A passage I absolutely must share from The Devil in the White City that concerns: 1. my home state, 2. the University of Louisville, & 3. unabashed grave robbing!
"After a foiled raid on a graveyard in New Albany, Indiana, on February 24th, 1890, Dr. W. H. Wathen, head of the Kentucky Medical College, told a Tribune reporter, "The gentlemen were acting not for the Kentucky School of Medicine nor for themselves individually, but for the medical schools of Louisville to which the human subject is as necessary as breath to life." Just three weeks later the physicians of Louisville were at it again. They attempted to rob a grave at the State Asylum for the Insane in Anchorage, Kentucky, this time on the behalf of the University of Louisville. "Yes, the party was sent by us," a senior school official said. "We must have bodies, and if the State won't give them to us we must steal them. The winter classes were large and used up so many subjects that there are none for the Spring classes." He saw no need to apologize. "The Asylum Cemetery has been robbed for years," he said, "and I doubt if there is a corpse in it. I tell you we must have bodies. You cannot make doctors without them, and the public must understand it. If we can't get them from any other way we will arm the students with Winchester rifles and send them to protect the body-snatchers on their raids."
(Larson, 150)
Wow! I wonder if today's up-and-coming young U of L med students are in some way touched by this plucky, unapologetically brazen "yeah, so what?" attitude from a century ago. Maybe each student, upon passing the enrollment exam for entrance into the medical school, receives a ceremonial Winchester rifle to keep in their dormitory. The students accept this token with baffled excitement, wondering at the purpose of such an offering. Dismissing it as an eccentricity (perhaps a cryptic sort of reminder of the Hippocratic Oath?), they blow it off as something symbolic, whose meaning has been lost to antiquity, never guessing that they are functional: ready for service when the State's supply of medical cadavers dry up.
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