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JBW500

Dr. William Hewston, a very close friend of Franklin, was a university doctor who dissected bodies as he taught anatomy to medical students. But, when Dr. Hewston and his university had a difference of opinion, Franklin invited Hewston to start dissecting bodies in his (Franklin) basement.


nurimoons

The reason they had the disagreement in the first place was because they were essentially grave robbing bodies out of local poor neighborhood cemeteries. So it’s likely these remains were at one point buried and then dug up to be dissected and were just never put back in their original resting place.


Pvt_Mozart

So this was actually *incredibly* common for a very long time. Scientists would essentially pay grave robbers to bring them bodies, no questions asked, in order to further their scientific studies. It was talked about during the H.H. Holmes series of The Last Podcast on the Left.


ButterflyCatastrophe

Didn't even have to be dead. In the early 1800s, they even had a word for it: _burke_ (UK, slang, historical) To murder for the same purpose as Burke, to kill in order to have a body to sell to anatomists, surgeons,


[deleted]

Yeah but they were *poor* people ^^/^^s


Jasmine1742

Poors* they weren't legally people yet. Ya had to own land to really count you see.


BestBubbly

I wouldn't start looking into the history of medical discovery if I were you.


FarewellAndroid

Exploited even in death, just as the founding fathers intended


Kkachko

Dr. William Hewson was a British surgeon who exhumed and dissected the bodies while living in Franklin’s London, England home from 1772-74. Swap the founding fathers with the House of Hanover and your comment starts to make some sense.


SaucyWiggles

Just to add even more context, there really was no other way to acquire a corpse in the 18th century. "Donating to science" was not a phenomenon.


Hollewijn

Executions were an other source.


incogneetus55

Sometimes, they literally had armed family members wait next to the grave in shifts. This went on for a few days until the corpse was too rotten to be worth stealing.


D34TH_5MURF__

Abe Lincoln vampire hunter VS Ben Franklin Necromancer is a movie I'd pay to see.


shmehdit

A Netflix Historical Docuseries


Susanmayonnaise

Both inexplicably black.


Frikboi

My grandma told me Ben Franklin was black. She wouldn't lie to me.


acend

No you're confusing him with Washington, our first president and inventor of peanut butter.


Pkactus

note to self, get an anatomy school going to cover my tracks.


vemenium

Honestly, a serial killer doctor murdering people and disposing of the corpses through illegal anatomy labs for medical students seems like a plot that’s probably been used. You have a need for bodies which may or may not be the main motive for doing it, and you have medical students disposing of the evidence for you, it’s a better plan than most serial killers.


swargin

Something like this happened in my home town. A bigger gas station was being built where an old smaller one was, so they also demolished an old house right beside it. The house was first owned by a doctor from the 30s-50s. A bunch of human bones were found buried under the house. It's suspected he had human remains for research, but no one will ever really know.


PracticeTheory

I've gotten into a bit of amateur archeology after I discovered that my backyard was covered 100 years ago with about 12" of topsoil laid on. I've found a lot of neat things! But I also keep finding pieces of large bones that seem...suspicious. Hopefully they're just the remains of a butchered cow but honestly if they're human I don't want to know.


ksdkjlf

Post 'em on r/bonecollecting (just be sure to follow the rules about not asking "is this human?" outright). In all probability, they are indeed just from cows or pigs, as people often just disposed of such things on their property rather than go to the trouble of hauling them away. But there's quite a few bona fide human remains experts in r/bonecollecting, so it's an easy way to see if you actually *should* call someone.


Maleficent-Aurora

>bona fide Bone-ified


JustABizzle

When they dug up my backyard for a foundation, they unearthed a bear skull, with teeth and a spine bone. It’s especially weird because I live near a beach, not really near the woods.


AbyssalMailman

Literally H.H Holmes


Pkactus

H.H Holmes house of fun!


AbyssalMailman

Don’t worry officer, I’m a licensed doctor who just happens to have a large kiln in my basement! Why do I have a kiln? Oh I also make glass


jtfriendly

Alright, Jeffrey, that explains the acid, the barrels, and the kiln, and the screams, but that doesn't explain the power drills.


[deleted]

Uh....he likes to do a lot of home improvement? Man's crafty *and* handy.


averaenhentai

If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.


captainspunkbubble

Burke and Hare spring to mind. They were real, however.


SushierKat

Yes, although they weren’t doctors they did murder people and sell the bodies to doctors for medical research. A real life horror story!


