The Resurrectionist by Samuel Warren — Read

My gentle reader--start not at learning that I have been, in my time, a resurrectionist! Let not this appalling word, this humiliating confession, conjure up in your fancy a throng of vampire-like images and associatiors, or earn your "Physician's" dismissal from your hearts and hearths. It is your own groundless fears, my fair trembler!--your own superstitious prejudices--that have driven me, and will drive many others of my brethern, to such dreadful doings as those hereafter detailed. Come, come--let us have one word of reason between us on the abstract question--and then for my tale. You expect us to cure you of disease, and yet deny us the only means of learning _how_! You would have us bring you the ore of skill and experience, yet forbid us to break the soil or sink a shaft! Is this fair, _fair_ reader? Is this reasonable?

What I am now going to describe was my first and last exploit in the way of body-stealing. It was a grotesque if not a ludicrous scene, and occurred during the period of my "walking the hospitals," as it is called, which occupied the two seasons immediately after my leaving Cambridge. A young and rather interesting female was admitted a patient at the hospital I attended; her case baffled all our skill, and her symptoms even defied diagnosis. _Now_, it seemed an enlargement of the heart--now, an ossification--then this, that, and the other; and at last it was plain we knew nothing at all about the matter--no, not even whether her disorder was organic or functional, primary or symptomatic--or whether it _was_ really the heart that was at fault. She received no benefit at all under the fluctuating schemes of treatment we pursued, and at length fell into dying circumstances. As soon as her friends were apprised of her situation, and had an inkling of our intention to open the body, they insisted on removing her immediately from the hospital, that she might "die at home."