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A mortsafe or mortcage was a construction designed to protect graves from disturbance and used in the United Kingdom. Resurrectionists had supplied schools of anatomy since the early 18th century. This was due to the necessity for medical students to learn anatomy by attending dissections of human subjects, which was frustrated by the very limited allowance of dead bodies – for example the corpses of executed criminals – granted by the government, which controlled the supply. [1]
The British authorities turned a blind eye to grave-rifling because surgeons and students were working to advance medical knowledge. They kept publicity to a minimum to prevent people from realising what was happening. The cases of grave-robbing that came to light caused riots, damage to property and even fatal attacks. In the early 19th century, with the great increase in numbers of schools and students, there was continual rifling of secluded graveyards, fights in city burial grounds and other disturbances. Men were employed to steal bodies and transport them from place to place, even across the sea, for sale to medical schools. Revelations led to public outrage, particularly in Scotland, where there was great reverence for the dead and a literal belief in the Resurrection. It was popularly believed that the dead could not rise in an incomplete state. [2]
People were determined to protect the graves of newly deceased friends and relatives. The rich could afford heavy table tombstones, vaults, mausoleums and iron cages around graves. The poor began to place flowers and pebbles on graves to detect disturbances. They dug heather and branches into the soil to make disinterment more difficult. Large stones, often coffin-shaped, sometimes the gift of a wealthy man to the parish, were placed over new graves. Friends and relatives took turns or hired men to watch graves through the hours of darkness. Watch-houses were sometimes erected to shelter the watchers. One watch-house in Edinburgh is a three-storey castellated building with windows. Watching societies were often formed in towns, one in Glasgow having 2,000 members. Many kirk session houses were used by watchers, but graves were still violated.
The mortsafe was invented around 1816. These were iron or iron-and-stone devices of great weight, in many different designs. Often they were complex heavy iron contraptions of rods and plates, padlocked together; examples have been found close to all Scottish medical schools. A plate was placed over the coffin and rods with heads were pushed through holes in it. These rods were kept in place by locking a second plate over the first to form extremely heavy protection. It would be removed by two people with keys. They were placed over the coffins for about six weeks, then removed for further use when the body inside was sufficiently decayed. There is a model of a mortsafe of this type in Marischal Museum, Aberdeen. Sometimes a church bought them and hired them out. Societies were also formed to purchase them and control their use, with annual membership fees, and charges made to non-members.
Publicity surrounding the crimes of Burke and Hare heightened the fear felt by many people. It was about this time that vaults – repositories for dead bodies – were built by public subscription in Scotland, with their use governed by rules and regulations. Some of these were above ground while others – mainly in Aberdeenshire – were wholly or partly underground. In one Aberdeenshire village, Udny Green, the morthouse is a circular building with a thick studded wooden door and an inner iron door. Inside there is a turntable to accommodate seven coffins. A coffin would be moved round as further ones were added and by the time it reappeared the body would be of no use to the dissectionists.
Likely all communities near the Scottish schools of medicine in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen employed some means of protecting the dead. Some used both mortsafes and watching. There are watch-houses in the remoter Scottish areas, in the Borders, and two have been found in the English county of Northumberland.
Surviving mortsafes are generally found in churchyards and burial grounds; some are very broken and rusting away. One has been restored and hung in a church porch, with an explanatory note, by the East Lothian Antiquary Society. There are one or two in museums but those on display rarely have any indication of what they are or how they were used. Some documents appertaining to mortsafes and other protection devices are still in existence in libraries and record offices. There are two mortsafes in reasonable condition outside the old Aberfoyle church in Stirling, which was fully 30 miles from the nearest School of Anatomy in Glasgow. One can also be found, in a slightly rusted state, to the right of the door outside Skene Parish Church, Kirkton of Skene, Aberdeenshire. Another in reasonable condition can be found in the kirkyard at the remote hamlet of Towie, west of Alford. Tullibody, as well as having a famous stone coffin, is also recorded to have had an iron coffin case as an attempt to thwart local body-snatchers. [3]
William Forbes Skene WS FRSE FSA(Scot) DCL LLD, was a Scottish lawyer, historian and antiquary.
Pictish is an extinct Brittonic Celtic language spoken by the Picts, the people of eastern and northern Scotland from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. Virtually no direct attestations of Pictish remain, short of a limited number of geographical and personal names found on monuments and early medieval records in the area controlled by the kingdoms of the Picts. Such evidence, however, shows the language to be an Insular Celtic language related to the Brittonic language then spoken in most of the rest of Britain.
The Burke and Hare murders were a series of sixteen killings committed over a period of about ten months in 1828 in Edinburgh, Scotland. They were undertaken by William Burke and William Hare, who sold the corpses to Robert Knox for dissection at his anatomy lectures.
Cowdenbeath is a town and burgh in west Fife, Scotland. It is 5 miles (8 km) north-east of Dunfermline and 18 miles (29 km) north of the capital, Edinburgh. The town grew up around the extensive coalfields of the area and became a police burgh in 1890. According to a 2008 estimate, the town has a population of 14,081.
Body snatching is the illicit removal of corpses from graves, morgues, and other burial sites. Body snatching is distinct from the act of grave robbery as grave robbing does not explicitly involve the removal of the corpse, but rather theft from the burial site itself. The term 'body snatching' most commonly refers to the removal and sale of corpses primarily for the purpose of dissection or anatomy lectures in medical schools. The term was coined primarily in regard to cases in the United Kingdom and United States throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. However, there have been cases of body snatching in many countries, with the first recorded case dating back to 1319 in Bologna, Italy.
