In the story Wabash County preserved about John Hubbard’s burial, the doctors arrived in two parties. The local men reached the grave first, opened it, and discovered they had forgotten the tools needed to get into the coffin. Someone was sent back to town. While they waited, a rival group of physicians came up the lane, and shots broke out in the darkness. The Wabash men secured the body and carried it away by wagon.
Hubbard had been hanged on the courthouse square on December 13, 1855, after his conviction for murdering Aaron French. Seven members of the French household had been found beneath the floor of their cabin; the investigation began with the discovery of another murdered boarder, Edward Boyle, in the canal. The newspaper account of the execution followed Hubbard’s body back into the jail. Later retellings took it into a grave, then into the hands of Dr. James Ford.
The fight at the cemetery acquired its details through recollection. The demand behind the story was familiar throughout nineteenth-century medicine. A physician needed to understand the arrangement of muscles, nerves, blood vessels, and organs, and learning from a human body offered something a lecture or an illustration could only partly convey. Every new class of medical students required material. A recently buried person could become valuable to people who had never known them alive.
The men supplying that demand were often called resurrectionists. Some were medical students getting their own dissection subjects; others supplied bodies for payment. Their work depended on knowing who had died, where a burial had taken place, and how quickly a body could be removed. Cemetery employees could be particularly useful. The trade joined the people responsible for putting bodies into the ground with the people who wanted them brought back out.
Ford belonged to the professional world that could use those bodies. He had practiced in Wabash since 1841 and became the first president of the Wabash County Medical Society in 1854. The association pursued a medical library, shared consultations, and arrangements for treating people at the county’s Poor Farm and in the townships. Its members were the doctors neighbors called when someone fell ill, including when another physician needed help.
Ford had been a patient himself. He had been seriously ill with typhoid in 1853 and credited other doctors and his wife’s nursing with his recovery. The following autumn, after roughly twenty years in practice, he took his daughter to Chicago, placed her in a boarding school, and entered Rush Medical College for the winter. He concentrated on anatomy, surgery, chemistry, and recent discoveries. His diploma was dated February 21, 1855, less than ten months before Hubbard’s hanging.
At Rush, dissection was part of the education being sold. The college’s announcement for 1856–57 listed a five-dollar dissection ticket among its fees. That was the price of access to instruction, rather than a stated purchase price for a corpse, but the practical work required bodies to be available. A prepared skeleton could remain useful afterward, accompanying lectures or serving students in an office or classroom for years.
Chicago supplied a particularly revealing example in 1857. Hired to investigate thefts from the city cemetery, Allan Pinkerton put men on watch. On November 6, they followed a buggy carrying two corpses and arrested Martin Quinlan, the city sexton. Eli Yorke was arrested the following evening. Pinkerton’s report recorded that Dr. Daniel Brainard became surety for Yorke’s seven-hundred-dollar bail. Brainard was the Rush professor Ford had known during his Chicago winter, when a smallpox outbreak brought them into contact over the care of sick lodgers.
The medical response could be remarkably impatient with public objections. A Chicago correspondent writing in a medical journal that December mocked the outrage over the stolen bodies and defended the necessity of practical anatomy. From inside the profession, access to dissection material could appear so essential that the people protesting a disturbed grave became the unreasonable parties. The people who had buried a relative had reasons of their own for wanting the coffin left alone.
In Wabash, the accounts of Hubbard’s remains kept returning to Ford. Clarkson Weesner’s 1914 county history said Hubbard had been decently buried and was reportedly disinterred in the interest of science. It also described a plaster cast of his head and shoulders that Ford had long preserved. A later family letter recalled Ford and his nephew preparing a skeleton identified as Hubbard’s. Together, those accounts gave the physician’s involvement a history beyond the tale of gunfire at the grave.
Hubbard’s notoriety helped keep that association alive. A body connected with an infamous hanging came with a story that could be repeated whenever somebody asked about the specimen. Later accounts placed a skeleton in medical premises, family storage, and schools. A teacher could inherit the bones and the name together, then pass both to the next keeper. The account of where the skeleton had been used could survive even as the circumstances of its acquisition became harder to recover.
Elsewhere in Indiana, the supply of bodies remained a public problem. In 1879, the state enacted an anatomy law permitting the use of certain bodies left unclaimed for twenty-four hours after death in public institutions, including prisons, county asylums, infirmaries, and public hospitals. The arrangement gave medical teaching a lawful supply while placing a particular burden on people who died in public custody or care. Whether somebody came to claim the dead now helped determine what could happen to their remains.
The trade in stolen corpses continued. In the autumn of 1902, Indianapolis families received anonymous warnings about the graves of recently buried relatives. On investigation, coffins were found empty, and missing remains were traced to the basement of the Central College of Physicians and Surgeons. Other families began guarding fresh graves. The arrests of Rufus Cantrell and his associates exposed a business supplying medical institutions with bodies taken from cemeteries around the city.
Cantrell implicated physician Joseph Alexander as a buyer and participant in the operation. The scandal spread into neighboring Hamilton County, where a jury convicted farmer Hampton West of robbing a grave. In 1903, the General Assembly created the State Anatomical Board to oversee the distribution of cadavers to medical schools. Nearly half a century after Hubbard’s execution, Indiana was still trying to bring the medical demand for the dead under effective public control.
The skeleton associated with Hubbard eventually entered another kind of institution. A 2021 report described human remains kept in two cardboard boxes in the basement of the Wabash County Historical Museum. The museum acknowledged the association with Hubbard while explaining that it could not confirm the identification. The bones were kept off display. A plaster likeness and other objects connected with the murder case remained part of the public account.
Another published account gives the teaching skeleton a different beginning: a Civil War sailor called Oscar, said to have donated his body to Ford in the late 1860s. In that account, the bones passed through Ford’s care, storage, and a school before reaching the museum. Donation papers and a full name would give that man a history of his own. The cast Ford reportedly kept and the skeleton later inherited by a school could also have come from different people.
Those possibilities bring the old trade into the present through ordinary objects: a specimen, a label, a box. The people who received them may have known a classroom history more clearly than a personal one. Establishing the bones’ identity would mean following those transfers alongside a careful examination of the remains. It would also mean recovering, as far as possible, the life and wishes of the person whose body had been useful to so many others.
Bones in the Box follows the French family murders, Hubbard’s execution, Dr. James Ford’s reported custody of his remains, and the competing histories attached to the skeleton that reached the museum. Read Bones in the Box on Amazon.