Professor Brian Carroll will discuss the largely unknown practice of exhuming and burning corpses thought to prey on the living as a way to cure tuberculosis (consumption). German military physicians serving in Hessian regiments during the War for Independence introduced this European custom to the American northeast. Speaking to the state of medicine during the era, the version that caught on in early America was a medicalized form of the belief—stripped of all occult connotations and turned by American doctors into a ‘scientific’ procedure.
Hundreds of exhumations took place between 1782 and 1897. In telling this fascinating story, Carroll links vampire belief to migration and medical history. His talk will focus on the two exhumations that occurred in Pennsylvania: the first involving members of the Ephrata Cloister in Lancaster County in 1857, and the second among Hungarian miners in Antrim in northeastern Pennsylvania in 1893.
Admission is FREE for Easton Out Loud: Fourth Friday.
About Brian Carroll
Brian D. Carroll is Visiting Associate Professor of History at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and has been on the faculty of a number of major colleges and universities. A public historian, Professor Carroll has worked extensively for museums and historical societies in the Northeast and Pacific Northwest. He has published numerous articles and book reviews in leading scholarly publications, including The William and Mary Quarterly, The New England Quarterly, Early American Studies, Ethnohistory, The Journal of Military History and The Journal of American Ethnic History. He has written extensively on the experiences of Native Americans in the colonial and Revolutionary militaries, as well as the history of gender and sexuality in early America. He is currently writing a book manuscript, Burning the Hearts of the Dead: Medicine, Migration and Vampire Belief in Early America. His research has been supported by fellowships and grants from a variety of leading research institutions, including the American Antiquarian Society, the Huntington Library, and Harvard University.