The_Resurrectionist_The_Lost_Work_of_Dr

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: