Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
A normal person might think it a tragedy that thousands of anonymous labourers succumbed to disease and exhaustion during the building of the Panama Railroad.
Not John Totten though. This plucky entrepreneur saw an opportunity for a grisly side hustle - pickling unclaimed bodies like a jar of gherkins and selling them to medical schools for anatomical study.
The practice became so notorious that an Irish-American newspaper published a warning to would-be workers, cautioning that if the jungle didn't kill them, they might end up as a medical student's first patient.
A normal person might think it a tragedy that thousands of anonymous labourers succumbed to disease and exhaustion during the building of the Panama Railroad.
Not John Totten though. This plucky entrepreneur saw an opportunity for a grisly side hustle - pickling unclaimed bodies like a jar of gherkins and selling them to medical schools for anatomical study.
The practice became so notorious that an Irish-American newspaper published a warning to would-be workers, cautioning that if the jungle didn't kill them, they might end up as a medical student's first patient.
