History of medical practice in Illinois - Bushnell Historical Society

402 History of Medical Practice in IllinoisWhen the millionaire George M. Pullman, inventor and builder of railwaycars that bear his name, died he left "extraordinary precautionsagainst disturbance of his grave. His coffin was wrapped in tarpaper andthen completely covered and sealed with a coating of asphalt an inch thick.It was lowered into an underground vault of massive concrete, reinforcedwith steel bars. This chamber was then poured full of concrete and coveredwith bolted railroad rails. The process formed a solid block of concreteand metal, immovable except by heavy machinery, indestructible exceptby prodigious charges of dynamite." Thus, Pullman met the age-old fearof grave-robbers, a fear that began to haunt him when he heard as a boy thetales of ghouls digging up bodies and purveying them to the dissectingrooms of medical schools, and that seized and took overpowering possessionof him when the desecration of the graves of Lincoln and of Stewart werepublicized. In 1901, when the body of Abraham Lincoln was placed in itsfinal resting place in a vault beneath the monument in the cemetery atSpringfield,the order which the son, Robert T. Lincoln, then presidentof the Pullman Company, gave for the preparation of the tomb was implicitlyobeyed: "Bury him now and for all time exactly the way Mr.Pullman was buried in Chicago." 4343 Collins, ibid.