Mary Shelley often visited Saint Pancras Cemetery in London to keep vigil beside her mother’s grave, who had died in childbirth. Those frequent pilgrimages may have kindled the spark that later grew into Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, published in 1818. A time when the city’s anatomy theaters faced a dangerous shortage of cadavers, and the illicit trade of bodies loomed as a grim answer to scholarly need. The diary-like testimony found in the book Diary of a Revivalist (La Felguera), written between 1811 and 1812, adds a stark context: a graveyard night mission recorded in a logbook shows the dawn-to-dusk rhythm of a city hungry for knowledge. The note reads of a 3 a.m. rise and a cemetery visit tied to a hospital payoff of five thousand dollars. In a world where London was the navel of the universe for science and commerce, the fever for discovery and the engines of industry rolled forward on steam-powered momentum. Medical schools expanded, but the bodies to study remained scarce. By law, only the remains of executed individuals could legally enter dissection classes, a constraint that helped to birth a murky industry and sparked enduring debates among contemporaries such as Dickens and Stevenson, who navigated the moral and social implications in their own works.
I pause before continuing with this Victorian prelude, because it mirrors a recurring curiosity about how past economies echo into the present. The last few decades have seen a similarly urgent unease about automation and the future of work, a modern riposte to those earlier controversies. Today, concerns about artificial intelligence fill the air as people worry about displacement and the possibility of becoming modern Luddites who resist new tools rather than embrace them. In one contemporary echo, reports describe a criminal network in Valencia centered on bodies and the funeral economy, a chilling reminder that the ethics of care, science, and commerce still intersect in unsettling ways. The tension between progress and exploitation remains a loud, unresolved chord in the collective memory.
In Valencia, four individuals employed at a funeral home were arrested for creating false documents to obtain bodies from hospitals and nursing homes and then selling them to universities for dissection. The scheme netted around 1,200 euros per deceased person. The operation targeted vulnerable individuals with no obvious next of kin, or strangers left unseen in the quiet edges of life, so no one would step forward to claim them. After the harvest, those responsible profited further from the cremation process, distributing dismembered parts into other people’s coffins. The disconcerting phrase “glups” lingers as a blunt, almost casual admission of a crime that affronted both science and civil decency.
Among the many gaps that complicate the case, it is notable that the detainees were charged with fraud and document forgery, while direct charges of body theft did not appear at first glance. The question of whether such a body could be acquired remains murky, even to seasoned observers. Meanwhile, in 2012, amid a broader financial crisis, some university faculties faced the brutal reality of budget cuts. Donations to science rose in some places, yet institutions were forced to display the stark reality of scarcity by posting the stark “full” sign on doors. Funeral costs hovered around 3,000 euros, a reminder that financial pressure often intersects with the ethics of memory and research. What occurred in the intervening years was a continual negotiation of value, memory, and the limits of what a society will fund in the name of knowledge. When money tightens its grip, what people owe to memory, to those who came before, and to the future of science becomes a question that remains unresolved, always deserving careful reflection.