When I was in college, I had the honor of performing the title role in Sophocles’ Antigone. For many years, this was the first, and only, credit on my acting resume. I would like to say that my starring role was a result of my commanding stage presence and powerful performance, but in full disclosure, my roommate was the director and nepotism definitely played a role in the casting. Still, I loved that show. Our costumes were repurposed bed sheets, but our stage was second to none in a little-known theater tucked in the back of a gothic building off the quad, and we were a troupe of classicists deeply in love with the myth.
If you don’t know the story of Antigone, it’s not a complex plot: most of the action takes place off stage. Antigone is a daughter of Oedipus (yes, that Oedipus). The play starts when the Trojan War ended, and both of Antigone’s brothers have been killed. Unfortunately, while one brother (Eteocles) fought for the winning side and was buried with military honors, the other (Polynices) died fighting for the losing side. King Creon of Thebes declares that Polynices will rot on the hillside, “to be a sweet treasure for [vultures’] eyes and beaks.”1 Antigone, early in the play, makes the daring choice to disobey the King and bury her brother. The remainder of the play is mostly taken up with Antigone being sentenced to death, preparing for death with several fantastically angry and righteous speeches, and then ultimately being led off to die. You can’t beat the Greeks for tragedy.
It might feel like an odd plot in the modern world— especially for a cast of mostly 20-something atheists. Antigone was willing to die rather than have her brother’s body go unburied. She did die, for the crime of covering his corpse. How compelling can that conflict possibly be in today’s world? For Antigone, or others who view bodily integrity after death as a key to entry into the afterlife, perhaps the motivation sings more instinctively. But for those of us who have the organ donor heart proudly displayed on our driver’s license? Who find cremation a practical and admirable funerary practice, and would rather see ashes scattered than sit morbid in an urn?
There are things I would die for— although of course, that resolve remains untested in my life to date. But the treatment of a corpse, even the corpse of a beloved, is not high on the list. Still— it is not hard for me to understand the outrage, the righteous anger, that runs through Antigone when she declares:
“I will bury him myself. And even if I die in the act, that death will be a glory.”
The way we treat our dead is part of what defines humanity; what separates us from other species. When we hear that elephants, for example, dig graves— it is profound information that shakes our concept of the animal. The idea of desecration or violation of a corpse or a grave is deeply disturbing at a visceral level; perhaps because there is no state more helpless than death. And if you imagine yourself in Antigone’s place, with a brother, a friend, a loved one, condemned to humiliation and desecration after death, the anger and the outrage and the horror is easier to understand.
But this is a story about anatomy, not afterlife. And as I think back on Antigone, her furious speeches and her emotionally moving sacrifice, I find myself drawn to a strange comparison with the anatomists whose stories I’ve sworn to tell. How do we reconcile the gothic and the gruesome with the heroic and the hard-fought?
The history of medicine is no stranger to horror. I will, one day, tell the full story of the anatomy murders of Burke and Hare. But it is just one part of the fascinating back-and-forth legality of human dissection that influences and underlies the history of anatomy. The Murder Act of 1752 made it legal for medical schools to dissect the cadavers of executed criminals- but only those. As medical schools and private anatomy labs expanded, demand quickly outstripped supply for cadavers. The market solved, as it so often does, with the cottage industry of Resurrection Men: glorified grave robbers, who dug up corpses and delivered them to dissecting room back doors.
Burke and Hare cut out the middleman, so to speak. William Burke and William Hare owned a lodging house, and when a lodger died with a debt unpaid, they sold the corpse to Dr. Robert Knox, a well-known anatomy teacher. They quickly realized the untapped potential of the market, and started creating their own supply by killing more than 15 of their lodgers. Ironically, after Burke was found guilty and hanged in 1829, his body was donated to the medical school for dissection— in fact, his skeleton is still on display at the University of Edinburgh Medical School.
Up the close and down the stair, In the house with Burke and Hare, Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief, Knox, the boy who buys the beef.
19th Century Children’s Rhyme
The history of anatomy is not for the faint of heart.
But Burke and Hare were not anatomists. They were more aligned with Creon, the king who thought punishing a corpse was a valid means of political action, than with Antigone. Because what really drove Antigone? What inspired her to action, what made her willing to die for her principles? She has been compared to Joan of Arc, a French peasant girl canonized after her death for her willingness to die for God and country. But I don’t see Antigone as a childlike token of man or deity. Her love is not for duty, but for humanity, as personified by those she loves. In fact, after Creon sentences her to death, Antigone retorts:
“It is no shame to pay respect to one’s own flesh and blood. I was not born to share in hatred, but in love.”
The anatomists are united in love, not hatred. A deep, unshakeable love of the truth, and of humanity. Put yourself in Antigone’s shoes. The dark of night, a lonely hillside, the vultures sweeping overhead. Around you, corpses— your enemies and your countrymen. You come in search of a brother who, when you find him, is not the brother you remember. He is a dead thing, broken and putrefying. Your task is unpleasant in the extreme, even putting aside the mortal danger, and yet you persevere. Antigone, without a doubt, had the soul of an anatomist. What is it that unites every individual who has ever— in pursuit of truth— defied the edicts of society, of tyranny, and of the gods themselves, to do what many think immoral, indecent, or simply unsavory? It is the belief that there is nothing in the world more noble than understanding. Nothing more crucial than the truth. And nothing more enticing than the knowledge of who we are as human beings.
Antigone— the Greek heroine who died rather than suffer desecration of her brother’s corpse— in this way joins the ranks of every anatomist who has ever risked censure by exploring the mysteries of the dead or living human form. They were not born to share in hatred, but in love.
https://www.uww.edu/documents/colleges/cac/TheatreDance/audition%20info/21%20Antigone/Antigone-Script.pdf
Ancient Greeks did cremate.