds, swam in the highest social circles, and enjoyed the elevated social status of the educated elite. The medical schools at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia (among many others) were eager participants in the corpse circuit. Sometimes cost-minded medical faculty and students would even cut out the middlemen and go a-graverobbing themselves (Harvard’s freelance body-snatching crew got so into the spirit of the thing that they gave themselves a name, “the Spunker Club.”)
Each one of those cadavers had a story, and few of them were happy. The resurrection men discovered quite early on that it was far easier to pillage the graves of the poor, the marginalized, and the forgotten than it was to get away with swiping society swells. The people whose remains briefly rested in potters’ fields, in Black cemeteries, in Native burial sites, and in the churchyards of poor neighborhoods were regarded as disposable while they were alive, and unfortunately, their afterlives weren’t much better. The rich could afford tamper-resistant luxuries like lead coffins; the poor were left to their pine boxes and their luck. They were the first to go when the keepers of the dissecting table came knocking. The authorities did nothing, and the trainee surgeons kept on slicing. The march of medical progress could not be stopped, no matter how the living felt about its methods.
None of this was a secret, either. People were well aware that their coffins might end up empty, and a visceral horror of grave-robbing filtered into the public consciousness. Stealing a body was akin to stealing a soul, and the thought of all those not-quite-human figures rotting quietly away on dissecting tables made peoples’ skin crawl. Medical men may have insisted that they needed those corpses to improve their knowledge, to advance technologically and intellectually, to ultimately serve them, the people, better, but it was difficult to square those assertions with the bone-deep horror of a disturbed grave. Death was meant to be final. What did it mean if these unscrupulous characters could come along and disrupt the natural order of things, simply because some mustachioed gentleman in a dirty apron said so? Can you still get to heaven from the medical school’s rubbish bin?
These notions seeped into the worlds of art and literature as well as people’s own burial plans. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was written in 1818, when the resurrectionist’s trade was alive and well; her vision of Victor Frankenstein haunting “the dissecting room and the slaughter-house” for scrap organs was ripped straight from real life. The thought of being dissected terrified Charles Byrne, a native of Ireland who stood over seven feet tall and traveled the UK performing as “The Irish Giant.” Byrne was well aware that his extraordinary body was of interest to medical minds, but was determined to avoid their clutches posthumously. The last place he wanted to end up was a display case in some dusty museum.
That didn’t deter the bone-hunters, and Scottish surgeon John Hunter actually tried to buy his corpse in advance, offering to pre-pay Byrne for the use of his skeleton after death. In response, the giant made arrangements to have his body sealed in a lead coffin and buried at sea. But after Byrne’s untimely death at age 22, Hunter managed to steal the body anyway. Instead of resting peacefully in the depths of the North Sea, Byrne’s skeleton was displayed at Royal College of Surgeons’ Hunterian Museum (named for Hunter)… for the next 200 years.
The people didn’t take this inhumane affront lying down. Fervent protests against body-snatching roiled the 18th and early 19th centuries, and mobs attacked hospitals, medical schools, and doctors’ residences. Medical historian Michael Sappol cites at least 17 “anatomy riots” between 1765 and 1854. Some of the targets of their ire were innocent, but others did themselves few favors. In 1788, a riot broke out after a white medical student at the New York Hospital taunted a group of young Black children by waving a cadaver’s arm out the window and telling a little boy whose mother had recently died that it was hers. When the horrified child ran home to tell his father, they rushed to her grave—and found it empty. A crowd of over 2,000 marched to the hospital to protest; in response, the militia was called in, and the ensuing conflagration left six dead.
Eventually, this rancid state of affairs came to an end after the passage of various Anatomy Acts that created state-sanctioned avenues for medical schools to source cadavers for their dissecting classes; those bodies still overwhelmingly came from the poor, the disabled, and the disenfranchised, but at least people who buried their loved ones could now cling to a reasonable expectation that they would stay buried. The resurrection men hung up their crowbars and found other employment, and the generations of medical students who had benefited from their brutal business left school with a much better understanding of how the hip bone connects to the thigh bone. Everybody won—except, of course, the people who had had the misfortune of being born and buried prior to the passage of those laws, and whose bits and bones had ended up unceremoniously destroyed in the name of advancement.
Today’s body-snatchers don’t set up shop in graveyards anymore; more people are being cremated, for one thing. Though the practice of “body-brokering” outside of the cemetery is not at all a thing of the past; in fact, it’s a profitable modern industry. Horrified relatives have learned that their loved ones’ corpses have been sold not only to medical science, but to the military for explosives testing. We are not as far removed from body-snatching’s Victorian glory days as we might like to think.
But as for the rest of us, we are still haunted by new sorts of dispossession, exploitation, and undignified desecration. If the thought of a creature that was humanlike but not human sent chills down 18th-century spines, so too must the rise of artificial intelligence and its attendant army of chatbots. What could be more unnerving than the canned phrases of an undead digital brain? Active but not alive, these friends without faces prey on the curious, the lonely, the young, the old, the hopeful, and the hopeless; any warm body will do, so long as it pays the fee and continues to engage, generate data, and consume.
Profit-seeking social media and artificial intelligence companies feed upon the lives, relationships, and well-being of the living. And AI takes its victims too from dead labor: the work of millions and millions of writers and artists throughout history, alive or otherwise, the entire corpus of human creation exhumed and consumed, without credit, for training data and profit. This unchecked appropriation represents a theft of humanity’s shared intellectual inheritance: a robbery of art, culture, and what makes us human, pilfered from the cradle of civilization all the way to its grave.
Meanwhile, the present-day users among its victims are still living, but they are vulnerable. Some tumble headlong into the uncanny valley and find it impossible to escape. When Shelley wrote, “How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge” back in 1818, she had no idea how true this would hold. Lives have already been ruined (predominantly among the young, the vulnerable, and the unwell), while the wave of breathless AI hype and boosterism is still cresting. To make it all possible, low-wage content moderators and data labelers in the Global South spend hours each day staring at the worst of humanity, and are given little to no support to handle the psychological harms of seeing more dead bodies in a week than even the most prolific resurrection man did over his entire career.
Data centers wreak environmental havoc wherever they are planted, sucking up vital resources from the human communities they encircle. Entire swaths of industries and professions are being snuffed out without warning—and, certainly without consent from the human beings who operate them, are left zombified and half-dead. As Shelley opined, “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.” Of course, the chaos of which she spoke concerned man’s determination to subjugate others to his will and the wretchedness that vile hubris wrought, but who’s keeping track? The ChatGPT summary of Frankenstein is all you need.
Those who benefit most from its deployment insist that AI is the future. It is necessary, it is inevitable, the argument has already been resolved and the law will be on their side, eventually, so you may as well fall in line. The good doctors need our data and our time and our bodies in order to learn, to evolve, to conquer, and most importantly for them, to profit. Ignore the warning signals your brain screams out when it encounters an undead creature that pretends to have a soul and urges you to trust it. Turn away from the tearing of the social fabric, the personal cost, the environmental destruction, the political destabilization and bloody violence of the AI surge. “Nothing is so painful to the human mind as great and sudden change” may still be as true as when Shelley jotted it down, but a little pain is good for you, right?
After all, who are you to stand in the way of progress? ♦
