Paging Dr. Benway

The [Boston] Liberator, August 13, 1858. Here’s the Magee case that inspired this previous item.

Paging Dr. Icard

Lowell Citizen and Daily News, July 28, 1858. Dunno who this Magee character was but will attempt to find out. I wouldn’t bet the rent on the truth value of this anecdote, but it’s a fine story.

“Unskilfully haggled”

New York Times, October 24, 1865. I’m thinking Patrolman Coughlin just might have taken a peek into said box before complying with said rule. Anyway, medical students once again furnish the cops with a handy alibi for a tough and ugly case. Not that anybody lost much sleep over the murder of neonates at this time. As we’ve seen, there was an entire industry built around the quiet disposal of unwanted babies.

Penultimate death test

Washington Post, April 9, 1907. Okay, it seems like I was maybe jumping to conclusions about the sinister vampiric agenda of Dr. Icard. Detection of suspended animation and prevention of premature burial seem to have been sincere and lifelong obsessions chez lui. One wonders why, if this test worked so perfectly, he had to go and develop his second method.

Absolute death test

The New York Times, September 14, 1914. Lemme get this straight: Upon the injection of this Lovecraftian substance into a freshly dead person, his or her eyes turn into “superb emeralds, set like jewels in their sockets,” and then it turns out no funeral is necessary after all. Could this “Icard” (transparent anagram for “I, Drac”) be any more brazen in his campaign to take over Marseilles with his private army of the undead?

Still, it would all make a great ad for the glossies. You’ve got this Lionel Atwill-type in a white lab coat brandishing a big hypodermic, see? He’s shooting the goo into the pallid arm of a young lovely whose charms are barely covered by her winding sheet. Her wide-open eyes are superb green emeralds, and nicely set off by the stainless steel mortuary table upon which she reposes, whose outline is isometric to the fireplug shape of the bottle containing your client’s naphtha-like beverage.

Meat market

Chicago Tribune, June 23, 1878. Could be this interview is vaguely on the level, could be it’s a total put-on. It’s worth noting that “cunny” was then a well-known term for ye nether lady-parts of the fairer sex at a time when the general vocabulary lacked polite equivalents. It’s a noun now generally forgotten except by attentive followers of HBO’s Deadwood. Anyway, the ensuing description of the mechanics of body-snatching has an impressive verisimilitude.

Renal, shunned

Associated Press, January 9, 1878. No idea whether these reports of the liver-eater’s demise were premature, though a guy named Liver Eating Johnson surely has got to go sometime . Anyway, this one was the inspiration for a hokey ’70s eco-Western starring Robert Redford, but the entire liver-eating angle somehow got lost along the way. Time for a remake, I think. Casey Affleck looks like he might eat your liver.

Special delivery

Los Angeles Times, November 7, 1901. Weird stuff tends to happen once you assign a cash value to dead people. And this is far from the worst of it.

Here’s looking through you

Chicago Defender, August 13, 1913. Okay , I’ve changed my funeral plans again: Rather than being freeze-dried and ground into crystals, I fain would be rendered transparent.

Go fetch

Chicago Defender, January 3, 1938. Leave it to the South to keep these old traditions alive. I wonder if the lawman’s curiosity was exhausted once the racial identification of the part came to a dead end. Chances are it was in fact a “sable arm,” as black people were vastly overrepresented on med school dissecting tables. The golden age of medical grave robbing is over by this time (1938), but back in the day there were actually organized rings that looted Southern black graveyards and shipped cadavers all over the country. Basically any poor population was vulnerable to the medical ghouls. Grave-robbing scandals were typically triggered by the discovery that ‘respectable’ white person had been “resurrected.”