John Scott Harrison's body was stolen from his grave the night he was buried
In 1878, the son of a U.S. president was buried in Ohio, only to have his body stolen that same night by grave robbers and taken to a medical college.
In 1878, John Scott Harrison was buried in Ohio. But grave robbers stole his body that night.
His son searched Cincinnati's Medical College of Ohio. Inside, he found a body hanging from a rope.
The grim discovery
It was John Scott Harrison, his own father. His grave had been robbed for medical dissection.
The case shocked the nation. John Scott Harrison was the son of President William Henry Harrison and the father of future President Benjamin Harrison. He was the only man in American history to be both the son and father of a U.S. president.
Grave robbing was common in the nineteenth century. Medical schools needed cadavers for anatomy classes, but legal sources were scarce. Body snatchers, called resurrection men, dug up fresh graves and sold corpses to medical colleges.
A family's nightmare
Harrison's son had gone to the medical college while searching for another missing body. Instead, he made the horrifying discovery of his own father's corpse, prepared for dissection.
The incident led to public outrage and calls for reform. Ohio and other states eventually passed anatomy acts that provided legal ways for medical schools to obtain bodies, reducing the need for grave robbing.
