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no bodies were provided by law for dissection purposes. In the course of
some studies for the history of the New York State Medical Society (New
York, 1906) I found that nearly every one of the first half dozen
presidents of the New York Academy of Medicine, which is not much more
than sixty years old, had had body-snatching experiences when they were
younger. Dr. Samuel Francis, the medico-historical writer, tells of a
personal expedition across the ferry in the winter time, bringing a body
from a Long Island graveyard. In order to avoid the constables on the
Long Island side and the police on the New York side, because there had
been a number of cases of body-snatching recently and the authorities
were on the lookout, the corpse was placed sitting beside the physician
who drove the wagon, with a cloak wrapped around it, as if it were a
living person specially protected against the cold. Similar experiences
were not unusual. The lack of bodies for dissection is sometimes
attributed to religious scruples, but they have very little to do with
it, as at all times men have refused to allow the bodies of their
friends to be treated as anatomical material. This is the natural
feeling of abhorrence and not at all religious. It is only when there
are many unclaimed bodies of strangers and the poor, as happens in large
cities, that there can be an abundance of anatomical material.

The details of this body-snatching case are strangely familiar to those
who know the history of similar cases before the middle of the
nineteenth century. The case occurred in 1319 in Bologna, just four
years after Mondino's public dissections. Four students were involved in
the charge of body-snatching, all of them from outside the city of
Bologna itself, three from Milan and one from Piacenza. In modern
experience, too, as a rule, students from outside of the town where the
medical college was situated, were always a little readier than natives
to violate graveyards. These four students were accused of having gone
at night to the Cemetery of St. Barnabas, outside the gate of San
Felice,--suburban graveyards were usually the scene of such
exploits,--and to have dug up the body of a certain criminal named
Pasino, who had been hanged a few days before. They carried the body to
the school in the Parish of San Salvatore, where Alberto Zancari was
teaching. The resurrection had been accomplished without witnesses, but
there were several witnesses who t