Procuring corpses: The english anatomy inspectorate, 1842 to 1858

Medical History

Volumn 53, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 379-396

  MacDonald, Helen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE   (Australia)

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EID: 69449089544     PISSN: 00257273     EISSN: 09505571     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0025727300003987     Document Type: Article

References (120)

1. Daily News, 8 Sept. 1873, and Birmingham Daily Post, 20 Sept. 1873, containing reprinted articles from the Lancet and the British Medical Journal.
2. Presumed consent to donation was extensively discussed in the English media following the release of the Organ Donation Taskforce's report, Organs for transplants: a report, London, Department of Health, in January 2008
3. These included, in 1828, R. v. Gill in which a Liverpool surgeon was convicted and fined, and the trial of medical student John Davies in R. v. Davies et al., which resulted in a conviction at the Lancaster assizes.
4. Henry Warburton, MP for Bridport, was the instigator of the Select Committee on Anatomy. For the failure of the 1829 Anatomy Bill, see Ruth Richardson, Death, dissection and the destitute, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1988, p. 157.
5. For the murders, see William Roughead (ed.), Burke and Hare, London, William Hodge, 1948.
6. Sarah Wise, The Italian boy: murder and grave-robbery in 1830s London, London, Jonathan Cape, 2004.
7. Helen MacDonald, Human remains: dissection and its histories, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006, pp. 23-7 (published in Australia as Human remains: episodes in human dissection, Carlton, Melbourne University Press, 2005).
8. For the ways in which dissection contravened social mores about how corpses should be treated, see Richardson, op. cit., note 4 above, pp. 3-29.
9. Over subsequent years, corpses were also obtained from places in which people were confined: jails, houses of correction, prison hulks and asylums. The hulks were a favoured source of supply, as those who died on them were relatively young and they made good subjects for dissection (Richardson, op. cit., note 4 above, p. 248).
10. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (hereafter Parl. Debs (series 3), vol. 14, col. 534, 3 July to 16 Aug. 1832 (on 19 July 1832).
11. In chronological order, these were anatomy (1832), factories (1833), lunacy (1833), emigration (1833), poor law (1834), prisons (1836), tithe commutation (1836), education (1839), railways (1840), mines (1842), public health / local government (1848), mercantile marine (1850), charities (1853), juvenile reformatories (1854), burial grounds (1855), police (1856), vaccination (1861), salmon fisheries (1861), alkali works (1863), oyster and mussel fisheries (1866), contagious diseases in animals (1869), explosive substances (1875), and cruelty to animals (1876), see P W J Bartrip, 'British government inspection, 1832-1875: some observations', Hist. J., 1982, 25: 605-26, p. 607. See also, Jill Pellew, The Home Office 1848-1914: from clerks to bureaucrats, London, Heinemann Educational Books, 1982, p. 122
12. Christine Garwood, 'Green crusaders or captives of industry? The British alkali inspectorate and the ethics of environmental decision making, 1864-95', Ann. Sci., 2004, 61: 99-117
13. Tom Crook, 'Sanitary inspection and the public sphere in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain: a case study in liberal governance', Soc. Hist., 2008, 32: 369-93.
14. Bartrip, op. cit., note 9 above, p. 606, and Felix Driver, Power and pauperism: the workhouse system 1834-1884, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 28.
15. Parl. Debs. (series 3), vol. 10, col. 836, 7 Feb. to 8 Mar. 1832 (on 27 Feb. 1832); vol. 12, cols. 667-68, 9 Apr. to 23 May 1832 (on 18 Apr. 1832).
16. Parl. Debs. (series 3), vol. 10, col. 833, 27 Feb. 1832; col. 667, 18 Apr. 1832.
17. Parl. Debs. (series 3), vol. 12, col. 313, 11 Apr. 1832.
18. Ibid., col. 317, 11 Apr. 1832.
19. Ibid., cols. 316-17, 11 Apr. 1832.
20. Ibid., col. 317, 11 Apr. 1832.
21. Minute written by Winterbotham, cited in Pellew, op. cit., note 9 above, p. 141.
22. Philip Harling, 'The power of persuasion: central authority, local bureaucracy and the New Poor Law', Eng. Hist. Rev., 1992, 107: 30-53, p. 31. The assistant commissioners were called inspectors after 1842, and their role also changed over time.
23. Pellew, op. cit., note 9 above, pp. 146-7. The Home Office, and individual Secretaries of State, were also increasingly overworked as this era of legislative change progressed (A P Donajgrodzki, 'Sir James Graham at the Home Office', Hist. J., 1977, 20: 97-120).
24. For a discussion focusing on two of the industrial inspectorates established under factory and mines legislation, see P W J Bartrip, 'State intervention in mid-nineteenth century Britain: fact or fiction?', J. Br. Stud., 1983, 23: 63-83.
25. Dr James Craig Somerville had given evidence before the 1828 Select Committee on Anatomy, at which time he was Benjamin Brodie's assistant at the School of Anatomy in Windmill Street. In December 1836 Somerville became Britain's only anatomy inspector when his role was expanded to incorporate Scotland as well as England. A protégé of Henry Warburton, Somerville controversially became a member of the University of London Senate for a brief period in 1838. He died in 1847, five years after being dismissed from the inspectorate. Dr David Craigie, the Scottish inspector from 1832 until 1836, was a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, an elected physician at Edinburgh's Royal Infirmary, and a Fellow of Edinburgh's Royal College of Surgeons. For many years he edited the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal.
26. M J Durey, 'Bodysnatchers and Benthamites: the implications of the Dead Body Bill for the London schools of anatomy, 1820-42', Lond. J., 1976, 2: 200-25.
27. Richardson, op. cit., note 4 above, pp. 239-60.
28. Other historians exploring aspects of the history of human dissection in Britain during the nineteenth-century include Sean Burrell and Geoffrey Gill, 'The Liverpool cholera epidemic of 1832 and anatomical dissection: medical mistrust and civil unrest', J. Hist. Med. Allied Sci., 2005, 60: 478-98
29. Elizabeth T Hurren, 'A pauper dead-house: the expansion of the Cambridge anatomical teaching school under the late-Victorian Poor Law, 1870-1914', Med. Hist., 2004, 48: 69-94
30. idem, 'Whose body is it anyway? Trading the dead poor, coroner's disputes, and the business of anatomy at Oxford University, 1885-1929', Bull. Hist. Med., 2008, 82: 775-819
31. idem, Dying for Victorian medicine: English anatomy and its trade in the dead poor, 1870 to 1929, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming
32. Fiona Hutton, 'The working of the 1832 Anatomy Act in Oxford and Manchester', Family and Community History, 2006, 9: 125-39
33. M H Kaufman, 'Transfer of bodies to the University of Edinburgh after the 1832 Anatomy Act', J. R. Coll Physicians Edinb., 2004, 34: 228-36
34. MacDonald, op. cit., note 5 above; idem, 'Possessing Bodies', Meanjin, 2007, 66: 88-98
35. idem, Possessing the dead: the artful science of anatomy, Carlton, Melbourne University Press, forthcoming; idem, 'A body buried is a body wasted': the spoils of human dissection', in Sarah Ferber and Helen MacDonald (eds), The body divided, Aldershot, Ashgate, forthcoming; Anna Stevenson, 'An obscure personality called William Roberts: the later history of the Anatomy Act of 1832', BSc dissertation, History of Medicine, University of London, 2004. For the US, see Michael Sappol, A traffic of dead bodies: anatomy and embodied social identity in nineteenth-century America, Princeton University Press, 2002; for Australia, see Helen MacDonald, 'A scandalous Act: regulating anatomy in a British settler colony', Soc. Hist. Med., 2007, 20: 39-56
36. idem, '"Humanity's discards": the New South Wales Anatomy Act, 1881', Mortality, 12: 365-82
37. idem, 'The anatomy inspector and the government corpse', History Australia, forthcoming. For Vienna, see Tatjana Buklijas, 'Cultures of death and politics of corpse supply: anatomy in Vienna, 1848-1914', Bull. Hist. Med., 2008, 82: 570-607.
38. Quotation from letter from magistrates Thomas Walker and J Harwick, The Times, 21 Nov. 1834, p. 1.
39. Durey notes that there were only isolated cases in London, but that grave-robbing remained a problem in the provinces throughout the 1830s: op. cit., note 22 above, pp. 211, 219-20.
