mccord-museum.qc.ca

In the 1860s and 1870s, the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University was known for an anatomy program that always seemed to have a fresh supply of cadavers for its students to dissect. The Faculty of Medicine came to be when the university  incorporated the Montreal Medical Institution. In 1833, the institution moved from their building on St. James Street to a new location that was described by a McGill registrar as “a strategic site for a medical faculty,” as it was located just over the fence from the cemetery.

The Medical students were largely separated from the university’s Arts students, and, according to McGill professor Stephen Leacock in 1942, “controlled their own funds, their own property, and their own activities.” Leacock hints at what John Irwin Cooper, another McGill professor from the 1940s, explained in more detail and in a slightly shocking language.

“The ‘meds’ were a strange and virile race, who, in popular opinion, divided their time between body snatching and fighting the police.”

At this time, there was a provincial act in place in Quebec that regulated the supply of bodies to medical schools. However this law was rarely enforced, which led to many bodies being taken by illegal means through the likes of “body snatchers” or “resurrectionists.” According to historian Joseph Hanaway, a body snatcher was able to sell a cadaver to medical schools for somewhere between $30 to $50, no questions asked. It became so lucrative a business that some students were even able to pay their tuition in full from the money they gathered from grave robbing. There were a number of stories of bodies taken from the cemetery and tobogganed down Côte-des-Neiges to McGill.

The situation came to its boiling point near the end of the 1880s, when one winter, a group of students decided to steal a number of bodies from a convent that had experienced a bout of typhoid fever. When it was discovered that the nuns’ bodies were missing, a public outcry arose, which led to the intervention of the Archbishop of Quebec. He appealed to the anatomy professors in order to figure out a way to stop these grave robbings, which resulted in a law that allowed all unclaimed bodies to be donated to Quebec Medical schools. This provided the students with a large enough supply of bodies that body snatchers were no longer needed.