THE RESURRECTIONISTS.
As we returned to our lodgings, our conversation naturally turned upon the agitating event that we had just witnessed, and the extreme caution necessary in the procuring of subjects for anatomical examination. Lee related an occurrence that had happened to Dr. ——, a gentleman of high standing in South Carolina.
Shortly after the American revolution, he visited Europe for the purpose of pursuing his medical studies, and was received into the family of the same distinguished gentleman, whom we had just heard lecture, then beginning to rise to eminence and notice; an advantage which was necessarily confined to a very few. In one of the dark and stormy nights of December, Mr. Hunter and his wife having been called to the bedside of a dying relative in the country, as Dr. —— was quietly sitting at the parlour fire, absorbed in his studies, he was aroused by a hurried ring at the street door, and rising, went to answer it himself. Upon opening the door, a hackney coach, with its half-drowned horses, presented itself at the side of the walk, and two men, in slouched hats and heavy sailor coals dripping with water, standing upon the steps,inquired in a low tone if he wanted a subject. Being answered in the affirmative, they opened the carriage door, lifted out the body, which was enveloped in a sack, and having carried it up stairs to the dissecting-room, which was in the garret, received the two guineas which they had demanded, and withdrew. The affair was not unusual, and Dr. —— resuming his book, soon forgot the transaction. About eleven o’clock, while still absorbed in his studies, he heard a violent female shriek in the entry, and the next instant the servant maid, dashing open the door, fell senseless upon the carpet at his feet, the candlestick which she held, rolling some distance as it fell.
Perceiving that the cause of alarm, whatever it might be, was without, he caught up the candlestick, and, jumping over her prostrate form, rushed into the hall where an object met his view which might well have tried the nerves of the strongest man. Standing half-way down the stair-case, was a fierce, grim-looking man, perfectly naked, his eyes glaring wildly and fearfully from beneath a coarse shock of dark hair, which, nearly concealing a narrow forehead, partially impeded a small stream of blood trickling down the side of the face, from a deep scratch in the temple. In one hand he grasped a sharp long belt-knife, such as is used by riggers and sailors, the other holding on by the bannister, as he somewhat bent over to meet the gaze of the Doctor rushing into the entry. The truth flashedacross the mind of Dr. —— in an instant, and with admirable presence of mind, he made one spring, catching the man by the wrist which held the knife, in a way that effectually prevented his using it. “In the name of God! where am I?” demanded the man in a horror-stricken voice, “am I to be murdered?” “Silence!—not a whisper,” sternly answered Dr. ——, looking him steadily in the eyes—“Silence—and your life is safe.”—Wrenching the knife from his hand, he pulled him by the arm passively along into the yard, and hurrying through the gate, first ran with him through one alley, then into another, and finally rapidly through a third, till coming to an outlet upon one of the narrow and unfrequented streets, he gave him a violent push,—retracing his steps again on the wings of the wind, pulling too, and doubly locking the gate behind him, leaving the object of his alarm perfectly bewildered and perplexed, and entirely ignorant of the place from whence he had been so summarily ejected. The precaution and presence of mind of Dr. ——, most probably saved the house of Mr. Hunter from being torn down and sacked by the mob, which would have been instantly collected around it, had the aggrieved party known where to have led them to wreak his vengeance.
After a few days, inquiry was carefully and cautiously made through the police, and it was ascertained that three men answering the description of the resurrectionistsand their victim had been drinking deeply through the afternoon, in one of the low dens in the neighbourhood of Wapping; that one had sunk into a stupid state of intoxication, and had, in that situation, been stripped and placed in a sack by his companions, a knife having been previously placed in his hand that he might relieve himself from his confinement upon his return to sensibility; and that in addition to the poor wretch’s clothes, they had realized the two guineas for his body.
It is certainly painful, that the requirements of suffering humanity should make the occasional violation of the grave indispensably necessary. Whether the spirit, released from its confinement, lies in the limbo of the fathers, the purgatory of the Catholics, awaiting the great day of doom; whether called from a life of virtue, all time and distance annihilated, it sweeps free and unconstrained in heavenly delight through the myriads and myriads of worlds, rolling in the vast sublimity of space; whether summoned from a course of evil, it shudders in regions of darkness and desolation, or writhes in agony amid flaming atmospheres; or whether its germ of life remains torpid, as in the wheat taken from the Egyptian pyramids, thousands of years existent, but apparently not sentient, must, of course, be to us but the wild theories of imagination, and so remain until that judgment, predicted by the holy Revelation, shall sweep away the darknesswith which, in inscrutable and awful wisdom, the Almighty has enveloped us.
But that the spirit can look with other than indifference, if not loathing, on the perishing exuviæ of its chrysalis existence, which, to its retrospective gaze, presents little other than a tasking house of base necessities, a chained prison of cruel disappointments, even to our human reason, clogged as it is with bars and contradictions, appears hardly to admit the opportunity of question, and of consequence to that spirit its disposition can but be a matter of indifference. Still, to the surviving friends, whose affection cannot separate mind from matter, those forms lying in the still and silent tomb, retain all their dear associations, and surely it most gravely becomes the members of that profession, which, next to the altar, stands foremost in benevolence, that the deepest prudence should be exercised in this gloomy rite required by the living from the dead.