Body-snatching in Ontario.

In a well known scene in Tom Sawyer, Tom and Huck watch while Injun Joe and two associates, one of them a doctor, open a grave in the cemetery at midnight to steal a recently buried body. The purpose of the theft was to use the body for anatomical teaching. This scene was based on life. Throughout the English-speaking world in the nineteenth century, grave-robbers stole newly buried corpses to provide subjects for medical students. A surprisingly extensive literature has developed on this practice as it existed in Britain and the United States.l In Canada, the subject has also been well treated for the Province of Quebec. E. D. Worthington's Reminiscenses [sic] of Student Life and Practice (1897) described his personal involvement in body-snatching up to the year 1840. F. J. Shepherd's privately printed and much cited Reminiscences of Student Days and Dissecting Room (1919) told the story for the 1870s and 1880s. C. R. Rouleau has described in a fictionalized autobiography, Laurentian Heritage (1948), what grave-robbing meant to the people of a French Canadian parish particularly exposed to the depredations of the medical students. The subject has been thoroughly researched for Quebec in D. G. Lawrence's W i a m Osler Medal Essay, " 'Resurrection' and Legislation: Or Body-Snatching in Relation to the Anatomy Act in the Province of Q~ebec."~ Sylvio Leblond has written of "Anatomistes et rksurrectionnistes au Canada et plus particuli6rement dans la Province de Q~dbec,"~ which, despite its title, deals exclusively with the province of Quebec. I shall return later in this article to the conclusions reached by the medical memoirist, Shepherd, and by the researchers, Lawrence and Leblond. By contrast, there is little on body-snatching in Ontario. The matter is occasionally mentioned in local histories.* The only article seems to be my own, published in 1985 in a University of Waterloo alurnni