Grave robbery, tomb robbing, or tomb raiding is the act of uncovering a grave, tomb or crypt to steal commodities. It is usually perpetrated to take and profit from valuable artefacts or personal property. A related act is body snatching, a term denoting the contested or unlawful taking of a body, which can be extended to the unlawful taking of organs alone.
Alexander Monro III of Craiglockhart, FRSE FRCPE FSA (Scot) MWS, was a Scottish anatomist and medical educator at the University of Edinburgh Medical School. According to his detractors, Monro was an uninspired anatomist who did not compare with his brilliant father or grandfather as a teacher or scientist. His students included Charles Darwin who asserted that Monro "made his lectures on human anatomy as dull as he was himself."
Skene Parish Church is a congregation of the Church of Scotland in Skene, part of the Presbytery of Gordon. The parish has two places of worship, Skene Church in Kirkton of Skene and Trinity Church in Westhill. The current minister is Rev. Stella Campbell.
Tullibody is a town set in the Central Lowlands of Scotland. It lies north of the River Forth near to the foot of the Ochil Hills within the Forth Valley. The town is 1.8 miles (2.9 km) south-west of Alva, 1.8 miles (2.9 km) north-west of Alloa and 4.0 miles (6.4 km) east-northeast of Stirling. The town is part of the Clackmannanshire council area.
Scone is a town in Perth and Kinross, Scotland. The medieval town of Scone, which grew up around the monastery and royal residence, was abandoned in the early 19th century when the residents were removed and a new palace was built on the site by the Earl of Mansfield. Hence the modern village of Scone, and the medieval village of Old Scone, can often be distinguished.
Greyfriars Kirkyard is the graveyard surrounding Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh, Scotland. It is located at the southern edge of the Old Town, adjacent to George Heriot's School. Burials have been taking place since the late 16th century, and a number of notable Edinburgh residents are interred at Greyfriars. The Kirkyard is operated by City of Edinburgh Council in liaison with a charitable trust, which is linked to but separate from the church. The Kirkyard and its monuments are protected as a category A listed building.
Donald Gregory (1803–1836) was a Scottish historian and antiquarian, who published a valuable history of the Western Highlands and Isles of Scotland.
Resurrectionists were body snatchers who were commonly employed by anatomists in the United Kingdom during the 18th and 19th centuries to exhume the bodies of the recently dead. Between 1506 and 1752 only a very few cadavers were available each year for anatomical research. The supply was increased when, in an attempt to intensify the deterrent effect of the death penalty, Parliament passed the Murder Act 1752. By allowing judges to substitute the public display of executed criminals with dissection, the new law significantly increased the number of bodies anatomists could legally access. This proved insufficient to meet the needs of the hospitals and teaching centres that opened during the 18th century. Corpses and their component parts became a commodity, but although the practice of disinterment was hated by the general public, bodies were not legally anyone's property. The resurrectionists therefore operated in a legal grey area.
Udny Mort House is a morthouse in the old kirkyard at Udny Green, Aberdeenshire, north-east Scotland. Built in 1832, it is today a Category B listed building. It housed corpses until they started to decompose, so their graves would not be desecrated by resurrectionists and body-snatchers digging them up to sell the cadavers to medical colleges for dissection. Bodies were permitted to be stored for up to three months before burial. The circular morthouse was designed with a revolving platform and double doors. After the passage into law of the Anatomy Act 1832 Udny Mort House gradually fell into disuse; minutes of the committee responsible for its operation cease in about July 1836.
Reverend Thomas Burns (1853–1938) was a Scottish minister and strong campaigner for the blind. As Chair of the Royal Blind School in Edinburgh he was the creator of the Thomas Burns Home which was named after him. He was also an author on several historical subjects.
Sir Henry Jardine of Harwood WS FRSE was a solicitor, antiquarian and a founder member of the Bannatyne Club in 1823, with his friend Sir Walter Scott.
Alexander Thomson of Banchory FRSE (1798–1868) was a 19th-century Scottish advocate, agriculturalist, antiquary, author, philanthropist and traveller. He owned an estate at Banchory-Devenick in Aberdeenshire. After qualifying as an advocate in Edinburgh he returned to the estate and did not pursue a career at the bar preferring to follow the life of a country gentleman. He travelled extensively in Europe, spending many years studying overseas. He settled crofters on his estate and planted many trees. His position in life allowed to give time to many interests including antiquarian studies, geology, biology and social reform. He attempted to unite Marischal and King's Colleges in Aberdeen University. At the Dirsuption he sided with the Free Church and was a prominent leader in that cause. He died in 1868 and bequeathed a sizeable museum and collection of books to the church. He also gave a substantial amount of money to set up a Free Church College in Aberdeen.
David Waterston OBE FRSE was a 20th-century Scottish surgeon and anatomist. He was the Bute Professor of Anatomy at the University of St Andrews. He was one of the first to debunk the Piltdown Man hoax, correctly pointing out that the jaw and skull did not match correctly.
A morthouse or deadhouse was a specialised secure building usually located in a churchyard where bodies were temporarily interred before a formal funeral took place. These buildings date back to the time when bodysnatchers or resurrectionists frequently illegally exhumed dead bodies that were then sold for dissection as part of human anatomy training at universities, etc. Morthouses were alternatives to mortsafes, watch houses, watch towers, etc.
Dunnideer stone circle is a mostly destroyed recumbent stone circle located near Insch in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. The three remaining stones lie close to the ruins of Dunnideer Castle. It is a scheduled monument.