222 HUMAN DISSECTION. ITS DRAMA AND STRUGGLE 



life. In disposition, he was very amiable, friendly, generous and 

 charitable, honorable, direct, innocent of guile and incapable of, 

 deceit. At times, he could be quite emotional about things and 

 he was fond of music. In his pursuits, he was persistent and 

 diligent throughout his life and was always careful in the economy 

 of his time. He won a place for anatomy as a science in America. 

 Apparently, he was loved by all, as he was given a tremendous 

 funeral (Middleton, '23a). 



Pennsylvania passed its first anatomical law in 1867 (Hart- 

 well, 1881b). It has since become a model for other states. Yet, 

 it did not abolish grave robbing entirely. As late as 1883, there 

 was an incident in this respect. In that year, a drunken, worth- 

 less soldier living in Easton, Pennsylvania, committed suicide by 

 hanging. Some trouble was encountered in giving him proper 

 rites but he was finally buried in a pauper's cemetery in Easton^ 



The evening of interment, Samuel D. Gross, a practicing 

 surgeon in Easton, called a student from the University of Pennsyl- 

 vania, who was home on a visit, into his office and said, "Green, 

 I want that fellow." That night, at a late hour. Gross, Green and 

 another student marched to the cemetery with a wheelbarrow 

 and spade. They located the grave in a remote corner of the 

 potter's field, where the soil was rough and undulating. They 

 set to work to unearth the coffin but the shovel made so much 

 noise that Gross said, ''Green, we had better quit or we'll get 

 caught." So they stopped, filled up the grave and left the premises. 

 A few days later, a brother of the deceased soldier, with the mis- 

 taken idea that the body had been stolen, met Green in the 

 street and said, "Doctor, I believe you got my brother's body." 

 The student responded with the enigmatical answer, "You can 

 believe what you please." This closed the incident (Rohrer, *12). 



B. Early Dissection in New York — A.D. 1750 to 1790 



Going back to colonial times (1750), the body of Hermanns 

 Carroll, a criminal executed in New York City, was injected 

 and dissected by Dr. John Bard and Peter Middleton; this was 

 used for medical instruction and was performed under legal 

 sanction (Ball, '28; Ladenheim, '50). 