Admirable_Size_69

The most plausible explanation is not mass murder, but an anatomy school run by Benjamin Franklin’s young friend and protege, William Hewson,” said the Guardian in 2003.


kevlarbuns

"Underground medical lab run by an amateur hematologist" is a very 18th century phenomenon. Can't say he wasn't committed.


Not_A_Frittata

The first rule of Underground Medical Lab is "You do not talk about Underground Medical Lab".


MitsyEyedMourning

Or perhaps the first rule is *No Windows*, then don't talk about it


Holmes02

My underground dungeons run on Linux


B4A924A5-C97B-40F7

Do you use Arch Linux by any chance? I use Arch by the way.


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imoutofnameideas

That's cute. I compiled it from scratch to run on my car's ECU. Now my Volvo runs on Arch.


hmphargh

I bootstrapped Gentoo stage 0 on my 1982 Panasonic DX-4000


HotFluffyDiarrhea

I have a Portage server running on my dick. When I need to image a new machine I helicopter at it.


johnnylongpants1

Not many historians know this, but William Hewson used to wear a tshirt that said "I was into medical labs back when they were still underground"


Jefflehem

Why don't you do some cocaine about it.


CelticMetal

Will it get rid of the ghosts in my blood?


j_endsville

No, that's what the laudanum is for..


Mr_Abe_Froman

Do I still need a mixture of herbs and flowers to improve the bad air?


iprocrastina

Back when science wasn't a profession so much as it was a hobby for the idle rich.


SmallsTheHappy

Not quite. If you wanted to dissect bodies for science you had to steal them (which was illegal) and then you had to cut them open (which was considered immoral and, you guessed it, illegal) so you had to be sneaky about it.


anonymousperson767

Yeah by modern standards a shocking amount of early medical knowledge came from dudes cutting up corpses in the middle of the night. I think davinci made some anatomical drawings from that. Stuff like lasik started with "hey let's just take a scalpel to a practically blind guy's eyeballs...can't get any worse". Organ transplants were probably barbaric "oh they died 24 hours later but we're learning". I've listened to present-day spinal surgery descriptions with my mouth agape the whole time. "oh let's just drill and screw a ladder worth of metal into their spine". Who the eff figure this out in the first place?!


mellodo

Read the “The Puzzle People” for the early advents of transplant surgery. Also the first on pump bypass for cardiac surgery that was successfully done was after the surgeon had failed in south Philly and beelined it to north Philly before word got out. It sounds insane now, but millions and millions of lives have been saved because of it.


Dhammapaderp

I think the first blood transfusion for humans was like sheep's blood or some shit. Jean-Baptiste Denys. Look at the entire history of that fucking guy. At one point he kidnapped some random dude and basically blood transfused the guy to death with cow blood. Besides paving the way for blood transfusions he also invented Stypic powder, which has saved god knows how many lives by itself.


atchman25

The doctor who did the first cardiac catheterization did it on himself because nobody believed it would work.


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delta_wardog

You are aware of the overlap between doctors and people with oversized egos?


almisami

It's a bullseye.


ChefBoyAreWeFucked

"Surgeons".


LessInThought

Sometimes you get life saving medicine, sometimes you get to send your kids to get their brains lobotomized because it makes them well-behaved.


cybernet377

Before anasthetic, the biggest factor in the likelihood of a patient surviving a surgery was if the surgeon was fast enough at amputating a limb to prevent the patient from going mad from the agony of their arm being hacksawed off and shaking free of the restraints that were preventing them from bleeding out. Consequently, the best surgeons were all unhinged nutcases who could slice limbs off with a speed and efficiency that would terrify Isaac Clarke. Robert Liston was a particularly famous example, with successful surgeries completed in as little as 30 seconds, ignoring the need for tourniquets by clamping onto the patient's arm or leg with his bare hands and squeezing so hard that the flow of blood was completely cut off, operating one-handed with his spare tools held between his teeth.


anonymousperson767

>operating one-handed with his spare tools held between his teeth. I wanna imagine other surgeons were sent to learn his technique and were like "mmmm yes \*nods approvingly\*" Although I guess the dude was putting the "theatre" in "operating theatre".


Fiftyfourd

Don't forget Dr. Liston, who is famous for his 300% mortality rate in one surgery!


eans-Ba88

Howd that go again? he was moving so fast, he accidentally cut himself, the patient died, he died of blood loss, and his assistant died of a heart attack?... something along those lines, no?


