Knowlton Biography Chapter 6
Six: Body-Snatcher
He was all in a flutter—said the Old Harry was in me; that within a day or two there would be another burial in the same yard from which I had taken the subject; that they would pass right by the grave, and that the old sexton would certainly observe that the grave had been disturbed. So he teamed off to the old sexton, put a terrible oath upon him to keep a great secret, and told him what I had done. The sexton then almost regretted that he had pledged himself so strongly. He thought it was a terrible affair.
After a summer of recuperating and enjoying life as a newlywed, Charles acted on his decision to become a doctor. It isn’t certain exactly when Charles first committed himself to studying medicine. His admiration for Dr. Charles Adams in Keene probably mixed with his frustration over his own experiences. The ten physicians Charles had seen during his three years of illness had not only failed to cure his “disease” but had nearly killed him in the process. But Charles had a new optimism and a new tool: “free enquiry.” Charles was beginning to understand that his condition had never really been a problem in the first place, and that only the small-mindedness of ignorant, moralizing physicians had made gonorrhea dormientium seem so deplorable and become so debilitating. Years later, when Charles was a respected doctor in a position to give advice on the subject, he said “In spite of preaching…Nothing is so effectual in curing…a young man as marriage. All restraint, fear and solicitude should be removed.”
Charles’s decision to study medicine was almost certainly influenced by his father-in-law, Richard Stuart. Like many freethinkers, Stuart was a self-taught scientist. In Stuart’s house Charles probably had his first encounter authors such as Erasmus Darwin, who may have been the source of Stuart’s knowledge of medical electricity. Darwin had been a country doctor in England in the late 1700s, and had written books on medicine and natural science that were very popular in New England. Darwin’s most important work was called Zoonomia, or The Laws of Organic Life. In addition to a section on “Generation” that anticipated his grandson Charles’s theory of evolution by fifty years, Darwin’s book advocated anatomy as the best way for physicians to learn about health and disease.
Anatomy was a dangerous subject in the early nineteenth century. Studying the human body to understand how it worked suggested that health was primarily physical. The focus on material processes offended religious spiritualists and moralists who, like many of the doctors who treated Charles, preferred to focus on the relationship between behavior—especially sinful behavior—and disease. Anything that put physical causes of disease first smacked of materialism. As an extreme expression of freethought, materialism was regarded by many as the antithesis of religion and morality. But this wasn’t the worst of it. Anatomy was about cutting up human bodies.
Throughout the early nineteenth century, “anatomical” doctors were prosecuted, jailed, and shunned. Anatomists who dissected corpses were viewed as monsters by the public, and they were often denounced by conservative doctors who believed that studying the old texts was all the training a physician needed. There were at least a dozen riots during the nineteenth century, where people attacked physicians or medical schools for teaching anatomy. Because anatomy meant body-snatching.
Nineteenth-century christians believed that at the end of time all the people who had ever lived would rise from their graves. God would judge them and welcome the righteous into heaven. But in order for this to happen, the bodies of the dead had to be available and in reasonably good condition. Even today, christians tend to embalm their dead and cremation is associated with atheism. The last thing anybody wanted was to face the throne of eternal judgment in a body that had been taken apart by medical students.
Dissection was feared and hated by the public, and corpses were not generally available. Sometimes, the bodies of executed criminals were donated to medical schools. But the number of these legal corpses was nowhere near the need. So medical students—and often schools—resorted to other means. People who robbed graves or bought stolen bodies for study were sometimes called “resurrectionists,” which referred to the digging up of bodies, but also echoed the public fear of facing eternal life without a pristine corpse. As one of the first acts of his medical career, Charles Knowlton became a resurrectionist.
In October 1821, Charles left his bride Tabitha at his parents’ home in Templeton, and went to live about four miles away with Dr. Charles Wilder. Wilder was Templeton’s town physician from 1819 to 1828, and may have been one of the men who had treated Charles during his illness. Charles agreed to pay Wilder fifty cents a week for his medical training, and to do chores and farm work in exchange for his room and board. On Saturday evenings after his chores were done, Charles walked home to spend the weekend with his wife.
