The Underground Railroad

Chapter 12 Summary

The beginning of this chapter finds Aloysius Stevens in the anatomy house of the Proctor Medical School. We are told that this school is not as selective as the more prominent medical schools in Boston. Stevens works at the Proctor Medical School at night to meet the terms of his fellowship. His job is to open the door to the body-snatcher, Carpenter. Throughout the chapter, we receive hints that Stevens is financially struggling.

Carpenter usually delivers his cargo just before sunrise. Tonight, however, he arrives at midnight. Stevens rushes to greet him. Carpenter and his man Cobb await him in the driver’s seat of a cart. Stevens boards the cart with his tools. Stevens feels resentful about having to miss guest lectures because of his work post. He begrudges the fact that most of his peers come from wealthy families.

Cobb informs Stevens that they are going to Concord. A camaraderie has sprung up between the rough-and-tumble Cobb and the medical student Stevens. Their friendship, uneasy at first, has blossomed through their work: illegal grave robbing. The two have found kinship in their mutually rapscallion ways. When Carpenter asked Stevens to join him on a grave robbing mission one night, Stevens did not hesitate to join him. Meanwhile, the county has recently begun hanging grave robbers.

A body shortage has accompanied the rise of the study of anatomy, as medical practitioners can only secure so many corpses of murderers and prostitutes from the state. Some people with rare afflictions did sell their bodies upon their deaths, and some doctors donated their own bodies to the cause. But this did not satisfy anatomy practitioners’ needs for dead bodies.

Carpenter is a towering Irishman, brusque in temperament and speech. It is rumored that when two of his own children died from yellow fever, he sold their bodies for anatomical study. Stevens, aware that one is better off curtailing sentimentality while undertaking the endeavor of grave robbing, never asked the frightening Carpenter if the story was true.

Carpenter composed his gang of lowlife men from the saloon. He specifically sought out those of a criminal character. Rival gangs of grave robbers are known to viciously fight each other for cemetery spoils. During his peak, Carpenter was known for elevating his macabre doings to the level of “devilish art” (140). He deployed children taught to cry on cue, posing as mourners, to aid him in making off with bodies to which he had no right. He designed elaborate schemes to both profit from his trade, and to squirrel bodies away from where they belonged. Eventually, the body trade became so incorrigible that families began to hold vigils at their loved ones’ gravesites. This is when Carpenter turned to Black people.

Black people did not hold vigil over the graves of their loved ones, and there was no authority for them to appeal to. Stevens, in contrast, considers himself devoid of racial prejudice and can plainly see that Carpenter, un uneducated Irishmen steered into the body trade by a society not designed for him, has more in common with Black people than with him, a white doctor. However, he does not broach this topic aloud.

Stevens understands that his perspective is a minority one. His fellow students regularly deride the Black population as intellectually deficient, primal, and primitive:

 Yet when his classmates put their blades to a colored cadaver, they did more for the cause of colored advancement than the most high-minded abolitionist. In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man’s equal (142).

The narrator closes the chapter with a scene of Carpenter, Cobb, and Stevens beginning the work of robbing the graves of two large people, two medium ones, and three infants.