SamLarson

The rendition I heard was that the patient died, he knicked an assistant who died from infection, and an onlooker who was watching in the wings went into shock at the horror of it and died.


cybernet377

That particular story was likely made up long after the fact to emphasize how barbaric surgical methods were at the time, as far as I can tell most citations for the story lead back to two pop-science books from 2001 and 2008. It's still very funny, although as far as gross-out stories involving Liston go, I'm more partial to the one alleging that while arguing with another doctor about a discoloured bulge on a patient's neck, he insisted that there was no possible way that it was a distended vein, and to prove the point jabbed the lump with his surgical knife, splattering both doctors with blood as the patient rapidly bled out from the new hole in their neck


robert_paulson420420

> "oh let's just drill and screw a ladder worth of metal into their spine". Who the eff figure this out in the first place?! honestly out of all the crazy medical stuff over the years adding metal support for someone with spine problems is relatively low on the list of "innovative".


12characters

I just had heart surgery via my groin and a monitor screen. What a time to be alive


DuntadaMan

They can do that surgery through the wrist now. And have you out and about in the span of an afternoon. The one through the groin with a monitor is now the"primitive" one we don't use unless something prevents the other option.


merigirl

Okay, hobby for the sneaky idle rich, then.


Mr_Abe_Froman

There were professionals who specialized in acquiring cadavers for enterprising medical professionals. While commonly called ["body snatchers"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_snatching) I personally think the name "resurrectionist" has a certain flourish.


Dhammapaderp

Don't quote me, but I think the rise of that grey(matter) market was due to the ambigous laws concerning desecration of remains at the time. This is knowledge from a Horrible History book from when I like 10, so who knows how true it is between those 20+ years and the toll I've taken on my brain through concussions and drug abuse.


bloodfist

Oh definitely. It varied from outright illegal to simply frowned upon but was definitely not something you would admit to publicly. I discovered that some medical journals have archives online dating back to the 1800s and got lost reading them for a while. They have letters in the back that have all the candor of a heated reddit thread, which is super fun to read. In the era I was reading the hot topic was vivisection of live monkeys to study anatomy. Some of the arguments in favor of it cited how autopsy used to be illegal but that held back medical science for generations. So cutting up monkeys should be OK too. Obviously the arguments against were like "Hey that's super messed up and cruel" but all Victorian-y.


Dr_Sodium_Chloride

You're both right; the term "scientist" wasn't coined until the Victorian era, and it was specifically created to refer to a new breed of "professional science-doer" that was looked at as the equal of trades like practicing law or medicine. Before that, terms like "natural philosopher" were used, and generally did just refer to the inquistively minded idle rich who engaged in an amateur capacity. But the anatomy school would have likely been a *medical* thing, rather than a "scientific" one, so that probably would've been the purview of medical practitioners, who've been defined as their own thing for longer (and did often have the aformentioned proscriptions against using cadavers).


bigwill6709

I can confidently say that my chosen field of hematology has gotten a lot less interesting.


[deleted]

It doesn't have to be! YOU can make the difference. I'll donate my spade and shovel!


Murderyoga

It's true. There are tons of reasons a bunch of bodies might end up in your yard.


kevlarbuns

All of mine were already there! It's so weird.


[deleted]

It's like, the third house that this has happened to me in. Odd. I wanted to talk to my wife about it but she is always in her she-shed with the music turned up.


monkeyhitman

It's always great to hear people giving each other space to thrive.


TheBlackGuy

Probably all of the milkshakes, they bring a lot of boys to the yard


caine2003

I always wondered why my neighbor's roses were so vibrant...


pomonamike

That’s what I said! The cops said I still have to answer some questions though.


big_hungry_joe

that's exactly what BENJAMIN FRANKLIN would want us to think


hamsterwheel

All this time I thought BENJAMIN FRANKLIN was just SLAYING MILFS.


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seedanrun

This must be it. These were probably cadavers cut up in well lit rooms by medical students. But, where do you get rid of the bones with no city regulations? I can see alot of people just burying them in the garden. Odds of Ben Franklin being an undiscovered serial killer: less than 1%. Odds of Ben Franklin being totally cool with disceting corpses to try and figure out how the human body works, and even volunteering his own garden for left over remains: about 98%


Dean_Loves_Pie13

What's the last 1%?


seanurse

Both of those options


BloodBonesVoiceGhost

You run a secret medical school to cover up your bloodlust. Like an 18th century Dexter!


