Body Snatching in Chicago and Its Environs

The history of body snatching (also called “grave robbing,” “resurrectionism,” etc.) has been thoroughly explored in such medically prominent cities as New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, as well as historically important regions such as early New England, Virginia, and the Southern states during slavery. Yet this literature has often neglected the Midwest in general, and medically significant midwestern cities, such as Chicago, in particular. My master’s thesis aims to close this gap, being the first monograph to comprehensively explore various aspects of the 19^th-century traffic of dead bodies as it occurred in the Second City and its environs. This work is important because it contributes novel data to the larger enterprise of historicizing the U.S. body trade, namely on how the regional, cultural, and historical idiosyncrasies of a rapidly growing medical powerhouse shaped the practice of body snatching to its particular needs and circumstances.

My poster will serve as both an overview and a microcosm of my thesis. Visually, it will consist of a text section expositing both the background and one of the core arguments of my thesis: that Chicago physicians largely did not wish to engage in illegal body snatching, but were constantly frustrated in their efforts to acquire legal cadavers not only by logistical legislative difficulties but also by internecine competition between schools for a relatively small contingent of skilled students and by the medical establishment’s own social stances toward the poor and disenfranchised. Alongside this section, it will contain a timeline of every reported body snatching incident in Chicago and Illinois that my research has uncovered to date, along with contextual events, such as the founding of particular medical school, the passage of anatomy laws, etc. This timeline will include a brief but narratively engaging and informative summary of the incident or event in question. I will also include a map corresponding to this timeline, indicating where, both in Chicago and Illinois broadly, each incident occurred.

Readers will be able to extract various historical data from this poster, such as which decades saw the most body snatching, which cemeteries in Chicago were the most utilized, which stories share similar elements and which stand on their own, and so on.