40. National Archives, Kew (hereafter NA), MH 74/12, letter from Somerville to Helps, 24 Nov. 1832, p. 45; letter from Somerville to Commissioners for Police, 28 Dec. 1832, p. 55; letter from Somerville to S M Phillipps, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Home Office, 28 Jan. 1834, p. 135.
41. NA, MH 74/12, letter from Somerville to Phillipps, 5 June 1834, p. 148, Richardson op. cit., note 4 above, p. 263.
42. Durey, op. cit., note 22 above, p. 219.
43. By the 1840s, the private schools had amalgamated with the larger schools, or closed. For their demise, see Adrian Desmond, The politics of evolution: morphology, medicine, and reform in radical London, University of Chicago Press, 1989.
44. NA, MH 74/12, letter from Somerville to Phillipps, 15 Apr. 1834, p. 145.
45. NA, MH 74/12, report from Somerville to Phillipps, 12 Jan. 1835, p. 175.
46. The parliamentary debates reveal that those promoting the bill wished to reduce the cost of corpses, rather than ban their sale. As Richardson has shown, given Wakley's long campaign in the pages of the Lancet to prohibit commercial dealings with the dead, this omission from the Act was unlikely to have been accidental. Richardson, op. cit., note 4 above, p. 249.
47. NA, MH 74/12, report from Somerville to Phillipps, 12 Jan. 1835, p. 175. See also The Times, 21 Nov. 1834, p. 1.
48. NA, MH 74/12, letter from Somerville to Phillipps, 9 Oct. 1834, p. 164.
49. NA, MH 74/12, report from Somerville to Phillipps, 12 Jan. 1835, p. 175.
50. NA, MH 74/12, letter from Somerville to Teale, 5 Nov. 1832, p. 41.
51. NA, MH 74/12, letter from Somerville to Partudy, Stanley and Grainger, 19 Mar. 1834, p. 138.
52. Richardson has argued that during Somerville's term, the public knew that unclaimed bodies were sent to be dissected, but was unaware of the routine means through which this was effected, as these were secretive: op. cit., note 4 above, p. 252.
53. Stevenson, op. cit., note 22 above, pp. 24-5. On Roberts, see also Durey, op. cit., note 22 above, pp. 212-17, and Richardson, op. cit., note 4 above, pp. 246-50.
54. Stevenson, op. cit., note 22 above, p. 32.
55. Alcock, an FRCS, had trained at Westminster Hospital and the Royal Westminster Ophthalmic Hospital, before serving as a house surgeon at the Westminster Hospital, then obtaining military postings abroad. He returned to England in 1838, and was a lecturer in surgery at Sydenham College before taking up the position of anatomy inspector. A muscular problem with his hands brought to an end his surgical career. R K Douglas, 'Alcock, Sir (John) Rutherford (1809-1897)' (1999)
56. rev. J A G Roberts, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol. 1, pp. 500-601, and http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/293.
57. John Bacot (1781-1879), MRCS, FRCS, had trained at St George's Hospital and had also been an army doctor, as well as a surgeon to St George's Hospital and the St James' Dispensary. He was one of the first members of the Senate of the University of London. After a period in private practice, Bacot joined the inspectorate: Plarr's Lives of the Fellows Online, http://livesonline/rcseng.ac.uk/biogs/E000471b.htm. He retired from it in 1858.
58. Alcock became British consul at Foo-Chow-foo (NA, MH 74/15, letter from Alcock to Phillipps, 17 June 1844, p. 124). George Cursham, MD, FRCP, had been a physician to the Brompton Hospital and the Asylum for Female Orphans in London before his appointment as provincial inspector, which he held until his death. 'George Cursham, MD, FRCP', Br. Med. J., 1871, ii: 424.
59. NA, MH 74/15, letter from Alcock and Bacot to metropolitan and provincial teachers, 18 Oct. 1842, p. 5; report from Alcock to Phillipps, 7 Mar. 1843, p. 60.
