The Lady and Her Monsters by Roseanne Montillo

prices and were said to prevent the picks and shovels of the resurrectionists from breaking through. One such doctor, on the brink of death, imagined that his assistants would descend on his dead carcass like vultures and wrote a poem begging,
    And my ’prentices will surely come
    And carve me bone from bone,
    And I, who have rifled the dead man’s grave,
    Shall never rest in my own.
    Bury me in lead when I am dead,
    My brethren, I entrust.
    And see the coffin weigh’d I beg
    Lest the plumber should be a chest.
    Giovanni Aldini could have gone to the Fortune of War pub, or one like it, and engaged one of the resurrection men. He could have made his specifications known and perhaps one of them, in time, would have come up with the right subject, for a particular sum of money. But Aldini had another plan in mind. He not only wanted to find the perfect man to restore life to, but he also hoped to attract the right people who would back up his concepts, and possibly even pay for his stay in London. That’s when he approached the members of the Royal Humane Society.
    William Hawes and Thomas Cogan founded the Royal Humane Society in 1774. They were physicians who were concerned when they realized that a great number of people in the city’s hospitals were being taken for dead when they were still alive. To make matters worse, some of those still-living patients were being buried alive. This frightened doctors, as they were the ones to declare the actual time of death, and made patients fear going to sleep one moment and waking up the next in a pine box. The society was initially called the Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned, as restoring life to the drowned was their first order of business.
    Unlike other doctors, they found it necessary to push the new technique—an unproven one, no less—of resuscitation. They came up with a list of objectives the society would aim for. They agreed that people at large would help them, for why wouldn’t people support the art of resuscitation if it benefited them? Among their goals was the one they felt would attract the public the most: they would actually pay those who not only tried to bring someone back to life but actually managed to do so.
    Aldini approached the Royal Humane Society with a solution. Unabashedly suave in his demonstrations, he had come to realize, unlike his uncle, that his spectators came to view the experiments as much for the grand shows he provided as for the potential outcome. He also hoped the men of the society would provide him much-needed validation for his contraptions, as well as support, and introductions to the even more refined society of London. While the society members found his manners and his propositions a little unusual and his self-assurance almost bordering on conceit, they nonetheless agreed that his methods were worthy of a try. They also agreed to help with the more tangible issue at hand: finding the right corpse.
    W hen George Foster was arrested, he was “indicted for the willful murder of Jane Foster, his wife, and Louisa Foster, his infant child.” This had occurred on December 5, 1802, in a canal at Westbourne Green, in the city of Westminster. Despite the dire accusations, Foster believed a grave mistake had been made and he would soon be vindicated. Undaunted and ignorant in the ways the laws worked, he believed that the testimonies of his neighbors, coworkers, the people he had lodged with in the past, and the ones he was now living with would set him free.
    Jane Hobart, Jane Foster’s mother, was the first to take the stand. A bundle of grief, anger, and resentment underneath her raggedy garments, she stared at Foster as she gave detailed accounts of how she had removed her daughter and granddaughter from the poorhouse to care for them. She unleashed her tongue as she began to tell the courts and those in attendance of Foster’s desire to place even the smallest of his