AN APPROPRIATE FINIS
It is not known whether or not he was able to fulfill his promise. However, it is known from the announcement in the local daily press that Old Cunny met his demise on November 2, 1871, at the age of 64.[5] According to Juettner that was not the end, however, of his earthly remains; for on authority of this author, prior to Cunningham’s death, he had sold his body to the Medical College of Ohio, and when he died it was turned over to that institution by his “bereaved widow” who managed to get an additional $5.00 bill for his giant carcass. This author also made the claim that, at the time when he wrote the statement, “the skeleton of Old Cunny is to this day the pièce de résistance in the museum of the Medical College of Ohio.”[6]
Juettner’s claim as to the eventual fate of Old Cunny’s skeleton has been verified by a statement received recently from the Department of Anatomy, University of Cincinnati, College of Medicine, where the skeleton is now housed.
This is not the last we hear of Old Cunny’s widow, who has been described as being “a bony, brawny-jawed Irish woman, with a mouth like an alligator.” She had evidently taken up Old Cunny’s business where he left off, judging from a news item that appeared in the OHIO STATE JOURNAL of December 6, 1878, under the date line Cincinnati, December 5. According to this news report, a gang of resurrectionists consisting of five persons was arrested in that city, included among which were two women, one of whom was “the widow of Cunningham, of former notoriety in this business.”
Upon such depraved characters as the Cunninghams did the anatomists of the nineteenth century have to rely for the procurement of their anatomical subjects prior to the passage of anatomy laws, which made it unnecessary to resort to the nefarious and odious practice of body snatching. Inasmuch as the identities of the procurers and of the bodies which they delivered to the medical colleges were unknown to the anatomy professors, all business transactions having been carried on through an intermediary person—usually the janitor—the professors were consequently absolved of being a principal or accessory to the crime of body snatching. Granted that anyone who would be so wanton as to make his livelihood by desecrating places of human sepulture was deserving of all the villifying names hurled at him; nevertheless we should not lose sight of the fact that the sins of commission of the ghoulish resurrectionists were made possible by sins of omission of the public and of their representatives in the legislative halls, who refused for so many years to support an anatomy law, which, as time has proved, abolished the need for resurrectionists.