Free The Lady and Her Monsters by Roseanne Montillo

others saw the temple for what it was: an upper-class bordello. Horace Walpole, who went to the temple for a session, described it as “the most impudent puppet show of imposition I ever saw, and the mountebank himself that dullest of his profession. A woman, invisible, warbled to clarinets on the stairs. The decorations are pretty and odd, and the apothecary, who comes up a trap-door (for no purpose, since he might as well come up the stairs), is a novelty. The electrical experiments are nothing at all singular, and a poor air-pump, that only hurts a bladder, pieces out the farce.”
    Faced with Graham’s legacy, Aldini had to be careful how he promoted and described his methods. Graham had tried to restore peoples’ depleted sexuality; Aldini wanted to restore life to the dead and to show that it was possible to do so with scientific methods. It was a highly dangerous move, impractical in a sense, and fraught with difficulties, not the least of which was the possibility of his experiments being undermined and of his being seen as a fool. He needed to do things precisely and in order.
    First, he needed the perfect subject to galvanize. Youth and health were priorities, but most people died of disease and malnutrition, so it would be hard to find a vigorous body in its prime. He could rely on the gallows, as most anatomists did, but English law allotted only ten or twelve bodies for anatomizations, and those came highly prized by the medical institutions, which clamored after them. He could have hired a “resurrectionist,” or a body snatcher, like most others in his position did, but they were expensive. Moreover, resurrection men were indiscriminate in whom they dug up—whether young or old, man or woman, healthy or diseased. The only requirement for a resurrectionist was a recent time of death, because then putrefaction would not have set in. Although Aldini needed a nonputrefied body, he would not stoop to employing a resurrection man to find one.
    Most anatomists were not as picky as he was. Up until the 1800s, most medical students learned surgical procedures by watching their teachers perform actual surgeries. But as the population grew, students and doctors realized a more hands-on method was needed, one in which each student could work on a corpse. This hands-on practice, called the Parisian method, gave them a chance to study how each organ, muscle, nerve, and bone operated. It was called the Parisian method because the law in France allowed surgeons to use the unclaimed bodies left in hospitals and death houses. However, in England the gallows were the only legal source from which to collect corpses.
    But the graveyards held a plentiful supply of unused corpses, and stealing them was not a serious crime. Actually trespassing was the grave robber’s biggest concern. If anatomists and their cohorts (mostly students) were found lurking in a place where they did not belong, say a cemetery, they could be arrested. They could also get in trouble if they were caught stealing objects—for instance, anything that belonged to the corpse, such as the clothes he or she had been interred with, any jewelry, shoes for the girlfriend, or mementoes, like portraits. To be careful, they conducted all transactions during the most absolute stillness of the night, and if the moon only rose to a sliver, so much the better, because too much light could be devastating. But some learned that too much silence could also cause problems, as it was hard to disguise the echo of their footsteps running down the street with a corpse bouncing off their backs.
    Snatching bodies proved a lucrative enterprise for the anatomists, though many found the actual digging of the bodies too stressful on their psyche. The general population thought it was disgraceful and gruesome. Doctors could have their reputations tarnished if they became known as grave robbers and body snatchers. Middlemen were needed to do the work for