Halloween, 1878
"The supply of subjects was a continual trouble to (them)... In that large and busy class, the raw material of the anatomists kept perpetually running out...and when subjects were scarce the pair would drive far into the country, visit and desecrate some lonely graveyard, and return before dawn their booty to the door of the dissecting room."
"The Body Snatcher," Robert Louis Stevenson
 1. Medical Students Dissecting Cadaver
University of Iowa
circa 1905 |
Nineteenth-century medical students faced a dilemma. They had to dissect cadavers to get a working knowledge of anatomy; as Iowa City publisher John Irish put it, "The surgeon must dissect the dead or mangle the living." However, most people objected to their loved ones' bodies being cut up for study. Citizens who lived near medical colleges often suspected the students of stealing bodies from local churchyards- and sometimes they were right. |
Early on the morning of Halloween, 1878, two barrels labeled 'traps' were left at a Beacon, Iowa train station for delivery to Keokuk. A suspicious postmaster opened one of the barrels and found the body of John Hynes, a young coal miner who had been buried near Oskaloosa two days earlier. The barrels were addressed to Dr. A. Mackey, a Keokuk medical student and practicing Beacon physician who had shipped similar barrels - labeled 'pickled pork'- earlier in the month.
Mackey was arrested that evening. The police planned to ship him through Beacon on his way to trial, despite fears that the coal miners who had worked with Hynes were angry enough to lynch Mackey. Then, the night before he was to leave Keokuk, Mackey's face apparently broke out in blisters, and he was quarantined for smallpox. |
Mackey soon admitted that he had used croton oil, brought to him by his lawyer, to cause the blisters. A November 7 article in the Keokuk Constitution quoted him as intending to plead guilty. The Keokuk School of Physicians and Surgeons does not appear to have suffered for Mackey's crime, possibly because he was only attending lectures and was not a registered student. Mackey's lawyer, who Mackey accused of tricking him, didn't fare so well: The Constitution reporter confessed sympathy for Mackey but denounced his "shark of a lawyer." |
2. Photograph of display including dissecting tools |
Dissecting tools
These tools were used to dissect cadavers. The object on the wall is a serrated amputating saw. At the left, between the two knives, is a pair of bone-cutting forceps. The hooks hanging from the top were probably used to hold open incisions. The dissecting kit at the right was awarded to University of Iowa medical student J. Sarah Braunwarth in 1876 for taking the best notes on clinical demonstrations.
On loan from the University of Iowa College of Medicine
|
