By: Chloe Fine
As a city known to have several supposedly haunted hotspots, it is unsurprising that Kingston has some rather spooky elements in its colourful history. One of the darker moments of this history surrounds a rather creepy activity that was occurring in the city and neighbouring areas well into the 1900s, as Kingston was plagued by a century of grave robbing. Grave robbing was an issue that was exceptionally prevalent in the United Kingdom but spread into North America as a resource for acquiring corpses. Grave robbing gained popularity by being seen as a necessity in the medical community due to using the exhumed corpses for dissection, experimentation and other medical practices. In the 19th century, dissection was established as a pillar of any future physicians' education and was seen as a required practice to ensure their qualification. Because of this, major hubs for this morbid activity often focussed around areas that were large medical centers and had medical students in need of cadavers. Kingston's large medical community and the medical program at Queen's University made it a prime location for grave robbing to be rampant. At one point, due to disease spreading in Montreal, which was the largest location of this activity, Kingston temporarily became the grave robbing capital of North America.
The first account of grave robbing within Kingston was in 1822, and occurrences started to increase after that. In the early 19th century, there were incidences of judges allotting the bodies of hanged criminals and unclaimed bodies to the medical school. From this, a relationship between the judicial and medical communities was forged. As Queen's medical school grew, grave robbing increased. In response to that, tensions rose between the Kingston community and its medical students, with people trying to create elaborate ways of preventing the exhumation of their loved ones. Eventually, body-snatching cases started to crop up in not only Kingston but its surrounding areas resulting from the difficulty of acquiring the corpses and the demand for them both increasing. By the middle of the century, legislation was created to verify legal avenues of getting cadavers. This legislation also clearly signalled that the more nefarious and unpermitted ways would not be supported by the law. Grave robbing was one of the formats for retrieving cadavers that were strictly not permissible under these laws.
Snatching reached its peak in the 1880s, and by the end of the 19th century, grave robbing was essentially a requirement to get through medical school. By this time, it had entered into the medical school's social culture and was now a ritual practiced every year. The other faculties within the university were acutely aware and worried about the medical school's reputation within the Kingston area. To combat losing standing themselves, other faculties attempted to actively distance themselves from the medical school. They essentially campaigned to show that they should not be associated with them and denounce their practices. Kingston medical leaders were also concerned with local perception. In an effort to finally try to address this dilemma internally, they declared that medical students would dissect half of a corpse instead of everyone dissecting their own corpse. This arrangement, unfortunately, aided the issue only minimally. The unlawful exhumation of a few individuals of notoriety was discovered and believed to be medical students' work. This event required the law to act more punitively and finally deter grave robbing through legal consequences. In 1892 one could now get up to 10 years in prison and $2000 to $5000 in fines if convicted of body snatching. These new dissuasion tactics were largely unsuccessful. Only one student was ever actually convicted on these charges.
There was still another rise in body snatching in the late 1890s. By this point, the hostility between the Kingston locals and Queen's medical students was a long-standing problem. This had caused generations of resentment, which arguably still exists today to a lesser extent. Although most grave robbing was directly the fault of medical students, there were some ways in which they contributed only indirectly to the issue. There were reports during this time of a black market in Kingston for cadaver parts, and the medical centres allegedly bought these parts as they did not have identification of how they were retrieved. Eventually the occurrences of body-snatching did die down slightly, and when the first world war came, medical students were no longer in such an aggressive need for cadavers as there were many wounded people and a shortage of medical staff, giving them an extensive amount of opportunity for hands-on training. The last incidence of grave robbing was recorded in the 1920s. Given how relatively recently this phenomenon ended, it would be interesting to contemplate that if the medical faculty was responsible for snatching the dead bodies of local's loved ones, then it could be from that conflict where the long-standing tensions within the community could have first risen.