ST:  Mercy Brown of Exeter, Rhode Island, the United States' most legendary vampire seems to have been the last suspected vampire exhumed. Why did the practice stop with Mercy?

MB:  By 1892, when Mercy was exhumed, several factors had come together to render the vampire practice obsolete. The tuberculosis germ was discovered in 1882 and, even though many people were slow to accept that consumption was caused by some microscopic organism, eventually the evidence for its validity was generally considered to be undeniable. Effective treatments for TB soon followed (public sanitation measures, isolating those infected, etc.), so that consumption ceased to be the terrible epidemic it was throughout the 1800s. At the same time, embalming corpses prior to burial was also coming into vogue; once the blood is removed and replaced with some chemical, the corpse becomes inert--at least as far as becoming a vampire is concerned.