Med School Owes Its Existence To Many Bodies of Knowledge

In some countries, scientists were allowed to use bodies from poorhouses or of criminals hanged from gallows. But there was plenty of grave robbing, too -- enough so that wealthy people sometimes put slabs of stone over tombs or hired guards to stay by grave sites until the bodies could decompose.

In the early 1800s, two men in Scotland killed 16 people and sold the bodies to a doctor. That prompted new laws in Maryland, where, in a few rare instances, a drunken sailor would disappear: "They would smother him and turn the body over to the Maryland doctors at a price," Pitrof said.

A medical school janitor (named Frank) would follow funeral processions to a cemetery and go back at night to get the body. In 1830, a professor of surgery wrote to a doctor at Bowdoin College in Maine: "It will give me pleasure to render you any assistance in regard to subjects. . . . I shall immediately invoke Frank, our body-snatcher (a better man never lifted a spade) and confer with him on the matter. We can get them without any difficulty at present. . . ."

The professor went on to set the price and promised to send three bodies packed in barrels of whiskey.

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From its early days, the school has had a rare collection: hundreds of mummies and body parts from the late 1700s and early 1800s.

They came from two brothers in Scotland: John Burns, a surgeon, was found guilty of body snatching; Allen Burns studied anatomy and embalmed hundreds of bodies using arsenic, mercury and other substances, dissected them and then preserved them with sugar and salt. One of his proteges, who was indicted in Scotland, brought the collection to the United States when he joined the faculty at Maryland.

Over the years, many of the bodies got spirited away.

One still lies deep inside Davidge Hall on the Baltimore campus, near the old anatomy classroom at the top of the domed building. A narrow wooden staircase, hidden in the back, spirals up past peeling, water-stained plaster walls. At the top, under a low ceiling, a skinny, wrinkled brown body lies on display in a dark corner on a dissection table.

That's Hermie, affectionately nicknamed by some med student long ago.

About 15 years ago, one of the missing 200-year-old Burns cadavers found its way back: A guy in Southern Maryland called the state anatomy board. He had found -- in a closet -- the mummy of a child. His great-great-great uncle had graduated from the medical school in the late 1800s and tucked the cadaver away with his medical books.

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