Charles’s arrangement with Dr. Wilder was not an unusual one. Throughout the early nineteenth century, apprenticeships of this type were common among doctors and lawyers. Abraham Lincoln became a lawyer this way in the 1830s, and like Lincoln, Knowlton probably learned as much from reading the books in Wilder’s medical library as from watching his “preceptor” at work. But Charles was not satisfied with what he read about the human body in Wilder’s books. He wanted to see for himself.
By January, Charles had learned all he could from watching Dr. Wilder work and studying his books. “I soon had such a desire to see the various organs which I had read so much about,” he said, “that I ventured out all alone…without saying a word to any one, and took up a subject.” Knowlton waited until the middle of the night, hitched up the doctor’s sleigh without bells, and drove out to a local cemetery where a burial had just taken place. He dug up the corpse, and as he was throwing it onto his shoulder to carry it out of the graveyard to the waiting sleigh, “wind or gas was forced upward out of the stomach with a somewhat frightful noise; but I commanded the said subject to be still, and trudged on, nothing daunted.”
Charles drove the body to Wilder’s office, and returned the horse and sleigh to the barn without anyone knowing he’d taken them. In the morning, Charles proudly announced to Dr. Wilder that he had a surprise to show him. The doctor’s reaction wasn’t what Charles had hoped it would be. Wilder was alarmed at the sight of the corpse in his office, who had probably been one of his patients. And he was very frightened that Charles would be caught. Even if they weren’t prosecuted, harboring a body-snatcher would certainly not improve Wilder’s standing in Templeton. The doctor was afraid Charles had done a sloppy job digging up the body, and that it would be easy to see the grave had been opened.
Dr. Wilder told Charles to hide the corpse, and took off in his sleigh to see the sexton at the town cemetery. Wilder swore the old man to secrecy before telling him that Charles had snatched a body from its grave. The sexton swore an oath, and then regretted his promise when Wilder told him of the crime. The old man was appalled, and would have gone straight to the authorities if he hadn’t promised to keep Wilder’s secret. The doctor explained that Charles was a troubled boy, obviously still half-mad from his illness, and didn’t know what he was doing. Wilder promised that Charles would return to the cemetery that night and rebury the body.
The sexton, recalling the rumors about Charles that had circulated throughout Templeton over the previous years and knowing he came from a “good family,” agreed to do nothing if Charles would replace the corpse and promise never to do it again. Dr. Wilder promised, and “the old coot evidently believed him,” Charles said. A few days later the sexton told the doctor that Charles had reburied the body so carefully that when he examined the grave he couldn’t tell it had ever been tampered with.
But Charles had not reburied the corpse. Instead of following the doctor’s orders, Charles had loaded the body back into the sleigh and driven it ten miles out of town, where he’d hid it in a haymow. A few weeks later, when all the trouble had been forgotten, Charles went back and retrieved the now-frozen corpse. He borrowed the doctor’s sleigh for another midnight run, and moved the body to a local pond where he’d cut a hole in the ice. Charles let the body thaw overnight in the warm water beneath the pond ice, and then took it to a remote, abandoned farmhouse. He skinned the corpse and extracted the few remaining teeth in its head, “that it might not be identified by any one.” Then Charles bundled up the remains and smuggled them into his room at the Wilder house.
For the next several weeks, when he wasn’t working for the doctor or reading his books, Charles locked himself in his room and “deliberately dissected the subject to my heart’s content.” Charles kept his door bolted, and if anybody approached pretended he wasn’t there. Luckily for Charles, it was winter and keeping the room cold probably slowed the corpse’s decay and reduced the smell. Dr. Wilder never discovered Charles’s secret, and Charles learned more anatomy from the stolen corpse than he ever would have from the doctor’s books. Perhaps more important, Charles had snatched a body and gotten away with it. He had stepped beyond the safe confines of public morality—never to return.