An outcry ensued, and law enforcement cracked down. But eventually, these brazen ploys caught up with him. Carpenter employed as many tricks as he could to increase the number of bodies he could sell. His gang are mostly recruits from the saloon, and their competition for bodies is a scramble. His boss, Carpenter, is an imposing figure: a huge Irish man with six children. Placed in the expensive city, far from his mother’s home cooking back in Maine, Stevens needs the money from body snatching. These “morbid paradoxes” (137) are simply part of Stevens’s life: he has to pay for his own cadavers as part of medical school. Rich medical schools outbid the poor ones for bodies, and there was a limited supply of legal ones. Cobb begins to warm to Stevens, even offering him a drink of liquor.Īnatomy was a relatively new field of study, and it had created a fierce demand for bodies. The act of stealing bodies has also made the men closer. It is risky work, though: the city has begun sending grave robbers to the gallows as punishment. Cobb is not a fan of Stevens’, even though Stevens was not a rich student, unlike those from well-off Massachusetts families who were the majority at the school. At midnight, the other body snatchers, Carpenter and Cobb, come to get him. The fifth chapter transports readers to a medical school in Boston, where Aloysius Stevens works at night as a grave robber to pay for his medical school expenses.
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