20 THE " RESURRECTIONISTS. 



the progress of dissections, and adding to his stores of 

 osteology. In his second year practical anatomy so 

 absorbed his attention that he wrote to his father ask- 

 ing his permission to become a surgeon, and not a gra- 

 duate in medicine. No doubt he was influenced in 

 part by his admiration of Knox, and a wish to avoid 

 attendance on Monro, and possibly also with a view to 

 economise his father's means. Immediately previous 

 to Goodsir's student-days, the Edinburgh school of 

 anatomy was supplied with materiel, got from the 

 burial-grounds of the neighbourhood, or from England, 

 even London itself. The men who robbed the graves 

 of their contents were called " Kesurrectionists," and 

 vile rascals they were ; some of them, not content with 

 nocturnal depredations, took to the heinous crime of 

 sacrificing the living for the sake of the booty their 

 cadaverous victim would yield. Fifteen or twenty 

 guineas for an adult subject was a great temptation to 

 the body-snatchers. Students of anatomy, till the act 

 legalising the removal of the unclaimed dead came 

 fairly into operation — and this was hardly the case in 

 1832 — had to pay dearly for their opportunities of 

 practical knowledge ; thus Goodsir had £2 to pay for 

 an upper extremity, and this he laboured at with a 

 zeal that implied a determination to exact the pound's 

 worth from the pounds of flesh. He wrote to his mo- 

 ther as follows — " I do not occupy much of my time 

 in dissecting animals, as I am too much employed with 

 human anatomy ; but when I find a leisure hour in 

 dissecting one, the information I acquire is so much 



