A Century of Body Snatching: A History of Cadaver‐ Acquisition in Kingston, Ontario from 1820–1920

Practical anatomy has always required bodies for dissection, and, when legal avenues failed to supply cadavers, more illicit practices developed. Scholarly and popular works on body snatching have addressed grave robbing in the United Kingdom and North America. The rise of American medical schools and their reliance on grave robbing have been well‐documented through substantial works by Suzanne Shultz and Michael Sappol, while the Canadian landscape has yet to be researched as thoroughly. This work begins to fill the gap by focussing on grave robbing in late nineteenth‐century Eastern Ontario. Lying between Toronto, and Montreal, and in close proximity to the American border, the area surrounds Kingston's medical school, founded in 1854. Sources include newspapers, pertinent legislation, and archival records of the Medical Faculty and hospital. They identify dozens of local body‐snatching cases with an uneven distribution through time, and they trace the public and medical reactions to grave robbing for anatomical study. Factors included the shortcomings of legal avenues of cadaver‐acquisition, unclaimed remains in the Kingston Penitentiary, and the city's cemetery practices. A more complete view emerges of early Canadian medical life and a reconsideration of the previously‐suggested grave‐robbing landscape in Canada with its North American implications.