Grave Robbers, Resurrection Men, and Med Students

I recently finished Colson Whitehead's excellent new novel The Underground Railroad. I can understand why it won the Pulitzer. It's an interesting mix of history, fantasy, adventure, and social commentary. It also gruesome and upsetting, which you'd expect from a novel about slavery.

Most of the novel takes place in the South, but one very short chapter deals with a 19th-century Boston medical student who moonlights as a grave robber. The city's medical schools need dead bodies for dissection class, and very few people are willing to leave their corpses to science. It's the perfect opportunity for an ambitious young man with bad morals...

After finishing The Underground Railroad I decided to look into grave robbery in old New England. Whitehead's book is fiction, but he incorporates a lot of fact into it. Does he accurately portray the local grave robbing business?

The answer is yes, more or less. In the 18th and 19th century, Boston medical schools were given the corpses of executed criminals by the government to dissect. Unfortunately, the stream of executed criminals was not enough to satisfy the schools' demand for fresh corpses. To increase their supply, medical professors turned to grave robbers euphemistically called "resurrection men." The resurrection were more than happy to dig up freshly buried bodies and sell them to the schools.

Surprisingly, legal penalties for resurrection men were quite light. They often got away with just a slap on the wrist. They had to worry more about being beaten by an angry mob of mourning relatives than being arrested by the police. It seems strange, but grave robbing did not become a felony in Massachusetts until 1815, when the legislature passed a bill called "An Act to Protect the Sepulchers of the Dead."

To avoid angry relatives (and later the police), resurrection men sought out corpses that no one important cared about. The graves of paupers, the insane, and the homeless were all good sources of revenue. African-American cemeteries also made good targets for the resurrection men. Corpses from the lower social levels of society could be taken more easily.

Since the penalties for grave robbing were originally light, sometimes even faculty and students from medical schools tried their hand at it. It saved them from having to pay the resurrection men and seems to have been viewed almost as a fun activity. For example, at Harvard Medical School a secret student society called the Spunkers Club routinely robbed graves in the years before the Revolution. Sam Adams's son was a member, as was William Eustis, who later became U.S. Secretary of War. The Revolutionary War later provided a steady stream of bodies; George Washington himself complained from his headquarters in Cambridge about the theft of a soldier's body. Happily, the Spunkers Club is no longer in operation.

It is now illegal to pay for a human body in the United States, and medical schools rely on donations. You can read more about the process in this National Geographic article. WARNING: It has photos of actual corpses. You can read more about the Spunkers Club at the History Channel. No photos of corpses there.

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FYI, I will be speaking about the monsters of Cape Cod on Saturday, May 13 as part of the Provincetown Paracon. Other speakers include Adam Barry and Amy Bruni from the TV shows Ghost Hunters and Kindred Spirits, and there will be a special Traveling Museum of the Occult and Paranormal as well. I hope you can make it!

Me and Paracon organizer Sam Baltrusis talking about the event on What's New Massachusetts.

Captain Dodge and the Mermaid

Many years ago, when I was just a small boy, my parents took me and my brother to visit Harvard's museums. I remember seeing the vast collection of taxidermied animals, the glass flowers, and the dinosaur skeletons, which were pretty cool to me back then. (They're still pretty cool now!)

The exhibit I remember best, though, was something called the Fiji Mermaid. This was a small, mummified corpse of a hideous mermaid. Of course, the placard next to the glass case explained that it was not really a mermaid, but was actually a 19th century hoax someone created by sewing a monkey's torso onto a fish's tail. Hoax or not, it was seared into my memory, and the name Fiji Mermaid has stuck in my head ever since. It's one of those things you can't unsee once you see it.

Harvard's Fiji Mermaid. Now you can't unsee this thing either...

I think the Fiji Mermaid is probably the most famous mermaid to visit Boston's shores - it was once owned by P.T. Barnum - but it is not the only one. In the 1820s, decades before the Fiji Mermaid appeared, the whole city was talking about another mermaid who came to visit.

The story starts in 1822 with a man named Captain Dodge, who sailed into Boston Harbor bearing an incredible tale. Dodge said he had met a mermaid, captured her, and left her behind on an island. Dodge seemed quite fond of the mermaid and said he was hoping to go back and teach her human language and culture. He was like a nautical Henry Higgins, I guess.

