The "Harrison Horror" of 1878

it was May 30th 1878 and John Harrison grandson of former President William Henry Harrison was at the Medical College of Ohio searching he was searching for the body of a friend whose grave had been disturbed and whose body had been stolen 10 days previously through the help of a Cincinnati detective they had found out that had been a delivery to the Medical College of Ohio 3 a.m. the previous morning of something white that was presumed to be a cadaver they searched the grounds and they made some disturbing discoveries but they didn't find the body of his friend and they'd almost given up when they found a hidden trapdoor underneath which was a top rope they pulled it up to find out that it was hanging a human body with a sheet over the head from the age of the cadaver Harrison didn't think it could be his friend but the detective suggested that he look at the face anyway just to be sure they pulled back the sheet and Harrison to his horror realized that he recognized the face its father he gasped John Scott Harrison had been buried just the previous day only to have his body snatched and discovered by his own son at a medical school the body snatching of John Scott Harrison a former congressman and son of United States President represented them a Cobb practice that had gone on for centuries but also illustrated the challenges of a new scientific age it is history that deserves to be remembered on May 25th 1878 John Scott Harrison the only man to be both the son and the father of a u.s. president died at his home he was the last surviving child of wh Harrison the 9th President of the United States although he died a mere 31 days into his tenure he was buried in Congress Green Cemetery in Ohio on the air President Harrison's tomb while burying the body John Scott's sons including future president Benjamin noticed that the grave of a friend Augustus Devon who had died 10 days earlier looked disturbed realizing if their friend's body had been stolen the Gasman were terrified that the same could happen to their father and so they took Prakash he was already in a masonry vault but as an added precaution they had several large stone slabs so large that quote their weight required the efforts of 16 strong men to overcome placed atop the casket and then they had the whole thing sealed in concrete as a further precaution they hired a watchman to look over the grave for 30 days in the mid 19th century body-snatching was common practice the teams of men and sometimes women who stole the bodies were often known as Resurrectionist or resurrection men and had developed sophisticated means of robbing the graves of fresh bodies which they again sell to medical colleges who desperately demanded bodies for use in the study of surgery and Anatomy the 19th century was something about Renaissance for American medical science in 1800 there are only four medical colleges in the country but by 1900 there were more than a hundred and sixty the growing professionalism and needs of the colleges necessitated demand for bodies to be used for teaching especially as medical teaching became more focused on anatomy in 1824 physician Charles Knowlton was arrested for illegal dissection which he defended by saying the value of any art or science should be determined by the tendency it has to increase the happiness or to diminish the misery of mankind the controversy wasn't new the conflict between doctors seeking to become more knowledgeable and effective and the social mores of respecting the dead repeatedly boiled over dozens of times in the late 18th and 19th centuries in 1788 a riot known as the doctors riot broke out in New York City over bodies of poor people being stolen especially from predominantly black cemeteries lost such as the Massachusetts Anatomy Act of 1831 sought to strike a balance between the two in most states it was legal to dissect the bodies of convicted criminals who have been sentenced to death but the supply of such bodies who was not nearly enough to meet the medical school's demand the Harrisons had taken every precaution for their beloved father but the Resurrectionist seemed to know how the body been buried because they dug at the foot of the grave and burned through the brick casing instead of from the head of the grave as was the usual strategy it wasn't uncommon for teams of resurrectionists to have mourner often women view the burial to report on the condition of the body and the burial the watchman was a suspect but cleanse that he'd been spooked in the dark and chosen not to go to the grave at all although some reports suggest the watchman had fled the city though rampant medical colleges tended to get away with buying bodies from resurrectionists because the bodies were usually of poor on desirable groups and it was even sometimes legal to do so the body snatching of John Scott Harrison received national attention as both he and the former president were well-liked and papers as far away as Helena Montana and even Dundee Scotland reported on it he brought back in a terrible focus the horrors of anatomy research that stood in the 19th century the Harrisons were national figures with benjamin standing as a leading republican in illinois recently defeated for seat in congress there and john scott having served in the house for a time when john harrison shut up the medical school of ohio armed with a search warrant and accompanied by a police detective a janitor named JQ who was described as obnoxious and protesting showed them around they found several disturbing things including the body of a black woman who they described as being chipped at a box full of severed limbs in the body of an infant but they didn't find any sign of Augustus Devon it was only when the police detective a man named Thomas Snell Baker had the janitor tale that they discovered the trapdoor with the hidden body the janitor was arrested but the faculty of the college quickly put up the $5,000 bail Carter Harrison discovered the disturbed grave and rushed to deliver the news to John and the searchers in Cincinnati when they met Carter and John exchanged the terrible news first that the body had been stolen and then that it had already been discovered the ottawa illinois free trader suggested that the doctors had targeted john scott specifically to study his sudden death while the Philadelphia Times expressed the dismay of the nation much surprise is expressed that the leading medical college should be caught in desecrating the grave of an honored citizen and that the faculty had no comment except to say that the discovery was just their luck the sons of the elder Harrison were in dismay Carter Harrison was said to have been quite overpowered by the discovery dr. Robert Barr hello Dean of the college faculty expressed his regret that John Scott's body had been taken but denied any wrongdoing I mean that the Resurrectionist identity was unknown to the faculty and that the janitor had no knowledge of the transaction and that no member of the faculty or students had touched the body benjamin wrote an anguished open letter in response while he lay upon your table the long white beard which the hands of infant grandchildren had often stroked in love was rudely shorn from his face have you so little care of your college that an unseen and unknown man may do all this Benjamin had a source in the form of a dr. Seeley who claimed to know the identity of the grave robber but when he was pressed he clammed up apparently worried about his own complicity the Harrisons believed that the college faculty had gotten to the man first a second search by Benjamin this time with Pinkerton detectives turned up his father's clothes shoved in the building's rafters this convinced the future president that the college had deliberately hidden the body and that they were hiding their complicity God keep you from that taste of Hell which comes with the discovery of a father's grave robbed and the body hanging by the neck like a dog the pit of a medical college he lamented in the paper the enraged citizens might have repeated the violence of New York's Anatomy riots but Benjamin Harrison was a cautious man who was cognizant of his position as a who's your political leader and he sought to calm them down still he insisted he would use every available means to make sure that the perpetrators were brought to justice and he initiated both civil and criminal actions the reburial of John Scott Harrison as well as the college's protests that the attention was hurting their craft kept the newspapers in the public frothing crowds milled in the alley where mr. Harrison's body had been dumped trying to get a look inside and one paper lamented what can we do with the bodies of our loved and lost ones to save them from the enemy of the shoot and windlass and dissecting knife of the Medical College Newsome broke that the scandal was larger than they imagined nearby Miami College which during the summer was mostly empty during the day was being used by a man who among other aliases used the name dr. Morton to store corpses which were then being sent all over the area's intial a clearinghouse for the trade in cadavers a janitor at Miami College confessed that dr. Morton had been packing bodies away in the basement of the college all summer and sending them to towns all over the region packed in barrels labeled Quimby and company it was that break that allowed them to finally find the body of Augustus Devon stored in a vat of brine at the University of Michigan real name Charles Morton the doctor was a medical school dropout who moved and sold hundreds of bodies in the region he arrived in Cincinnati March with the blonde woman he called his wife told his neighbors he was a doctor and that he loved night fishing which is why he was gone at all hours of the night while Devon was reburied on June 16th a month after he'd first been buried John Scott Harrison was brought to the tomb of a family friend where it would be safe till would eventually be brought back to its original resting place near his home in North Bend Ohio December of 1879 detective Snell Baker tried to track down dr. Morton but failed to find him College doctors weren't willing to be forthcoming with what admitting that anyone who gave the man up would receive the general hatred of all Body Snatchers it might prevent the University in the future from obtaining an adequate supply of bodies for their studies the outcomes of the Harrison's court cases are unknown JQ Marshall was not convicted but is it known if dr. Morton was ever found or charged in connection with a crime several civil suits were also filed but any records of what happened were lost when the Hamilton County Courthouse was burned during the Cincinnati courthouse riots of 1884 Benjamin Harrison's career skyrocketed during the 1880s eventually taking him to the White House in 1889 the subject of his father's grave robbing was not something he did the rest of Henle care to recall they said little of it after the affair was finished the body-snatching of John Scott Harrison went to many important changes five states passed new and aadmi laws which both increase the penalty for body snatching but also made it easier for medical schools to obtain unclaimed bodies of people who had died in the care of the state and while that reduced the demand for illicit bodies it didn't eliminate it and the trade continued into the 20th century the second change affected the nature of burial itself the Harrison horror inspired a number of inventor to tackle the question of how to make coffins in vendors in Ohio designed anti grave robbing coffins one of which would fire a shotgun like device and another which would explode like a landmine if the coffin was breached while several instances of exploding coffins appear in newspapers and in patent applications it doesn't appear that these inventions were ever actually installed more practically Andrew van Bieber patented in 1878 the morte safe the earliest example of a modern burial vault the next year George W Boyd invented the first burial vault that utilized air sealing to close the vault itself today burial vaults are mostly meant to protect bodies from the elements but they began their existence protecting bodies from much more nefarious threats the story of John Scott Harrison's body provides insights into the changing needs and struggles of a society as the Industrial Revolution the flowering of science and increased professionalism sought inroads into a nation that was already facing great change the tug of war between the growing demands of science and social mores was further complicated by sluggish government oversight which struggled to keep up with the pace of change it's all part of the broader backdrop of the growing pains of an era of enormous societal rearrangement and we are facing similar challenges in the pace of change today which is all the more reason that history deserves to be remembered I hope you enjoyed this episode of the history guy short snippets have forgotten history between 10 and 15 minutes long and if you did enjoy please go ahead and click that thumbs up button if you have any questions or comments or suggestions for future episodes please write those in the comment section I will be happy to personally respond be sure to follow the history guy on Facebook Instagram Twitter and check out our merchandise on teespring com and if you'd like more episodes don't forgotten history all you need to do is subscribe [Music] you

Channel: The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered

Views: 402,134

Rating: 4.9605913 out of 5

Keywords: history, the history guy, us history, ohio, william henry harrison, benjamin harrison, body snatching

Id: M2KPkRE1S7c

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 24 2019