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.
REFERENCES
[1]Juettner, Otto: Daniel Drake and His Followers (Cincinnati, 1909), p. 395.
[2]Cincinnati Daily Gazette, December 24, 1870.
[3]Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, February 3 and 4, 1871.
[4]Juettner, loc. cit., 395.
[5]Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, January 3, 1872.
[6]Juettner, loc. cit., 395.