Cadavers

One of the attractions in Paris of the 1830’s, I learned recently from David McCullough’s superb The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, was the Paris Morgue, on the Ile-de-la-Cité, where unidentified bodies taken from the Seine – mostly suicides but a few murder victims too - were laid out on black marble tables. If no one claimed a body after three days, it was sold to a medical doctor for ten francs.

McCullough doesn’t tell us if there were enough drowned corpses to supply the École de Médecine faculty ’s demand for cadavers. The demand was great because dissection had become a sine qua non for medical education. If the supply of corpses from the Seine was inadequate, as is likely, the medical faculty in Paris probably turned to an expedient common throughout the western world, namely grave robbing. “Resurrectionists” would dig up freshly buried bodies – the earth had not yet settled, which made it easier to exhume the corpses, and the bodies would not yet have decomposed – and sell them to medical schools.

Harvard Medical School, established in Cambridge in 1792, moved to Boston in 1810. According to the school, Boston “was more convenient for the faculty to see not only their private patients, but also patients in the military and naval hospitals and in public dispensaries being established in the city.” According to other accounts, however, there was an additional reason. It was easier to obtain corpses in Boston than in Cambridge.

Thoughts of graves and corpses occupied me few weeks ago during a recent hour and half stint in an MRI cylinder, where various parts of my anatomy were being scanned. Lying flat on my back and wearing earplugs, I was slowly slid inside the cylinder. There I was entertained by a series of very loud sounds - some short staccato bursts, others long blasts, one set of which sounded eerily like the opening bars of Die Meistersinger. When I was not following the technician’s instructions to take a deep breath and hold it, I could not help thinking that the capsule in which I was entombed was very like a coffin. It was a comfortable coffin to be sure, with ventilation and soft lighting, but it was like a coffin nonetheless. And that reminded me of the body snatchers employed by medical schools in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

Lying inside a coffin-like container is not an experience I long to repeat any time soon. I comforted myself during that ordeal by two thoughts. First, I would soon be released from my entombment. Second, I won’t be buried in a coffin, at least I’m pretty sure I won’t. I’ve left instructions – a request, really, because my instructions will have no legal standing after I'm dead - that my body be donated to a medical school for dissection. When the dissection is complete, my remains will be cremated.

Medical schools no longer depend on grave robbers for cadavers but on those who, as obituaries note, “leave their body to science.” I thought of all this between staccato bursts and the strains of Die Meistersinger. I suppose I should have tried to think of something less morbid, but I found it hard to escape the influence of my immediate environment. Still, these meanderings were not entirely morbid, for the thought that my body will help to educate a doctor, that it will be of use, is a comforting one. Nonetheless, I’m not eager to provide the means for that education any time soon.