In this French caricature, 2 pipe-smoking, wise-cracking surgeons stuff an old vagrant's corpse with newspaper after raiding it for useful organs. Their indifference to death and the undignified way in which they handle the body epitomised what many people came to believe was an unseemly irreverence towards the dead which was at variance with the feelings of society.

Colour photomechanical reproduction of a lithograph by Noël Dorville, published in L'assiette au beurre, 1901.