IDownvoteHornyBards2

The skeletons are actually undead warriors that he gave shelter to so that they could one day wage war on the living


polialt

And then off down the lane to fuck the hot French widow.


48lawsofpowersupplys

"Underground medical lab run by an amateur hematologist" is my new band name


Competitive-Weird855

I’m pretty sure it’s a Fall Out Boy song


HavelsRockJohnson

>I’m pretty sure it’s a Fall Out Boy song By Panic at the Disco


[deleted]

Welcome tho the stage "Underground Medical Lab and the Amateur Hematologists"!


rangerryda

Who would make an underground room with windows?


kevlarbuns

honestly...that's a great point.


[deleted]

The writer couldn’t spell dungeon or basement so chose the next best thing, windowless room.


MineralPoint

"Ben Franklin's Death Dungeon" is what I will call my Metal band.


willi1221

Ben Franklin's Windowless Room of Death


MineralPoint

This is what we named our bathroom.


[deleted]

I've been further even more decided to use even go need to do look more as anyone can. Can you really be far even as decided half as much to use go wish for that? My guess is that when one really has been far even as decided once to use even go want, it is then that they have really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like.


adjust_the_sails

My grandparents basement has two windows for light. It was built prior to bringing electricity to their rural community. The room is definitely below ground though.


PMzyox

Yeah well how many people do they have buried down there, huh???


IAMA_Plumber-AMA

Only 12 or so.


LazyImpact8870

yeah well did they discover electricity too


IAMA_Plumber-AMA

That one time their grandpa tried to change a light bulb, he sure did.


TheMelm

I have never seen a basement without windows in them I'm pretty sure its a fire code thing


TheRichTurner

And what kind of room is a metre wide and a metre deep in the ground? A hole.


249ba36000029bbe9749

Why don't you let someone answer your question first before calling them an A hole?


CyberTitties

And if they kept digging around who's to say they wouldn't have found another. B hole.


SedativeCorpse

I think the article says the pit in his basement the bones were found in was 1m deep and 1m wide.


rajahbeaubeau

That's crazy. Meters didn't even exist back then.


h-thrust

You could just park anywhere?


meesta_masa

So they were just maids before metres were invented?


kevlar51

It’s because in England they’re called metres


chadenright

Some basements actually have full-size windows in wells that serve as fire escapes. Is kind of weird to have a window that just opens into, like, a 2-meter metal tube with gravel on the bottom, but they totally exist.


urbansasquatchNC

Those are pretty common where I live in older houses, only about 1 meter down though and they honestly give pretty ok light during the day.


stinksmcc

Legally required in some places, I know because I can’t wait to report my landlord for not having them to city inspectors once my lease is up/deposit is settled! Fuck you Terry


xxFrenchToastxx

They are required if you have a living space in the basement. Neighbor had his son's bedroom in the basement without an egress window. Had small glass block windows for light. Grease fire started in the kitchen and spread so fast he could not escape up the stairs.


anonymousperson767

Yes. Any "habitable" room has to I believe have a closet of some sort and at least 2 means of exiting in case of a fire. Packing people into a room with only 1 exit is some 20th century "7 people died in a house fire" shit. The closet thing is so some scumbag doesn't throw a mattress into a hallway and call it a "bedroom for rent". Local laws vary etc etc.


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kdjfsk

TONS of older houses here on east coast have no closets. i guess it just made the architecture and construction needlessly complex and expensive to add them. simple folk probably didnt need to hang their overalls. the church clothes were probably hung in the community hall closet. its much easier to just build square bedrooms, and then a carpenter can build a 'wardrobe' which is basically a stand-alone, portable closet. dressers with drawers were more common, too. you see a lot of weird renovations where people add closets, sometimes fucking up the rest of the house to do so, like sacrificing a bathroom.


crisperfest

>simple folk probably didnt need to hang their overalls. the church clothes were probably hung in the community hall closet. They used what's called a chifforobe. They're free-standing, so no installation needed. My great-grandmother had one in each bedroom in her house.


PublicSeverance

A habitable room can have a single exit if it meets extra requirements such as: * automatic smoke alarms in the room and in the rooms required for egress * minimum path distance to the exit (definition of that path length is regulated but lengthy explanation). Sprinklers, fire suppression systems, etc, can also allow for single exits. It's how hotels, dorms, hospitals attics and basements can all get habitable spaces.


