The Resurrectionists

Category: Books

Tess Gerritsen’s new novel is called The Bone Garden. It is a literary venture that the reader will not soon forget. Back in the good ole days, the 1830’s to be exact, medical students sometimes had to provide their own cadavers for medical school. The newly departed could be purchased for medical research, but due to the fact that the demand was far greater than the supply, there was always a shortage of bodies.
One reason, for the shortage of willing corpses, was the tight restrictions detailed in the law, as to what constituted a suitable specimen for dissection. Only a body, which had been killed by execution or one that one had died in prison, could legally be used to help expand the knowledgeable realms of the inquisitive medical minds that were quickly filling up the young nation’s medical schools. In those days the going price for a fresh cadaver was twenty dollars. Considering a haircut only cost twenty-five cents, this was a tidy sum of money. Only the wealthy could afford to legally obtain a body for dissection. So what was a poor medical student to do? It is not too hard to figure out this part of the story. Hint, it has something to do with “resurrectionists”.
The best-selling novelist, Tess Gerritsen, has based a whole novel on this particularly dark facet of American History. Situated in Boston and rippled with detailed descriptions of medical practices of the day that only a licensed M.D. could provide, (Gerritsen is just that) the book takes the reader into a dark and mysterious world that is sure to please a true connoisseur of the mystery genre. Perhaps, the book is a bit more, for it is also described as a work of historical fiction.
Let the squeamish beware, but for everybody else take heart, for this very recent literary release, which is already headed for the top of the charts, will have a lot of readers turning pages late into the night, probably with all the lights in the house turned on.