The Bostonians he met were quite skeptical. It was only the 1820s but even then people in Boston prided themselves on their education and ability to sniff out a fraud. Dodge only had a drawing of his mermaid as proof, and people were unwilling to believe Dodge's story until they saw the see the real thing. Vowing to prove himself no liar, Dodge sailed off, promising to return with the mermaid.

Months passed. Captain Dodge's ship reappeared in Boston Harbor, carrying cargo from around the world but not the one thing everyone was most eager to see: the mermaid. Where was she, the crowds at India Wharf asked? Captain Dodge explained that sadly he found only her corpse when he returned to the island where he had left her. Apparently dragging a mermaid out of the ocean and leaving her stranded on an island was really bad idea. She couldn't survive outside of a marine environment.

Shouldn't someone should have charged Dodge with murder, or at least manslaughter? No one did. Instead people just ghoulishly demanded to see the corpse. I'm suppose most Bostonians were just skeptical of the whole story and didn't really think there was a mermaid to kill anyway. However, some local naturalists approached Dodge and politely asked him to bring the dead sea maiden to Boston for anatomical study. This, they argued, would help prove he was telling the truth. Dodge equivocated and sailed off without promising anything to anyone.

In 1824 Dodge once again sailed into Boston Harbor -  this time with the body of the mermaid on board his ship. Her corpse was enclosed within a glass case. Dodge made arrangements with the New-England Museum to exhibit the mermaid in their building on Court Street. Admission cost twenty-five cents. The mermaid was not allowed to be examined outside of her glass case. Those local naturalists were out of luck.

The New-England Museum (now gone), from Wikipedia

So what exactly did Dodge have inside the case? Was it an actual mermaid? Here is a description from an 1824 issue of The New York Mirror And Ladies Literary Gazette:

The question asked, is, Is it really and truly, bona fide, a Mermaid? We answer, go and see. Examine for yourself. If the skin of a large cod-fish stuffed, with the skeleton of a child’s body put on in the place of the cod’s head, the jaws and teeth of a cat inserted into that which represents the head of the child, and the whole, except for the scaly part enveloped in a bladder, or some other skinny substance, and smoked well with burning camphor, can make a Mermaid, then as sure as a fish is a fish… there is a Mermaid now to be seen in the room adjoining the New-England Museum…

So no, it was not an actual mermaid. Much like the Fiji Mermaid, it was created from the parts of various other animals. Let's hope it wasn't actually made from the body of a child.

Dodge had been sailing in the Pacific before he came to Boston with his mermaid, which helps explain where he got it. According to Wikipedia, fishermen in Japan and other Pacific nations often created these "mermaids" out of animal parts for religious reasons. They're kind of like the Pacific island version of jackalopes, I suppose. Dodge had purchased it during his voyage and then brought it back to New England to show. Did he think it was really a mermaid, or did he know if was fake? That's hard to say, but I suspect he knew it was a hoax. Otherwise, he would have let the naturalists examine it.

Dodge's mermaid corpse was one of the first to appear in the United States, but others soon followed, including the more famous Fiji Mermaid, which was promoted by none other than the great circus impresario P.T. Barnum. There is some debate over whether Harvard's mermaid is actually the same one that Barnum owned, but if not it's still a good example of these mummified mermaids. I think Loren Coleman's Cryptozoology Museum in Portland Maine has one as well. There are quite a few of these taxidermy oddities out in the world,and the term "Fiji Mermaid" is often used to describe any of them. 

As far as I know, no one has ever found an authentic mermaid (or merman) corpse. Skeptics might say that's because they don't exist, but perhaps mermaids are really manifestations of the ocean's spirit, beautiful but dangerous, and cannnot ever be captured. As for Dodge's mermaid, she long ago disappeared and hasn't been seen since.

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My sources for this week were Edward Rowe Snow's 1957 book Legends of the New England Coast, and also this great fairy tale blog which led me to the quote from The New York Mirror.

America's First Christmas Tree?

The Christmas tree is an old, possibly even ancient, Germanic tradition. But how did it get to America?

Historians know that the wife of England's King George III brought the tradition to England. She was German nobility, and decorated the British royal home with fir trees at Christmas-time. Queen Victoria, who was George's granddaughter, popularized the tradition in England after she married Germany's Prince Albert. By the mid-nineteenth century Christmas trees were well-known throughout Britain.

It would make sense if the Christmas tree arrived in the United States from Victorian England, but that may not be the case. The tradition may have been brought here by a radical German reformer - who was also a gymnast.