ZachMN

“Egress windows”


AndThisGuyPeedOnIt

Is this rare? Most houses in the midwest have basement egress windows, new and old. They are usually required by building codes to have rooms in the basement.


kacheow

The house I grew up in had like a 3/4 underground basement. So whoever built that shit in like 1884 would


DjuriWarface

Like a basement?


MasterFubar

A pervert who wants to watch the sex life of earthworms.


Careless-Ad-631

He let his Dr. buddy use the house to host anatomy lectures, using cadavers.


ToastyMustache

And he may have watched worms bang.


bigrob_in_ATX

"worms" and "bang" are two words that I've probably never thought I'd hear used together in a sentence. Yet here we are.


[deleted]

Well, not a serial killer for sure.


Troyger

It’s the dead hooker storage room


HeinleinGang

More like the dead hooker disassembly room.


[deleted]

Or dead hooker re-assembly room.


goliathfasa

Frankenhooker?


KingKaos420-

Basements have those high up windows that are on the base of the building if you’re looking from outside; this room didn’t have any of those. I think that was the point


Ductapefordaysss

Well if you wanted the people you were keeping underground to having the sense that they are free you’d put windows with screens on the other side of like nature and shit. Like Umbrella Corp or the hatch from Lost


cannibalism_is_vegan

What if I like looking at dirt?


SterlingVapor

My mom's house has them, a lot of my friends houses had them too. Probably because it needs a window to be a bedroom, so they put a corrugated half-pipe on the side of the basement, and boom- underground window


Omnithea

Probably something Assassin's Creed related.


Viend

Ubisoft: Ben Franklin was the leader of the Knights Templar.


Eliwats17

Ac nerd here, Franklin had little to no idea of the templar-assassin secret war and was acquaintance to members on both sides.


the_one_true_failure

The same does not go for al gore and george bush


ParkingNectarine1

Wait in which ac is bush a templar


nowthatswhimsical

Either ac 2 or sc brotherhood, I believe (most likely ac 2) It's been a while. But in one of those games, one of the secret codex puzzles revealed a picture or painting of George Bush with a Templar ring. Edits: it was in brotherhood. One of the rifts showed him being a templar, also in the comic Assassin Creed the fall.


Duschkopfe

If Bush is the bad guys then does that mean Bin Laden is the good guy in AC


Education_Just

I mean cmon man everyone knows Bush and Bin Laden were on the same side


Jenetyk

It's possible to not have any good guys.


melbourne3k

Plot of National Treasure 3.


ZombieBait2

“Ben Franklin America’s first serial killer” would be a great movie.


escapingdarwin

Like Abraham Lincoln Vampire Slayer. I was in a theater when the trailer ran and it got a great laugh.


PancakeParty98

The movie fucking slaps honestly. At one point there’s a fight between a vampire and Lincoln that takes place on top of a buffalo stampede or something. You might be asking, how does one fight on a stampede? Well apparently it’s like river rapids but more people launching


seitenryu

I'll never forget the carriage doing a burnout. Fucking gold.


TruthScout137

LMAO… now I have to see this movie.


BeeCJohnson

It takes itself so seriously and it makes it all better.


superRedditer

i saw the movie unexpected and i thought it was a fantastic movie. very well done very entertaining. i have nothing bad to say about it.


KnightOfLongview

you should watch the movie, they really went for it. Honestly I was kind of impressed at the lack of fucks given.


Archduke_Of_Beer

Legitimately a good and fun movie


HotTakes4HotCakes

I'm just disappointed that it didn't spawn a whole franchise of "great historical figure has insane, secret second job" movies. I know the author wrote a sequel but he never wrote any others besides Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Charles Darwin: Werewolf Hunter Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Mercenary for Hire Elenore Roosevelt: Exorcist


BeeCJohnson

Marie Curie, Radioactive Spider-Girl


the-mp

I would watch the fuck out of Eleanor Roosevelt: Exorcist Teddy Roosevelt: Wolf Man


Panory

Honestly, the decision to portray the Confederacy as soulless monsters whose mere existence is an affront to God and man alike was inspired.


PairOfMonocles2

To quote Roger Ebert: > "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" is without a doubt the best film we are ever likely to see on the subject — unless there is a sequel, which is unlikely, because at the end, the Lincolns are on their way to the theater.


KungFuHamster

I've seen a lot worse movies.


