Although many people have heard of bodysnatching, most don’t know that it is closely connected to modern medicine. Nor do they know that Indiana had some startling cases of grave robbery by these “resurrectionists” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this presentation, Tamara Hunt traces the medical history of bodysnatching and focuses on occurrences in Indiana that made national or even international news.
Dr Tamara Hunt has been a professor at the University of Southern Indiana for twenty years, teaching a variety of courses on European and World History. Among her most popular courses are “Social History of Murder” and “Social History of Ghosts.” The research for those classes led to this study of grave-robbing. She is currently working on a book on publishing in eighteenth century England and is writing a book with her husband, Scott Myerly, on how the ideology of capitalism and chivalry combined to create modern male dress from the medieval period to the early twentieth century.
