The Revivisectionists

In the city of Fraochdun, ancient capital of Alba and one of the largest cities on Albion, stands Knox College, a surgeon's school of grim renown. Within its halls works a small but influential faction known as the Revivisectionists - students of human anatomy who employ alchemical methods of revivification to restore cadavers to a semblance of life, that their organs might be more fully studied and understood. Though their practices are regarded with horror by the local community, the Crown has deemed their research valuable and granted them license to continue. Yet their detractors insist the Revivisectionists are defiling the dead, tormenting departed souls, and endangering the very fabric of reality itself.

The Need For Cadavers

The introduction of universal Magic has transformed many aspects of life in the Empire, but its influence on medicine remains limited. Most healing still belongs to the realm of idiosyncratic Magic, which is costly and inconsistent in its results. Thus, mundane medical practitioners - especially surgeons - remain in high demand. Training surgeons, however, is a delicate matter. They must practice their craft, and practice upon the living is frowned upon. Observation of surgeries is useful to a point, but every surgeon's college in the Empire requires cadavers for its students to study and dissect.

The state provides one sanctioned source: the bodies of condemned criminals. Yet even in these degenerate times, there are never enough hanged men to meet the demand of medical education. To fill the gap, surgeons' colleges have long relied on purchasing cadavers from the kin of the recently deceased - though few inquire too closely into the nature of that kinship, regardless of how many "relatives" a seller produces in a single year. Those who arrive at the college doors with a body in tow are well compensated and asked few questions. Selling bodies is not, strictly speaking, illegal under Albion law - so long as the corpse is stripped of all possessions, including clothing, to forestall charges of theft. This arrangement has inevitably encouraged grave robbing in the vicinity of the colleges, and has even given rise to at least one notorious series of murders in the last decade. Still, the practice of buying cadavers continues, and surgeons continue to train upon them.

Innovative Methods

In Fraochdun, the teachers of Knox College have devised innovations to provide what they claim is a superior education. Chief among these is the practice of Revivisection - a procedure by which cadavers are restored to a semblance of life, allowing dissections to reveal the body's processes in motion rather than the inert organs of the wholly dead. The precise method by which these functions are revived is closely guarded, lest rival schools steal the technique. The faculty assures the Crown that no soul is recalled to the body, which would constitute a forbidden act of Resurrection. Likewise, they insist that the mind is not restored, and that what thrashes upon the operating table is merely an animated husk, devoid of the person it once was.

Opponents of the practice, however, dispute these claims. They cite chilling anecdotes suggesting that both mind and soul are indeed dragged back into the flesh - forced to witness the ultimate defilement as their half-living body is laid open beneath the surgeon's blade. The fact that the dismembered components of the cadaver retain their vital actions for weeks afterwards - touted by the professors as an excellent educational benefit, since a single body can be divided among a dozen specialized classes such as ophthalmology, cardiology, and so forth - only deepens the horror in the eyes of the school's enemies.

Dark Rumors

Many dark rumors surround the practice of revivisection, spread eagerly by its detractors. Some claim that the faculty reassemble cadavers into grotesque but useful forms, employing them as animated servants or monstrous guards. Others insist that the process of vivification - said to drag the souls of the departed back into the world - is fraying the boundary between the mortal sphere and Beyond, allowing eldritch predators to slip through. A still more sinister belief holds that this is no accident at all: that Knox College is in truth the nexus of a hidden Cult, bound to some outside entity and deliberately seeking to open the world to an apocalyptic invasion from Beyond. When confronted with such tales, the professors of Knox College dismiss them as nothing more than the foolish ravings of the simple-minded and the paranoid.