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Marietta, or, The Two Students: A Tale of the Dissecting Room and "Body Snatchers"
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface.
We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface.
We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
48 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 1846
15 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 28, 2020
When I stumbled upon this obscure 19th century short story about body snatchers, I hoped it would be gothic horror reminiscent of the works of Poe. The opening chapter certainly gives the impression that it is, with a melancholy young medical student lamenting the loss of the beautiful woman on his dissecting table. In fact, he considers her so beautiful that he is willing to pay the resurrectionists who sold her corpse to the school to rebury her as he can't bring himself to cut her open. However, as the story continued it shifted tone drastically and ultimately had a fairy tale ending that relied so much on coincidence it was ridiculously unbelievable.
February 13, 2026
Because a corpse is beautiful, is it worth preserving? What about the corpses of the sick and starving wretches, purchased without a second thought to be dissected?
This book was sent to me by a friend. We were doing some research on the practices of the resurrectionists as well as the social attitudes of the time for a story that was put on hold. The adventure is straightforward, but it is the social representations that I found fascinating, surprisingly. It is an unambiguously moral story, in the sense that it imparts a moral lesson. This is in regard to the woman question; everyone who had a pen and paper wrote about it at the time. A dearth of respectable sources of income for impoverished and working women fast-tracked them to short and brutish lives of prostitution and hazardous labour. Worse so for the former, as medicine had not yet advanced to appropriately treat venereal disease, and women linked to the sex industry were shunned as vectors.
A contrast is made between Cecil, the main woman of our story, who has had two lovers and marries the second of the two, vs. the prostitute who has been morally and physically destroyed, the last ounce of value extracted from the body that is her only means of sustenance. Her corpse is considered useless and not even fit for dissection, as is that of a syphilitic man, a known debaucher of women who drives them to ruin. Cecil is an active and self-respecting woman who was seduced and jilted, but has the power of will place limits on the type of work she accepts. The moral of the story seems to be that women who’ve had sex outside of marriage should not be ruled out as potential wives, provided they are otherwise of good character, which is significant, as marriage was one of the few avenues through which a woman could acquire some measure of financial stability.
Of course, criminals are ugly, the outside reflecting their inner nature—remember this is the age of physiognomy—and women that have not been so degraded that they can’t be reformed are always young and beautiful. The value of the work is not so much in its narrative qualities but as a window to the 1840s. The gravediggers, the dissections, I found deeply unserious, but there are nuggets here and there that lead to reflection.
This book was sent to me by a friend. We were doing some research on the practices of the resurrectionists as well as the social attitudes of the time for a story that was put on hold. The adventure is straightforward, but it is the social representations that I found fascinating, surprisingly. It is an unambiguously moral story, in the sense that it imparts a moral lesson. This is in regard to the woman question; everyone who had a pen and paper wrote about it at the time. A dearth of respectable sources of income for impoverished and working women fast-tracked them to short and brutish lives of prostitution and hazardous labour. Worse so for the former, as medicine had not yet advanced to appropriately treat venereal disease, and women linked to the sex industry were shunned as vectors.
A contrast is made between Cecil, the main woman of our story, who has had two lovers and marries the second of the two, vs. the prostitute who has been morally and physically destroyed, the last ounce of value extracted from the body that is her only means of sustenance. Her corpse is considered useless and not even fit for dissection, as is that of a syphilitic man, a known debaucher of women who drives them to ruin. Cecil is an active and self-respecting woman who was seduced and jilted, but has the power of will place limits on the type of work she accepts. The moral of the story seems to be that women who’ve had sex outside of marriage should not be ruled out as potential wives, provided they are otherwise of good character, which is significant, as marriage was one of the few avenues through which a woman could acquire some measure of financial stability.
Of course, criminals are ugly, the outside reflecting their inner nature—remember this is the age of physiognomy—and women that have not been so degraded that they can’t be reformed are always young and beautiful. The value of the work is not so much in its narrative qualities but as a window to the 1840s. The gravediggers, the dissections, I found deeply unserious, but there are nuggets here and there that lead to reflection.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews