Willcock, in his “Laws relating to the Medical Profession,” in his tenth chapter, when considering the lawfulness or unlawfulness of taking bodies for the purpose of dissection, says: “The whole question must depend upon the proper answer to these inquiries. Is it a violation of property? |158| Is it a personal injury to any individual? Or is it an injury to the public? Every lawyer who has mentioned the subject has admitted that there is no violation of property in respect of the corpse itself, which is necessary to constitute the removal an offence; and Blackstone has distinctly stated that the only property violated is the grass and soil of the land wherein the body was interred, in respect of which the person may bring his action of trespass, and the law has not provided any punishment as for an offence. It is equally clear that it is not an injury to any person; for the shrewd lawyers of Coke’s time determined that the body was no person but a lump of clay; and the only injury which can give a right of action to—that is which amounts to a violation of any legal right of—a relative or master, is such as may be said to recoil upon him, by causing him expense, labor, or loss of valuable service. The unpleasantness which may arise from an attack upon prejudices, however intimately blended with good feeling and delicacy of sentiment, is ranked by the court with that class of wrongs which are technically designated _damna absque injuria_.” “In _Lynn’s_ case, the judges assumed to answer the third question, that is to assert that it is an injury to the public. Society is not injured by the disinterment of the dead for the purposes of science, for it could hardly exist without such a sacrifice of fastidiousness; society is not insulted by the secret abstraction of the corpse from the vermin which crowd to pollute it, and they who so curiously seek the remains of those they hold dear, behind the veil of science, would do well to pry for one moment into the secrets of the sepulchre. They alone are the violators of every sentiment of delicacy and benevolence who insult the disconsolate relatives with the tale of the robbery and the pursuit, and with the foul spectacle of dismemberment they may have at length discovered.” |159|