Knowlton Biography, Chapter 10

Ten: Caught

In the summer of 1823, Dr. Bacheller had four other students besides myself. And some time in August we were strongly suspected of having taken up a subject in that town; and in truth, one was taken up and dissected by somebody.  But it is not worth while to give all the many particulars of this affair.  Suffice to say, that I was put under bonds to attend court at Worcester, the ensuing October or November, while all the other students either ran off or were let off.

Returning from fourteen weeks of medical lectures in Hanover, Charles went to Royalston to study with Dr. Stephen Bacheller.  Royalston was a village west of Winchendon on the New Hampshire border, and Stephen Bacheller was the second doctor of that name to work there.  The elder Stephen Bacheller was seventy-seven years old when Charles went to study with the forty-five year old son.  The old man had been practicing medicine in Royalston since 1768, and lived with his son in a big house in the center of the village where the two doctors worked together.  The old doctor loved to tell stories of the frontier days when Royalston had been an outpost in the wilderness.  He had traveled the roadless countryside on horseback, fording streams and often fleeing bears and wolves.  These stories were famous in the area, as was the old doctor’s kindness to the poorest of his patients, who he regularly treated for no charge.

The younger Dr. Bacheller was equally respected in Royalston and over the wide area of his country practice.  Taught mostly by his father, Bacheller was noted for his old-fashioned cheerfulness and his practice was distinguished both by his common sense and by his efforts to keep up to date with the latest developments.  A large, portly gentleman, the doctor was later remembered for “riding rapidly and smoking as fast, with a short, genial nod and a happy word for everyone.” Although he married three times, the younger Bacheller never had children.  He filled his household with medical students instead, and while Charles was in Royalston he was one of five students living with the doctors.

Tabitha was once again left on her own, and she spent part of the summer at the Knowltons’ place and the rest with her parents.  Charles had a horse this summer, so he was able to cover the ten to fifteen miles from Royalston to either place, to visit her occasionally.  By the fall she was pregnant with their first child. 

Charles also rode long distances to see patients, and the Bachellers trusted his skills and judgment enough by summer’s end to let him go alone.  Charles’s first solo case was a visit to a family five miles north of Royalston.  A child was sick with croup and the family no longer trusted their regular physician from Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire.  That doctor had recently treated another of their children for the same illness and the child had died.  Although he had never seen a case of croup in the flesh before, Charles examined his patient thoroughly and made his diagnosis.  He put the child in a warm bath, bled her, and gave her tartarized antimony to induce vomiting.  Although Charles had reservations about heroic treatments and tried to give the smallest possible doses of the poisons in his medical bag, these were the only medicines available to him in 1823.  It would be decades before doctors began to understand the role of germs in disease. 

Knowlton’s moderate treatments were successful, and his first patient was already feeling better before he left.  He visited her again a few days later, and the child was recovering.  Charles’s careful diagnosis and very moderate use of bleeding and poisons probably allowed the child’s own immune system to fight the disease when another doctor might have weakened her beyond recovery.  Charles had saved his first life.

But old habits really do die hard, and it wasn’t long before Charles was mixed up in body-snatching again.  Although the details are uncertain, Charles probably instigated but did not lead his fellow students in stealing a corpse in Royalston in the summer of 1823.  Charles firmly believed that anatomy was better learned by experience than by reading.  Fresh from Hanover, where his anatomy professor had regularly dissected illegally obtained bodies, Charles probably had little trouble convincing his fellow students that only old-fashioned superstitions stood between them and an understanding of the human body that would make them better doctors. 

Charles was a very careful body-snatcher.  He had taken three corpses, without leaving a trace.  From his very first attempt, Charles had been meticulously thorough—refilling the grave so it appeared untouched, removing skin and teeth to make the body unidentifiable.  Charles doesn’t say whether someone coached him, or if he developed these techniques on his own.  He wasn’t the first medical student to steal a corpse, and Charles had met several people in his young life who could have told him the tricks of the ancient trade.  Either way, Charles was a veteran of three successful thefts.  It’s unlikely he would have gotten sloppy in Royalston.

It’s possible that the Royalston corpse was stolen by the other students, and that the job was not done to Knowlton’s high standards.  Or that Charles had stolen the corpse as expertly as before, but somebody had talked.  In any case, the theft was discovered and Charles took the blame.  He was arrested and charged with body-snatching and dissection.  With no money for bail, Charles was forced to call on his father.  Stephen Knowlton bailed his son out of jail, giving security that Charles would return and appear before the court in Worcester in the fall.