Skulls in the Stars

In my last post, I talked about the remarkable career of Etienne-Gaspard Robert aka “Robertson”, who became famous in debunking the supernatural by revealing how ghosts and phantoms could be faked.  Remarkably, even today there are still places in the world where superstitious fear can be deadly, as two recent stories, here and here, demonstrate.  It seems to be ingrained in human nature to be credulous, and science-minded people must be vigilant in explaining away the supernatural before it gets out of control. Robertson himself had many experiences to drive this point home before he started his phantasmagoria.

One story that Robertson heard that clearly left a great impression on him was told to him by his early mentor, Monsieur Villette, an optical instrument maker.  Villette’s father was a maker of large concave mirrors, and at one point the local villagers became convinced that this mirror was producing excessive rain that was ruining their crops!

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Government has always played, and hopefully will continue to play, a necessary role in scientific and medical research.  Many important discoveries have been made through the use of government funding and in government labs, and many of those would never have been made in the private sector due to lack of marketability.

However, government can also play a negative role in science, as is clear looking at any number of examples through history.  One that really stands out are the Acts of Parliament in England starting in the 1500s related to the use of cadavers for dissection; these acts, and the failure to revise them quickly, led to an epidemic of grave-robbing that lasted until the early 1800s!

Numerous and increasingly desperate attempts were made by people to protect their loved one’s bodies from unlawful removal; one of the most dramatic was the use of a “cemetery gun,” an automatic spring-tripped weapon that would shoot anyone who tampered with graves.  As I understand it, these guns might be stationed above the grave, at the entrance to the cemetery, or even inside the coffin itself.  Their tendency to accidentally shoot innocent people, however, eventually led to their being outlawed.

There is very little information such weapons online.  Recently, when I was searching for information, I came across a 1905 article in the John Hopkins Hospital Bulletin by G. Canby Robinson*, “The development of grave robbing in England.”  This article provides an overall history of how the practice started in England and how extreme things became before its eventual demise; some of the tidbits are so fascinating that I had to share them here.

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