In Edinburgh’s cemeteries you can still find some tombs from the 19th century protected by an iron structure. Its function was not to prevent the dead from leaving their final resting place revived as zombies (a fear present in the imagination of the time), but to make difficult the work of an industry that two centuries ago was so profitable as to encourage specialized mafias to flourish. We are referring to the plots dedicated to the theft of corpses that were destined for the dissection tables of medical schools.
The dismantling of a plot of these characteristics in Valencia in 2024 invites us to look towards that remote past and revisit the work of authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson. If the alleged perpetrators of this current body trafficking case did the same, their hair would stand on end. Because they would discover that history was implacable with their predecessors.
The skeleton of one of those Edinburgh resurrectionists of the 19th century, William Burke, is still displayed in the Anatomical Museum of the Faculty of Medicine in a kind of mockery ad eternum, although in his case – nothing to do with the Valencian arrests – the aggravating circumstance that he himself had committed a few murders to optimize his business.
If the preferred victims of the Valencian plot were, as we are told, people without family ties, preferably foreigners, those of Hare and his people were prostitutes or homeless people whom no one was going to trace either. In this, the modus operandi has not changed.
Stevenson used that activity as a source of inspiration for his famous story The Body Snatcher (1884), inspired by the misdeeds of Burke and his accomplice William Hare. Dickens, Lovecraft and Poe are other authors who have introduced this type of undesirables in their work.
And, without leaving the cultural aspect of the matter, we must remember that the German resurrectionist Gunther von Hagens has exhibited plastinated corpses all over the world – also in Barcelona – which in some cases had a dubious origin.
Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, corpses perfectly simulated with Artificial Intelligence (AI) could be made available to medical students. This is supposed to be the end point of an illegal activity that only deserves to survive in good literature. Or maybe not.
