When McGill med students went grave-robbing for science

All of it began with a problem almost absurd in its contradictions: to get the anatomical knowledge a doctor would need in 1830s Montreal, one would learn through dissection, but dissecting a human body—then seen as a desecration of human remains—was illegal and punishable by law. This would put medical students in a Catch-22: the law demanded they learn through dissection while simultaneously threatening to punish them for dissection.

At McGill University, medical students opted to break the law, giving Montreal one of its strangest, most macabre chapters for the better part of a century.

Tobogganing in Montreal, about 1870. | Photograph: Alexander Henderson / McCord Stewart Museum

The midnight toboggans

Picture winter in 1860s Montreal and a group of medical students bundled against the cold making their way up a snow-capped Mount Royal to Côte-des-Neiges Cemetery. They break into the "dead house", a storage facility where bodies would stay cold for spring burial when the ground would thaw. They’d strip the corpses naked—keeping the clothes would mean robbery charges, but a body itself wasn't legally property—wrap them in blankets, and toboggan them down the mountain slopes back to the McGill Medical Building on Côté Street.

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