1818 AMERICAN DR. FRANKENSTEIN. Sermon on Reinterring Graves - Medical Body Snatcher

A very scarce survivor of one of the most famous and rare early American imprint accounts of body snatching and grave robbery. Delivered by Reverend Robert Crowell in the Second Parish of Ipswich, the sermon, and introduction describing the events, capture the kind of intense community horror immortalized in the publication of Shelley's Frankestein the same year. 

The present was published before the discovery of the perpetrator. Locals had discovered that at least eight graves in the parish burying ground had been disturbed, stripped of their corpses, and left empty.

After publication, the perpetrator was exposed as Dr. Thomas Sewall, a prominent, Harvard-educated local physician, preceptor, and parish treasurer who was using his own deceased patients for illicit anatomical research and dissection. The theft of local remains, including those of young children, a person of color, and a newly buried young woman, outraged the community. Despite hiring Daniel Webster as his defense counsel, Sewall was prosecuted under a 1815 Massachusetts anti-graverobbing statute, found guilty, fined $800, and driven out of town. Crowell’s sermon was delivered at a solemn public ceremony held to reinter the empty coffins in a single common grave near the cemetery entrance, a ceremony designed to restore spiritual order and community dignity following a profound violation of sacred norms.

The publication of this sermon in 1818 coincides precisely with the anonymous publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in London that same year. While Shelley’s novel explored the philosophical, ethical, and monstrous boundaries of science through a fictional narrative of a creation built from harvested human remains, Crowell’s pamphlet provides a real-world, localized snapshot of the exact societal anxieties surrounding medical dissection at that moment. Both texts reflect a transatlantic cultural crisis in 1818: the rise of modern medical science and anatomical education clashing violently with deeply held religious traditions, the sanctity of the human body, and the sacred nature of burial.

[Frankenstein, Body Snatching] Crowell, Robert. Interment of the Dead, a Dictate of Natural Affection, Sanctioned by the Word of God, and the Examples of the Good in Every Age. A Sermon Delivered in Ipswich, Second Parish, July 23, 1818, on the Occasion of Reinterring the Coffins which had been Robbed of their Contents. Andover. Printed by Flagg and Gould. 1818. 40pp. 

Very good in original salmon plain wrap; warps a bit tender and handled. Textually good + to very good.