About a Boy Who Slept Near Corpses
Reading time: 6 minutes
It seems obvious that in a time when deaths were very much in the public eye, children were more accustomed to the sight of a corpse. Nowadays, children hardly ever see a dead body. The activities of Gerrit Mulder at the beginning of the 19th century illustrate this vision. Later on, Mulder (1802-1880) studied medicine and became a chemistry professor at Utrecht University.
Bloodletting
Gerrit Mulder’s father was a surgeon who had specialized in bloodletting, mending fractures and performing amputations. This affected Gerrit’s early years: “Human bones were among my first toys.” In the 19th century, many boys played with human bones, but Gerrit was an exceptional boy. Already at the age of seven he had studied textbooks about the structure of the human skeleton and about dissections.
Then he got also interested in bloodletting. For centuries this had been a common way to cure all kinds of diseases. Bloodletting could also be done with leeches: every druggist had a pot with leeches standing on the counter. Another method was opening a blood vessel to drain blood. As an 8-year-old boy Gerrit performed his first bloodletting standing on a stove under the supervision of his father. The patient was a woman living nearby, who received a small fee by way of compensation. Having dissected dead birds, rabbits and dogs, Gerrit now wanted to examine human bodies. But his father refused to provide him with corpses.
Stealing and Dissecting Corpses
That is the reason why, as a ten-year-old, Gerrit decided to steal bodies. Outside the city walls of Utrecht, right on the spot where Utrecht Central Station is situated now, there was a cemetery for the poor. He went there every afternoon, and when he was in luck he saw that someone had just been buried. Gerrit hired their maid’s husband to take the dead body (wrapped in a blanket) back home in a wheelbarrow. Apparently it so happened that the wheelbarrow hit a door in the parental house. His father heard the noise and asked what had happened. Gerrit then explained everything to his father: “I was not reprimanded, but received the assurance that my father would take care of it in the future.”
“My father kept his promise and provided me with corpses, and I slept in the same room with the bodies; and I dissected them all day long. I slept near them because they were so valuable to me, and I did not know what would happened to them in any other room. The more I dissected them, the more compassion I felt when I saw those dead bodies.”
Looking back, Mulder was ashamed of having done all this, because the relatives of the deceased would have been very sad if had they heard of this body snatching. That is, if they felt a certain piety about the ‘empty house’ of their loved ones. As for Mulder himself, he could not care less about what would happen with his body after his death.
At the time, especially in Britain, body snatching occurred on a fairly large scale. The demand for them in the medical sciences was so great that sometimes murders would be committed in order to supply dead bodies. In the Netherlands, too, body snatching took place, not only by Gerrit and his father. It is also mentioned in a book written by C. Terne in 1786. He campaigned against burials in churches and churchyards. At the time body snatching was mentioned as a grave risk if cemeteries were created outside the city: stealing corpses was made too attractive in that way. But Terne did not think this was a very important problem. According to him, body snatching was in the interest of the medical sciences. And because he was a amateur dissector himself, he did not want to discuss the issue any further.
Why Would You Shiver for Corpses?
William’s grandmother had died and lay in state at home. Thus begins a children’s book written in 1833. William’s mother had to leave for a short while, so he was alone with his grandmother’s corpse. He felt uncomfortable and was afraid of the pale body in the coffin. As the author of the book says – he did not know this poem by the Dutch poet Van Alphen:
Children, do not be afraid,
When you see dead people.
Why would you shiver for corpses?
But William felt still more uncomfortable when he heard a steady ticking. And the creaking of a door made him even more afraid. He fled the house and ran straight into his mother’s arms. She wanted to explain the ticking and she led him back into the room where grandma’s body lay in state. “Look here, William.” his mother said. “Here we see the drops leaking from the coffin and falling on the stone floor, listen: tap, tap, that’s liquid coming from grandmother’s body. And that is no wonder either because this sweet person was very fat when she died. That is what you were so afraid of.”
From the poem by Van Alphen we may well conclude that children were not fond of the sight of a corpse, to say the least. Although he was only a character in a book, the way William reacted to a corpse seems to have been a more common reaction than Gerrit’s.
Assassination of Napoleon?
Gerrit Mulder was clearly a precocious child, not only because he dissected corpses at an early age, but also because he wanted people turned corpses. His target was none other than Napoleon himself. In the autumn of 1811, the great dictator intended to visit Utrecht. Apparently the route had been announced in advance, because Mulder knew that Napoleon was to ride past his parental home.
He had heard many nasty stories about Napoleon, including stories about the many Dutch soldiers who had had to join Napoleon’s armies. Most of them had never returned. Not surprisingly, Napoleon was blamed for all the misery in the Netherlands. That is why Gerrit planned to kill him. But the plan was never executed because he did not have enough money to buy a gun. Mulder writes: “When I saw Napoleon during his stay at Utrecht I was very emotional; but my emotions were caused by the fact that I did not have a pistol to shoot him.”
Sources: Spall, T. van. Geschenk voor kinderen (Den Haag 1837 2e dr.); Levensschets van G.J Mulder (Utrecht 1883 2e dr.); C. Terne, Schadelykheid der begrafenissen binnen de steden (1786); Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London 2001, orig. 1988).
Translated by Ite Wierenga
