USI Professor to speak at Southwestern Indiana Historical Society’s Monthly Lecture Series

Dr. Tamara Hunt, Professor of History, will give a lecture, “Resurrectionists: Body Snatching in Indiana?,” at Southwestern Indiana Historical Society’s monthly lecture series at 5:30 p.m. October 17 in the Welborn Foundation Community Room on the 15th Floor of the Fifth Third Bank Building in Evansville.

Ever since late medieval physicians began to practice dissection on dead bodies, they had a problem: where to get the bodies? Anatomy teachers paid “resurrectionists” to secretly dig up newly buried bodies. The prices paid for corpses was high, and in 1828, two men named Burke and Hare gained international fame for murdering people in Edinburgh, Scotland, to get bodies to sell. The British government acted with the Anatomy Act of 1832, which allowed anatomy schools to receive the bodies of those who died in poorhouses if they were unclaimed for 48 hours.

In America, similar laws were passed in a number of states in the nineteenth century, but Indiana’s anatomy law of 1879 was sparked by a notorious and shocking incident in which the body of a well-known individual was stolen and delivered to a Cincinnati medical school. The Indiana Anatomy act made it legal for hospitals and poor farms to give up unclaimed bodies, believing that this would safeguard the bodies of the well-to-do from body snatchers by substituting the poor, marginalized and forgotten.

“I don’t want to say more about this Indiana case, other than to note that people will immediately recognize the family name of this individual,” said Hunt.

Hunt received a doctorate degree in British history from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 1989. Since that time, she has taught at the University of Louisville, Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and USI, where she served as History Chair from 2003-12.

She teaches courses in British and European history, world history and historiography (the history of writing history). Hunt’s first book, Defining John Bull, was on English political caricature in the reign of George III (1760-1820), and she has co-edited a book called Women and the Colonial Gaze, which examines the ways in which ideologies of gender have been utilized as part of imperialism since at least the time of the ancient Romans. Her current research is a study two early eighteenth-century women and the world of London publishing.