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Showing content with the highest reputation on 08/02/2018 in all areas

  1. 2 points
    10 Weird Things That Prevented Body Snatchers From Ransacking Graves In the early 1800s, Britain and America found themselves in a whirlwind of scientific and medical discovery. The study of anatomy and surgery was extremely popular. This led to a gruesome trade in bodies, a practice which was mirrored elsewhere around the world. Grieving families could no longer bury their dead and expect them to remain that way. Resurrection men roamed churchyards late at night, looking for freshly dug graves. They would disinter the body, undress the corpse, and toss its clothes back into the grave before carrying it away into the night. After that, the body would be dissected, often in front of an audience, for the betterment of humankind. Obviously, some relatives took exception to this, and they came up with a number of ingenious ways to foil the body snatchers. 1. Mort Safes Mort safes were iron cages placed over and sometimes around the coffin to prevent it from being reached by the resurrection men. The cages were left over the graves for up to 10 weeks until the bodies were sufficiently putrefied that they were of no use for dissection. Sometimes, the cages were left in place permanently. 2. Iron Coffins Mort houses were fortified and guarded buildings used for storing bodies prior to burial to render the corpses unfit for dissection. Each mort house would store a number of bodies for a fee, and they would stay there for several weeks until the decomposition was advanced. The design of the mort houses was usually extremely secure. They were constructed along the lines of prisons and bank vaults. 4. Delaying Burial For those who couldn’t afford a place at a mort house, there remained the option of keeping the body at home until it had decomposed. It is unlikely that people found that to be a pleasant choice. Mourners would also mix the earth in which the body was to be buried with an equal measure of straw to make it more difficult to dig through. But with the elaborate measures taken by the wealthy for their burials, the poor dead were especially vulnerable. 5. Mort Stones Graves were most likely to be robbed in the first week or two following the funeral when the corpse was freshest and the soil in the grave had not yet been firmed up. As a temporary measure, mort stones were sometimes used to cover the top of the grave site. At Inverurie near Aberdeen, several mort stones can still be found in the graveyard. These large granite stones had the same dimensions as the plot and completely covered the coffin beneath. 6. Vigils Relatives often took turns sitting at a graveside every night for the first week to deter the grave robbers. Sitting in the dark beside a grave waiting for robbers to show up could not have been an easy task. But people were so afraid of the body snatchers that they did it. There was a popular view that a body had to be “whole” to enter Heaven. So the dissectors were therefore stealing not only the bodies of the dead but also their eternal rest. 7. Watchmen Those who did not fancy the task of sitting in the graveyard all night often procured the services of a watchman. The parish of Ely, for example, employed a watchman to be “constantly in the churchyards for the protection of the bodies buried.” In some of the larger churchyards, watchhouses were built to lodge the watchmen. 8. Coffin Torpedoes Among the more ingenious forms of burial security was the coffin torpedo. Patented in 1878 in Columbus, Ohio, by Philip K. Clover, the coffin torpedo was designed to “successfully prevent the unauthorized resurrection of dead bodies; and . . . be readily secured to the coffin and the body of the contained corpse in such manner that any attempt to remove the body after burial will cause the discharge of the cartridge contained in the torpedo and injury or death of the desecrator of the grave.” The torpedo featured an intricate mechanism that exploded “with deadly force” if the coffin was disturbed. Little thought appears to have been given to the legality of such a weapon. 9. Coffin Collars The coffin collar was made up of a very heavy iron ring mounted on a board of thick oak. This was secured to the base of the coffin with heavy bolts, thus rendering it impossible to remove the corpse without decapitating it and seriously reducing its value. This was a practical and comparatively cheap method of defeating the resurrectionists, and examples of their use have been found in churchyards in Scotland. The collars were not pretty and would have been very visible in an open casket. But they did give the deceased’s relatives some peace of mind. 10. Booby Traps On Graves The feeling against the dissectors was so strong that some mourners even went so far as to booby trap the graves. They set spring-loaded guns into the ground and embedded sharp objects. In Dublin, it was reported that a grieving father went so far as to plant a land mine in the coffin of his infant child. Whether the land mine was genuine is debatable. Certainly, no resurrection man took the trouble to find out. The passage of the 1832 Anatomy Act in England The feelings against the resurrection men ran high, with citizens demanding that something be done to protect the dead. The passage of the 1832 Anatomy Act in England and similar bills in America and elsewhere ended the trade in bodies almost overnight. It allowed for corpses to be obtained for medical research from a number of sources, particularly the poor and the unclaimed. Surgeons, medical students, and scientists could expand their knowledge of the human body while leaving the dead to their everlasting peace.
  2. 1 point
    wow very interesting thread.. thanx for the read uk666..
  3. 1 point
    hi ShAmmY1989, tnkx, but i already decided to go back to Win 7 Pro. i won't have any unexpected problems there tnkx again
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