Nathan Smith, the founder of Dartmouth Medical School,
started his medical practice in Cornish, New Hampshire. His wife was Sally Chase, daughter of
Jonathan Chase, Revolutionary War colonel and founder of the Windsor-Cornish
Bridge. For several years, Nathan had
two residences. He rented a room in
Hanover to be close to Dartmouth, but also maintained a household in Cornish,
where Sally was raising their children.
In
1803, Dartmouth College offered Nathan a raise if he would move his family to
Hanover and establish a permanent residence there. Maybe they felt that Nathan
was unable to fully attend to his the teaching and management of the medical
school with a family so far away in Cornish.
By 1803, he had four children in Cornish, Solon, age 8; Ryno, age 7;
Sally, age 4; Gratia, age 1, and just before the end of the year, on December
30, Sally had another baby, a girl, Mary.
It was
another two years before Sally and the kids moved to Hanover with Nathan. In the meantime, it appears that they moved from
a house Sally’s father owned in Cornish to a house in Windsor, where the brood
of five children was joined by nine medical students. Sally’s father Jonathan
died in 1801 and the house was probably sold after his death. When he died, Sally and Nathan inherited some
land in Cornish and Vermont, but they did not inherit the house they had been
living in.
We know
that Sally moved to Hanover in 1805 because there are surviving bills of sale
that show that she bought feather beds, chairs, desks, tables, cutlery and
dishes in Hanover to furnish her house in Hanover, leading Nathan’s biographer
Oliver Hayward to believe that prior to their move to Hanover, not only were
they living in Jonathan’s house, but that most of their household furnishings
were owned by him as well.
Nathan
strongly believed that a medical school education should include the
dissections of human bodies. Human dissection was illegal during this time, and
subjects for dissection had to be smuggled into medical schools. In large cities, it was easier to obtain
bodies than in rural areas like the Upper Valley. When possible, Nathan tried to have bodies
sent up from Boston, but this was difficult and expensive. Sometimes he had no alternative but to resort
to grave robbing, punishable with a $2,000 fine, two years in prison and fifty
lashes.
Certainly
Nathan did not rob graves himself.
Unlike the graverobbing depicted in “Tom Sawyer”, however, he didn’t
hire criminals to do it, either. He
hired one of his medical students. The situation got very dicey around the time
Sally finally moved to Hanover. Nathan had made arrangements to send a medical
student to Boston to pick up the body of a young boy and bring it back to
Hanover for dissection. The student,
Ezekiel Cushing, heard that a boy of about that same age had recently died in
Enfield, and thought that the job would be quicker and more lucrative if he
just went to Enfield, dug up the recently deceased body, and brought it back to
Hanover. He convinced several of his
buddies to go with him, and the deed was done.
On the
way back to Hanover, carrying the body he had just taken from its grave in the
back of a wagon under some hay, Ezekiel was so rattled when he paid a toll at a
tollhouse that he left his wallet behind.
The wallet contained a letter about the grave of a 10 year old boy in
Enfield. The man at the tollhouse notified the sheriff who went to check on the
grave, and of course, found that the body was missing.
The
sheriff came knocking at the doors of the medical school. He had a warrant and
searched the place. The students had been warned and quickly hid the body in a
closet, but during the search, the sheriff opened the door to the closet and
the body fell right out on top of him. Of course, during all of this, Nathan was
nowhere to be found. When the sheriff found the body, the guys that were there
convinced him not to do anything by threatening that the entire student body
would “tear him limb from limb”, according to Oliver Hayward in his book “Improve, Perfect
and Perpetuate”, his biography of Nathan. One of the students was carrying a
pistol, and he made sure the sheriff saw it.
Although the sheriff did not take any actions
that night, Ezekiel was charged with grave robbery and went to trial at the
courthouse in Haverhill, New Hampshire, where he swore under oath that he never
procured any human bodies for dissection, nor did Nathan Smith ever request him
to procure a subject from Boston. Ezekiel never served time or received any
consequences for grave robbery (or perjury).
Nathan Smith was questioned at the trial – and almost certainly
committed perjury along with his student – and was never charged or convicted
of procuring bodies or carrying out dissections.
The obvious question is – how and
why did Nathan and his students get caught robbing graves and get away with it?
I thought at first that the sheriff found the body in the closet but couldn’t
prove who had taken it. When I reread
the story, I realized that the wallet tied Ezekiel with the body, and provided
a date and even a time. It would seem
like an open and shut case. Did Nathan
bribe someone? Were the courts just
really sympathetic toward grave robbers and medical science? I can hardly imagine that was the case,
especially with a jury made up of New Hampshire farmers. Was the sheriff really
as intimidated by a bunch of medical students as Hayward portrays in his
book?
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