60. NA, MH 74/15, letter from Alcock to White, 6 Dec. 1842, p. 21.
61. NA, MH 74/15, report from Alcock to Phillipps, 7 Mar. 1843, pp. 72-3.
62. Ibid., pp. 71-2.
63. The Satirist; or, the Censor of the Times, 13 Feb. 1842, p. 55.
64. NA, MH 74/15, letter from Bacot to Sir George Cornewall Lewis, 28 Nov. 1849, p. 282.
65. NA, MH 74/15, report from Alcock to Phillipps, 7 Mar. 1843, pp. 71-2.
66. Ibid., p. 72.
67. NA, MH 74/15, letter from Alcock to Howell, 11 Nov. 1842, pp. 11-12.
68. NA, MH 74/15, letter from Bacot to Benjamin Alcock, Sep. 1853, pp. 337-8.
69. NA, MH 74/15, report from Alcock to Phillipps, 7 Mar. 1843, p. 67.
70. NA, MH 74/10, letter from Cursham to Embledon, 12 Jan. 1850, p. 80.
71. NA, MH 74/10, letter from Cursham to Key, 8 Jan. 1856, p. 195.
72. NA, MH 74/15, letter from Eubank to Ashton, 2 Jan. 1850, pp. 291-2.
73. NA, MH 74/15, letters from Gregg to Onslow, 1 Dec. 1855, p. 386; from Bacot to Deville, 1 Dec. 1855, p. 386; from Gregg to Shew, 17 Dec. 1855, p. 388.
74. The Times, 10 Dec. 1831, p. 3.
75. For a discussion of preparations and specimens in medical museums, see Samuel J M M Alberti, 'The museum affect: visiting collections of anatomy and natural history', in A Fyfe and B Lightman (eds), Science in the marketplace: nineteenth-century sites and experiences, University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 371-403
76. idem, 'Wax bodies: art and anatomy in Victorian medical museums', Mus. Hist. J., 2009, 2: 7-36
77. Simon Chaplin, 'Nature dissected, or dissection naturalized? The case of John Hunter's museum', Mus. Soc., 2008, 6: 135-51
78. Jonathan Reinarz, 'The age of museum medicine: the rise and fall of the medical museum at Birmingham's school of medicine', Soc. Hist. Med., 2005, 18: 419-37
79. Elizabeth Hallam, The anatomy museum: death and the body displayed, London, Reaktion, forthcoming
80. NA, MH 74/6, Hawkins to Bradford, 18 Jan. 1868, p. 246.
81. NA, MH 74/15, Alcock to Balfour, 18 Jan. 1844, p. 105.
82. NA, MH 74/12, Somerville to Sampson, 12 Oct. 1832, p. 28
83. Somerville to Barclay, 18 Oct. 1832, p.33
84. Somerville to Wheeler, 17 Oct. 1832, p. 32. As Elizabeth Hurren has shown for the Cambridge anatomical school later in the century, parts continued to be sought, especially when whole bodies were difficult to procure: Hurren, 'A pauper dead-house', op. cit., note 22 above, p. 83.
85. Parl. Debs. (series 3), vol. 75, col. 527, 13 May to 26 June 1844 (on 11 June 1844).
86. For the way in which anatomy featured in the parliamentary debate, see Parl. Debs. (series 3), vol. 74, cols. 26-29, 15 Apr. to 24 May 1844 (on Apr. 1844 and 21 May 1844); vol. 75, cols. 523-34, 30 May to 26 June (on 11 June 1844 and 24 July 1844).
87. 'An Act for the further amendment of the laws relating to the poor in England', 9 August 1844, The statutes of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, 7 & 8 Victoria. 1844, London, Her Majesty's Printers, 1844, pp. 600-35, on pp. 611-12.
88. William Day, cited in Michael Rose, The English Poor Law 1780-1930, Newton Abbot, David & Charles, 1971, p. 126.
89. Garwood, op. cit., note 9 above, p. 103.
90. Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, 11 Nov. 1855, p. 12.
91. NA, MH 74/15, report from Bacot to Phillipps, 5 Jan. 1846, p. 178.
92. NA, MH 74/15, letter from Bacot to Benjamin Alcock, Sept. 1853, p. 339.
93. NA, MH 74/15, report from Bacot to Phillipps, 2 Oct. 1846, p. 195.
94. Durey, op. cit., note 22 above, p. 219.
95. NA, MH 74/15, report from Alcock to Phillipps, 7 Mar. 1843, pp. 53, 61, 67.
96. NA, MH 74/15, report from Alcock and Bacot to Phillipps, 6 Oct. 1842, p.2.
97. NA, MH 74/15, report from Alcock and Bacot to Phillipps, 4 Nov. 1843, p.54.
98. NA, MH 74/15, letter from Alcock to Ellis, 20 Oct. 1842, p. 7.
99. NA, MH 74/15, letter from Alcock to Governors and Guardians of St Mary Newington, 8 Nov. 1842, p. 9.
100. NA, MH 74/15, report from Bacot to Phillipps, 5 Jan. 1846, p. 179.
101. NA, MH 74/15, letter from Eubank to Dix, 30 Nov. 1849, p. 286; letter from Gregg to Hogg, 29 May 1855, p. 366; letter from Gregg to Holden, 5 Nov. 1856, p. 416.
102. NA, MH 74/15, letter from Bacot to Ellis, 14 Oct. 1857, p. 453.
103. NA, MH 74/15, letter from Eubank to Dix, 26 Jan. 1850, p. 298. For hospital post-mortems, see MacDonald, Possessing the dead, op. cit., note 22 above.
104. NA, MH 74/15, Bacot to Harwell, 18 Jan. 1855, pp. 354-5. Prisons also opened bodies (NA, MH 74/15, Bacot to Ellis, 14 Oct. 1857, p. 453).
105. NA, MH 74/15, letter from Bacot to Dix, 1 Mar. 1848, p. 233.
106. See, for example, NA, MH 74/15, Eubank to Dix, 18 January 1850, p. 295.
107. NA, MH 74/15, letter from Bacot to Dix, 20 Jan. 1847, p. 202; see also letter from Gregg to Dix, 19 Jan. 1855, p. 355; letter from Gregg to Dix, 9 Feb. 1855, p. 356.
108. NA, MH 74/15, letter from Bacot to Johnes, 8 Jan. 1855, p. 353.
109. NA, MH 74/15, letter from Bacot to Adams, 14 Jan. 1850, p. 293, and letter from Bacot to Smith 21 Jan. 1850, p. 296.
110. Southwark Local History Library, Parish of St Mary Newington, 'Legal Papers about the Indictment of Alfred Feist, Workhouse Master, for the Removal of Paupers' Bodies to Guy's Hospital School of Anatomy, 1858'. 'Lambeth Police Court, Monday 20 January' and 'Copy of evidence taken by Mr Farnall, Poor Law Inspector, on 22 January 1857'. See MacDonald, 'Possessing bodies', and Possessing the dead, both cited in note 22 above.
111. R. v. Alfred Feist (1858), see Henry R Dearsly and Thomas Bell, Crown cases reserved for consideration, and decided by the judges of England, London, Stevens & Norton; H Sweet & W Maxwell, 1858, p. 1135.
112. The Anatomy Act joined other limited, non-proprietary rights in a corpse that were recognized in law, notably the duty to bury it. For a discussion, see Rohan Hardcastle, Law and the human body: property rights, ownership and control, Oxford and Portland, OR, Hart Publishing, 2007, pp. 46-53
113. Daniel Sperling, Posthumous interests: legal-ethical perspectives, Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 94-5. Prior to the Anatomy Act, the law also held that a dead person could not dispose of his corpse via a testamentary declaration, although utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham notably had: Ngaire Naffine, 'When does the legal person die? Jeremy Bentham and the "Auto-Icon"', Aust. J. Legal Philos., 2000, 25: 79-95.
114. Dearsly and Bell, op. cit., note 88 above, p. 1135.
115. Hurren, 'A pauper dead-house' and 'Whose body', both cited in note 22 above
116. NA, MH 74/15, letter from Gregg to Brown, 14 Dec. 1857, p. 462.
117. NA, MH 74/15, report from Bacot to Waddington, 4 Jan. 1858, pp. 465-6.
118. Charles Hawkins, MRCS, had trained at St George's Hospital. He assisted surgeon Sir Benjamin Brodie, later becoming Brodie's close friend and editor of his collected works. Hawkins was a Fellow of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society. He served St George's Hospital throughout his life, becoming its treasurer and vice-president, and he also sat on the Council of the Royal College of Surgeons. Lancet, 30 April 1892, i: 1004.
119. NA, MH 74/36, letter from Waddington to Hawkins, 17 Feb. 1858.
120. NA, MH 74/6, letter from Hawkins to Dix, 25 Feb. 1858, pp. 4-5.