The_Resurrectionist_The_Lost_Work_of_Dr

costumed animals. Others (correctly) believed they were surgically assembled hybrids. But Dr. Black
himself claimed they were newly discovered life forms. From the fall 1891 issue of Chicago Journal
of Science:
A man, scientist or not, who can manipulate nature through vivisection or any
means to this end does not practice science but instead knows it––and possesses a
power that no man should wield, for this work no man should have wrought.
—William J. Getty, M.D., F.R.S.C.
(Professor of Surgery in the Anatomy Department of the
University of Medical Science, New York)
Some of the performers in the Human Renaissance were Dr. Black’s patients from Ward C; others
were patients he’d met during his travels with the American Carnival. All their conditions were
extreme. One young man was said to have had leg transplants; he bore the limbs of a much taller man
with a darker complexion. Another patient was a formerly conjoined twin, a seventeen-year-old girl
named Rose. Her surgical procedure was so elaborate that it involved a new heart, lung, kidney,
spleen, and arm. The girl’s parents said that Black had even made her prettier than before. Her twin
sister had died during the surgery.
To the malformed, the sick, or the diseased, Dr. Black had become something of a folk hero. He
was ridiculed in the mainstream scientific community but revered by many, especially those afflicted
with unusual illnesses. Black wrote this quip to the Chicago Journal of Science: