Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/565

Rh feeling that has been manifested by all nations, creeds, and peoples—Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mohammedan, Christian, and. Jew. The primitive Christians, as evinced by their epitaphs, cursed the disturbers of their remains in the Roman Catacombs. When science was regarded as little else than magic, and diseases were ascribed to the influence of the devil, physicians were looked upon as sorcerers, and it was but natural that those who considered that their bodies were destined to resurrection should entertain a hatred and horror of those who would cut it up in the dissecting-room for base purposes of utility. And when governments in modern times began to concede a restricted privilege of dissection, the mode of doing it only served to heighten the horror with which the operation was popularly regarded. For three centuries the law increased the infamous reputation of dissection by making it follow the work of the gallows. These feelings were peculiarly intense in theological Scotland, so that the modern medical schools had the greatest difficulty in getting even a few subjects for anatomical study. The necessity of having them, however, created a special craft of body-snatchers and robbers of graveyards. Nothing was more calculated to infuriate the populace than to discover that a grave had been violated. The church-yard was a sacred precinct, "God's acre," and the removal of a body from it was treated as an impious interference with the plans of Providence respecting the great resurrection—the body-stealers being accordingly named "resurrectionists." The men who took to this vocation were of the lowest and most brutal sort. None but base and desperate rascals, indifferent to public detestation, would pursue a business so reprobated by all classes, and so the very quality of the men added repulsiveness to the occupation. Yet physicians were constantly compelled to cooperate with these wretches; that is, to buy their plunder and keep their secrets, as the very first condition of sound medical education. But government, with its legal enactments, joined the superstitious masses in arresting the work of anatomy and making it unlawful and impracticable. The physicians petitioned the authorities for relief, and were answered with more stringent enactments, prosecutions, and spies and detectives watching: the doors of medical schools. These schools in Edinburgh were sacked by mobs or starved into suspension by the impossibility of obtaining subjects. "The law virtually proclaimed that the surgeon should possess aptitude and skill as well as a formal license to practise; nay, it went further, and subjected him who failed to display proper skill to pecuniary forfeiture in the civil courts at the instigation of any dissatisfied patient; yet the only mode of acquiring that skill—namely, from dissections of the dead clandestinely obtained—was in the criminal court held to be a misdemeanor, punishable by fine and imprisonment."

Such was the state of things in Edinburgh when Dr. Knox entered upon the public teaching of anatomy. With the