Karl Follen was born in 1796 to well-off German family. Follen studied theology, but was also a political radical who supported the agenda of the French Revolution. After fleeing Germany (he was accused of assassinating a conservative politician) Follen went to France, where he met the Marquis de Lafayette. The Marquis, who pops up in so many surprising places, helped Follen move to America.

Charles Follen, 1796 - 1840.

Follen changed his first name from Karl to Charles, and in 1825 got a position teaching German at Harvard University. Oddly, Follen also introduced the sport of gymnastics to New England and supervised the first college gymnasium in the United States. The gymnasium was at Harvard.

Before we get to the Christmas tree, just a brief note about the whole gymnastics thing. The sport of gymnastics was created in Germany by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778 - 1852), who created it as a way of improving morale among German men after their defeat by Napoleon. At first Jahn was supported in his efforts by the German nobility, but they soon learned he was a radical political reformer who wanted a unified German state. Jahn fled Germany, but not before teaching gymnastics to a generation of German men, including Follen.

OK, now on to the Christmas tree. While teaching at Harvard, Follen met local Transcendentalist writers like Longfellow and married Eliza Cabot, a member of Boston's wealthy Cabot family. But despite his success Follen remained a political reformer at heart, and became involved in the movement to abolish slavery.

In 1835, an English journalist and fellow abolitionist named Harriet Martineau visited the Follen's Cambridge home on Christmas Eve. She had come to discuss politics with Charles Follen, but while there she witnessed the Follens set up a Christmas tree for their son Charley:

The tree was the top of a young fir, planted in a tub which was ornamented with moss. Smart dolls and other whimsies glittered on the evergreen and there was not a twig which had not something sparkling upon it... I mounted the steps behind the tree to see the effect of opening the doors. It was delightful. The children poured in, but in a moment every voice was hushed. Their faces were upturned to the blaze, all eyes wide open, all lips parted, all steps arrested. Nobody spoke, only Charley leaped for joy....

I have little doubt that the Christmas tree will become one of the most flourishing exotics of New England. 

Martineau was right, but sadly Follen never lived to see the Christmas tree tradition spread widely. He was denied tenure at Harvard because of his radical views and moved to Lexington, Massachusetts where he became a Unitarian preacher. He also traveled to lecture about the abolitionist movement. On January 13, 1840 the ship carrying Follen back to Massachusetts from a New York lecture caught fire and sank. Follen was among the many passengers who drowned.

Follen Community Church in Lexington

I don't want to end a Christmas post on a sad note, so I'll note that Follen's church in Lexington still stands today. To carry on his work, each year the church sells Christmas trees and donates the profits to social outreach programs.

Was Charles Follen's tree really the first Christmas tree in America? It's hard to say. I suppose there may have been earlier trees that were undocumented, but Follen's story is an inspiring one, and sometimes that's what we need at Christmas.

I got the information for this post form Amy Whorf McGuiggan's Christmas in New England and Stephen Nissenbaum's The Battle for Christmas.

Harvard Should Consult Its Magic Books

Last week the media was full of news about Harvard losing a big chunk of its endowment due to the recession. Some writers were gloating, while others were concerned about possible layoffs among the Harvard staff. I definitely have sympathy for the Harvard staff, since I work at a university myself.

I guess the money managers at Harvard didn't consult the stars for guidance, the way some earlier Harvard staff might have.

According to D. Michael Quinn, author of Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, divination and practices we now consider "occult" were a standard part of the curriculum at New England colleges before the 19th century. Harvard students learned how to use astrology as part of their medical training, and a working knowledge of astrology was crucial for anyone getting a BA or Master's degree. Harvard students wrote theses on astrology and alchemy as late as 1771, and many Harvard student continued practicing alchemy into the 1800's.

Not to be left out of the Ivy League magic, students at Yale studied astrology and alchemy as well, and Yale's president Ezra Stiles experimented with alchemy and studied the Cabala.

Three interesting points here:

1. Yale and Harvard were founded to train Christian ministers, but the faculty clearly saw no conflict between the occult and Christianity. How times have changed!

2. Pundits like Harold Bloom have complained that universities no longer teach students canonical works. Does this mean faculty should start teaching Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy again?

3.Early Mormonism and the Magic World View is a great and very informative book, with lots of detail about how occult practices were woven into the everyday lives of early Americans. Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, was born in Vermont and D. Michael Quinn shows how some of Smith's religious practices were influenced (or even identical to) magical practices in New England and New York. I think this book is one of the reasons Quinn was kicked out of the Mormon Church.