Scattered through the 19th century history of Ontario are tales of bodies disappearing or being stolen, either before burial or from their graves soon after internment.
Wellington County was no exception. Those acts were not perpetrated by a cult or by some supernatural force. The majority could be traced to a medical doctor or a student, for dissection, in order to enhance their knowledge of the human body. On at least two occasions the youthful Dr. Abraham Groves, of Fergus, found himself caught in embarrassing circumstances when he managed to secure corpses on the sly.
Incidents of other doctors in the county gaining access to bodies can be found in the historical record. A science teacher at the Mount Forest high school was also caught with a body that he had used for an anatomy lesson for his senior students.
In defence of those doctors and students, it should be pointed out they had no legal access to bodies for their studies. Photography of dissected bodies was yet in a primitive state, and was, of course, black and white. Only by looking at the real thing could doctors gain an understanding of the human body and its organs.
The examples of purloined cadavers that reached the public record in the 19th century are certainly only a small minority of the bodies dissected by doctors and students. In most cases, local undertakers were discrete accomplices of the medical profession. Almost invariably, the bodies so used were those of indigents, or very poor people. That minimized the risk of discovery by outraged relatives, and reduced the possibility of legal action if the dissection became public knowledge.
A story of a body stolen for medical purposes was an emotional one for most Victorians. Most people were supportive of scientific research and the advancement of medical knowledge. Against that fact was the widespread religious horror at desecration of the human body, and an abhorrence that a loved one had been reduced to an object for a science experiment. And in the background was an underlying fear of ghosts and spirits who might seek their revenge on the living.
None of those stories of stolen bodies carries more pathos and ghoulishness than the case of Donald Cameron, an immigrant from Scotland. He was an impoverished labourer in Fergus during the 1860s, with a wife and young family. He died in 1868, and his family arranged for him to be buried in Belsyde Cemetery, in an area set aside for those without means to afford a full burial plot.
Cameron’s widow, by striving constantly, managed to raise the family. One son, Hugh, became a blacksmith, and the others in the family also advanced into modest prosperity. As she grew older, Mrs. Cameron’s health began to fail. Over time, relocating her husband to a proper grave, where she herself could rest eternally beside him, became her obsession. She began to drift into senility, speaking of little else than her own death and her desire to rest beside her husband.
Playing his role as the dutiful son, Hugh purchased a double plot at Belsyde for his parents. Hugh agreed with his siblings that their father be moved to the new location at once, so that their mother’s anxiety could be relieved. Hugh believed that easing his mother’s fears would calm her and perhaps even prolong her life.
On May 19, 1883, Hugh Cameron arranged for his father’s grave to be opened and the remains taken to the new location.
Mrs. Cameron insisted on watching the move, and against his better judgment, Hugh took her to the cemetery. Labourers dug away and soon reached the wooden coffin. Despite a decade and a half in the ground, it was still reasonably intact.
As they were preparing to lift it out, Mrs. Cameron entreated the workman to lift her into the grave and open the coffin so she could look once more into her husband’s face. Hugh and other family members were horrified at the idea. The body had been embalmed, but no one knew how thorough the job had been, or what the body might look like after 15 years in a grave.
She became hysterical. No one wanted to lead her away. Eventually Hugh and the labourers relented, and lifted her into the excavation beside the remains of the coffin.
The labourers lifted the frail woman into the hole and gently pried up the top of the coffin. She looked, then let out an agonizing wail.
Sobbing in Gaelic, she exclaimed to her son, “Hughie, he’s not here. They have taken him away. There’s none of him left, Hughie!”
The labourers looked in, and confirmed that the box was indeed without a body or any other contents other than earth at places were the box had disintegrated. Her frantic display of emotion and disappointment at the gruesome discovery was a scene that no one present ever forgot. She never recovered from the shock that she would be unable to rest in death with her husband.
Surprisingly, or perhaps not, the authorities did not conduct an investigation, preferring to let the matter be forgotten as quickly as possible to avoid implicating the guilty, who still lived in Fergus. At the time Donald Cameron died, Dr. Abraham Groves was not yet practising medicine, but he was a medical student at the University of Toronto.
He seems unlikely to have been involved, but the circumstances do not acquit him entirely as a participant in the taking of the body, which would have been done, in all likelihood, before the coffin was buried.
More probable as a suspect or as someone with a knowledge of the case was Dr. George T. Orton, a hard drinking eccentric who, at the time of the disinterment, was the MP for Centre Wellington. He was the senior doctor in Fergus 15 years earlier, at the time of Cameron’s death, but he was not a man who pursued scientific investigation the way Dr. Groves later did.
Still, it is possible he was involved, perhaps to supply a body to a young junior doctor working in his practice. Dr. Orton had a succession of them. He might also have helped a medical colleague in a nearby town by arranging for a body for dissection. In any case, Dr. Orton never said anything about the case in public.
Whether or not local doctors were guilty, it is obvious that some well-placed and prominent men were involved in the removal of Donald Cameron’s body, and its ultimate disposal at some unknown site. No one back then wanted to embarrass them by delving into the details.
It is 142 years since the passing of Donald Cameron. The full story of his missing body is lost in the mists of history.
With the passing of time, medical students and doctors had less need to procure bodies for their studies and investigation. By the end of the 19th century, a full university education was the norm for all doctors. Some people, by then, were willing their bodies to medical schools on their death.
As well, other educational tools appeared, reducing the need to use real bodies to instruct students in anatomy and the workings of the human body.