From the archives: Invasions of the body-snatching barbarians in 1883

This story was first published on Jan. 23, 2005, in the Montreal Gazette. There was quite a lively time at the Court House yesterday afternoon, when the preliminary investigation into the case of Joseph Fontaine, of Victoria University, for body-snatching, was to have taken place.


Gazette, Wednesday, Jan. 24, 1883

A lively time, indeed. Joseph Fontaine didn’t merely show up for his court appearance; he showed up accompanied by about 300 fellow students from every college in Montreal, each armed, the Gazette assures us, “with a thighbone attached by a handkerchief to his wrist.”

There is a whiff of exaggeration here. Cadavers for dissection by medical students were in notoriously short supply. Yet for every one of them who turned out that day in support of Fontaine was equipped with a thighbone, there must have been stiffs aplenty on hand.

Whatever. The students poured into the courthouse, blocking the corridors and doors by sheer weight of numbers. They sang, they chanted, they mocked the few policemen on duty and they shouted down the magistrate’s attempts to get things under way. A riot threatened.

Story continues below

Sure enough, when the police tried to restore order, the students shoved back and began flailing about with their thighbones. The sounds of repeated blows connecting was said to be frightful. One policeman, “maddened by rage and pain,” drew his pistol and threatened to shoot anyone who approached him. “This had quite a wet-blanket effect” on the students mobbing him, and they promptly retreated.

Not so their colleagues. They knocked Constable Contant to the floor. They almost managed the same with Detective Richardson, but the doughty policeman was able to stay on his feet and, eventually, arrest two of his assailants.

Story continues below

Finally, the courthouse was cleared, but that didn’t cool the students’ ardour. Outside, they threatened to start breaking windows. The police, with reinforcements from nearby stations, grappled with the rioters and gradually pushed them toward the Champ de Mars. But still the students weren’t finished. They had reinforcements of their own, and laid siege once again to the courthouse, with more fighting breaking out. Several policemen and at least as many students were injured.

The following day, 13 young men appeared before the magistrate. They argued they were acting out of a combination of high spirits and a concern for Fontaine’s plight, and that they had been needlessly put upon by the police.

Story continues below

Surprisingly, the magistrate bought it. After giving the students a stern lecture and binding them to keep the peace, he discharged them.

“The students were then taken into the Chief’s office and their sticks and bones returned to them,” we reported. “The last seen of them was the students packing them carefully into a sleigh, amid the jokes of the crowd.”

The proceedings against Fontaine resumed that day, too, but “nothing of importance was elicited.” It was a sign of the twilight zone in which body-snatching was then to be found.

Dissection had become an essential part of a doctor’s training in Montreal. (Victoria College, the medical school where Fontaine studied, would be absorbed eight years later by the Montreal branch of Université Laval, which in turn evolved into the Université de Montréal.)

Story continues below

Provincial law allowed unclaimed bodies of those who had died in asylums, prisons and other institutions to be used for dissection, but there was no effective mechanism to give the law any meaning.

Enter the body snatchers, or resurrectionists as they were known. They would steal into cemeteries at night and dig up bodies from fresh graves. In winter, with the ground frozen, they would raid mausoleums where bodies were stored above ground, waiting for burial after the spring thaw.

There was money in it. A guard at Notre Dame des Neiges cemetery was paid by two McGill students to mark graves suitable for robbing. A cadaver, “resurrected” by a student or a professional body snatcher, would be discreetly taken to the back door of a medical school. A receipt would be issued. The next day, someone else would present the receipt for payment, thus keeping the resurrectionist’s identity hidden.

Story continues below

A body might be worth as much as $50. Some students, it was said, paid their way through a year of medical school this way.

If the identities of the resurrectionists were secret, resurrection itself was not. From time to time relatives would turn up at the medical schools, suspecting a loved one’s body had been snatched. Everyone seems to have known what was going on, including the medical professors.

On several occasions, Francis Shepherd, the distinguished McGill surgeon and anatomist, was charged with “an offence against decency” — that is, conniving in the use of a resurrected cadaver.

Usually, he paid a $50 fine. It was essentially a licence to continue as before with the clandestine business, as the legal proceedings never went further. The situation was hardly ideal.

Story continues below

Finally, church and medical officials, with Shepherd playing a leading role, drew up a plan and presented it to the Quebec government.

The law was duly changed to oblige — not merely allow — public institutions to hand over unclaimed bodies to the medical schools as needed. The remains after dissection were to be properly buried. However, the stealing of bodies from then on would result in hefty fines and, it was understood, might lead the government to consider rolling back the new law.

It worked. Body snatching ceased, and a model for anatomy instruction throughout the country was firmly established.

View on Montreal Gazette

This Week in Flyers