The Resurrectionist The Lost Work of Dr. - By E. B. Hudspeth Page 0,10

carnival showmen and suggests that the advertisement was created by Dr. Black himself.

As minister and scientist continued their debate, members of the audience began taking sides, and the confrontation climaxed in a brawl. Both men were arrested, but only Black was charged with inciting a riot. He was not convicted. As a result of this incident, he would spend the next few years enduring constant harassment and arrests, for local authorities believed him to be a nuisance to the common peace. Driven from towns, Black remained unaffected by the persecution. Although never convicted, he was charged with dozens of crimes: larceny, fraud, and public indecency (i.e., placing indecent objects/scenes or portrayals thereof before the public view), among many others.

More effort has been given to prevent the occasion of listening to me than would have been required to simply stand idle while I spoke. Can a scientist truly incite this kind of fear?

Black soon understood that no amount of intelligent scientific argument was likely to persuade his audience. He needed evidence, and he would have to create it himself. He theorized that the same reasoning used to heal or reverse a deformity could also serve to engineer a deformity; he would have to create what he thought the body (nature) had originally intended.

Black disappeared from the public view for the next few months as he reinvented his show. He undertook his work in the secluded privacy of his carnival caravan. He started with small dead animals and grafted parts of them together, assembling his vision of what the creatures might have looked like. During the summer of 1882, with the help of his five-year-old son Alphonse, Black made frequent trips in search of small game. When the small hunting party found success, father and son would take their quarry into the caravan, nestled in a meadow forty miles north of Philadelphia, and cut the animals’ bodies into pieces. On one occasion Black assembled some of these components into a sort of doll that resembled a small harpy. The lower portion consisted of a turkey; soft feathers covered its tough and bare-skinned neck. On top was the head of a small child, which Dr. Black taken from a cadaver. He called the creature Eve.

Eve was followed by a series of even more elaborate creations. Having knowledge of the physiological and anatomical design of living things, Black set out to engineer what he thought was intended by nature to still exist. And so in the year 1883 he built and designed a miraculous cabinet of curiosities––taxidermied replicas of a host of mythological creatures. Any human components involved in the creation of these oddities were likely exhumed from cemeteries by the doctor and Alphonse.

Black presented his revamped museum in the spring of 1884, touring the country with Elise and their two children. Despite his continued difficulty with local police, the show was a tremendous success:

May 9, 1883

They were gathering in crowds like swarms of pests, murmuring and confused. Suspicious shadows cast over their faces gave an eerie countenance to all who looked upon my work and believed in what they saw. They saw the vestige of life’s history.

The show was met by enthusiastic and oftentimes frightened or angry audiences. One review states: “It was quite a disturbing thing to see the taxidermy medley of Dr. Black. The animals appeared real, as though their eyes could have opened. All they needed was a nudge and they’d wake up.”

Initially, the show included only a small harpy, a Cerberus (a three-headed hell hound), and an Eastern dragon. But audience sensibilities were tested when Black presented a centaur that combined a human cadaver and a dead horse. The macabre scene was simply too grotesque, and audiences protested in horror. A local Philadelphia newspaper wrote, “Dr. Black is still disgusting and lacking the decency, manners, and good sense he once had.”

But Black was determined to persevere. He never lost his conviction that all the fantastic creatures he presented were once real. He argued it was his responsibility to science, medicine, and the world to uncover the true nature of man. According to his claims, there once lived more bizarre and unknown creatures in the world than what had been discovered. He believed mermaids once swam in the deep, minotaurs ruled in the hills of Macedonia, and sphinxes nested in the rocks of Mount St. Catherine in Egypt.

Black claimed to have proof of these ancient species, which had been shipped to him from around the world, packed neatly in a