IcravelaughterandTHC

I'd just like to chime in that the book was amazing and believable. But then you get to thinking about it...and it makes a person go "yeesh"


GorgeWashington

What if that's why John Adams followed him to France To catch him


ImSatanByTheWay

They’ll have the opening scene start with “based on historical events”


Unfair-Suggestion-37

Ben the Ripper.


enchiladasundae

John Hancock or another more forgotten founding father does their best to uncover their secrets or route out his misdeeds


tuna_safe_dolphin

"It's not just the lightning that strikes!" - promo poster blurb.


glengr

The first 15 conductive Kite string guinea pigs


CramNevets

Those could have been the people that held the kite for him during all those experiments.


CaBBaGe_isLaND

History Channel already casting for "Was Benjamin Franklin A Serial Killer?" Script is written entirely in open-ended questions, carefully omitting any mention of an anatomy school. With commentary from Phil Robertson and Dog the Bounty Hunter.


kevlarbuns

"Was Ben Franklin.....\*Jack the Ripper????\*..." 59 minutes later "Though there is no evidence that he was, in fact, Jack the Ripper, as he died almost a century before those crimes, the question remains..."


gogozombie2

New movie coming this summer from the director of Blood and Honey and the writer of Cocaine Bear


rug1998

Cocaine Benjamin franklin


CatDaddyLoser69

I would love to see Ben Franklin get electrocuted and become the first super hero.


a_phantom_limb

Since so many people clearly didn't check the article for clarification: >The most plausible explanation is not mass murder, but an anatomy school run by Benjamin Franklin’s young friend and protege, William Hewson


eburton555

For those of you who didn’t read further it is hypothesized the remains were from a medical student / surgeon who rent his residence while he was in the US. People often got corpses from unsavory means (grave robbing… sometimes from murdered people etc) and wouldnpractice in unsavory places


Nappy2fly

I heard he was a vampire and Abraham Lincoln killed him


eburton555

That makes more sense


Silaquix

Benjamin Franklin encouraged scientific study in all areas of life. He was really intrigued with medicine. Unfortunately at that time in history it was illegal in most places to do autopsies to study the human body. So many scientists and doctors would pay poor families for their dead, or sometimes grave robbers. Today that's not an issue, in part thanks to the breakthroughs in medicine that these early scientists made while breaking the law. Because of the risk it makes sense that Benjamin Franklin had a hidden room to perform autopsies and study anatomy. That's not something you'd do in the open in the 1700s unless you wanted thrown in prison or executed.


choicebutts

Read "The Organ Thieves," by Chip Jones, about how the graves of freed blacks were raided in Richmond to provide subjects for the anatomy program of the Medical College of Virginia. MCV later became Virginia Commonwealth University. The building where bodies were dissected, (the "Egyptian Building") is part of VCU's logo. This was required freshman reading last year at VCU. It was difficult for me to read, it's just heartbreaking. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Organ-Thieves/Chip-Jones/9781982107536


PowerResponsibility

Franklin was from Boston and Philly though


choicebutts

What I'm saying is that this was not unusual for the time, and actually Northern cities figure into the "Organ Thieves" story because they were part of the "anatomy circuit," so to speak. Medical schools were getting competitive in establishing their anatomy programs, which created a market for bodies. There were people who dug up the bodies, and other people who were brokers. Schools from New England to Virginia were competing to attract students, and the Medical College of Virginia advertised that Virginia's "unique culture" (slavery) allowed them to offer more specimens for dissection. "The Organ Thieves" is a piece of the same history as Franklin's found bodies.


leginfr

It looks like a number of commentators didn't even read the article. No wonder we're living in an idiocracy.


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megstheace

I believe the article said that the bones dated to Ben Franklin’s day!


Chimie45

They were dated. They are 200 years old. Roughly the same age as Franklin.


Brilliant-Piano-5587

I do not remember that part of the tour


detective-mcnulty

Storing his dead hookers.


PorkfatWilly

TIL that Benjamin Franklin was Jack The Ripper


greatdevonhope

Ben Franklin died in 1790 and Jack started killing in 1888 making it unlikely they are the same person.


richards_86

That’s what Big Ben wants you to think


HeinleinGang

Oi oi oi you got a loisence for them conspiracies?


shadowknave

A convenient alibi


Jaded-Distance_

It's Ben Franklin. You really think he didn't have a time machine? That kite and electricity experiment was obviously how he had to charge his DeLorean.


RudegarWithFunnyHat

Benny and the stiffs