The Body Divided

Human Beings and Human 'Material' in Modern Medical History

Sally Wilde, Sarah Ferber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754668343
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317040262
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Bodies and body parts of the dead have long been considered valuable material for use in medical science. Over time and in different places, they have been dissected, autopsied, investigated, harvested for research and therapeutic purposes, collected to turn into museum and other specimens, and then displayed, disposed of, and exchanged. This book examines the history of such activities, from the early nineteenth century through to the present, as they took place in hospitals, universities, workhouses, asylums and museums in England, Australia and elsewhere. Through a series of case studies, the volume reveals the changing scientific, economic and emotional value of corpses and their contested place in medical science.

Chapter 1
A Body Buried is a Body Wasted: The Spoils of Human Dissection

Helen MacDonald

In January 1847, parliamentarian Thomas Dunscombe revealed in the House of Commons the latest scandal concerning the ways in which British convicts were treated on board the hulks moored in the Thames at Woolwich. Dunscombe demanded that a Select Committee investigate the medical treatment meted out to those awaiting exile to Britain’s colonies aboard these makeshift prisons and what became of their corpses when they died. Prisoners’ corpses were being subjected to post-mortem examinations during which, Dunscombe asserted, surgeons threw entrails into the river rather than burying the bodies intact in the marshland graves that had for decades served this purpose. The convicts on board the Woolwich hulks told Dunscombe that they feared they were being allowed to die so that their bodies could be sent to a school under the Anatomy Act of 1832. In parliament, Dunscombe demanded to know how many hulk corpses went to such destinations rather than to graves, but the government brought a halt to his disclosures. Home Secretary Sir George Grey remonstrated with Dunscombe for raising the matter, suggesting that instead he should have quietly expressed his concerns with the executive government. In this way, one call among many made during the nineteenth century for an investigation into how the Anatomy Act worked was effectively sidelined.1

In her history of the making of Britain’s Anatomy Act, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (1988), Ruth Richardson demonstrated that the Act radically changed the source from which British medical schools obtained corpses for their students to dissect. Prior to 1832 murderers’ bodies provided the only legal source of subjects, under an Act of Parliament that made dissection a punitive measure inflicted on corpses. An Act for Better Preventing the Horrid Crime of Murder (25 Geo. 2, c. 37, 1752) had been designed with deterrence in mind by men who knew how far destroying a corpse and denying it burial strayed from customary ways of dealing with the dead. It attached a ‘peculiar Mark of Infamy’ to murderers’ bodies and was meant to induce ‘Terror’ in those who heard the sentence of dissection pronounced.2 However the gallows proved to be an uncertain source of subjects for Britain’s medical schools. Few people were hanged for murder in any given year, and their corpses were sent to the Colleges of Surgeons rather than being distributed among the schools. The supply was grossly inadequate. As Sir Robert Inglis pointed out during the parliamentary debate in 1832, in the previous year a mere 11 corpses had been ‘legally disposed of as subjects’, while 800 students of medicine required one or more each to dissect and upon which to practise operative surgery.3 This left most schools and students to find subjects where they could. Medical men attached to hospitals made good use of these institutions’ mortuaries. They and others also purchased corpses from grave-robbers who sold the freshest bodies they obtained intact – and took what they could get for the limbs they cut from putrefying remains.4

The Act to Regulate Schools of Anatomy brought this risky business to an end by authorizing the men in charge of the institutions in which large numbers of poor people died – workhouses, hospitals, prisons and, later in the century, lunatic asylums – to dispose of these corpses to a medical school. This increased supply and effectively reduced the cost of a corpse, thereby putting the resurrectionists out of work. So long as the patient or inmate had not recorded a formal protest against being dissected should they die and no relative claimed the body for a private burial instead within 48 hours of the death, it could be sent to a school. Then, after six weeks, that school was to pay for the remains to be buried.

This chapter focuses on an aspect of the history of human dissection that has thus far been little explored: how the concept of waste was mobilized under the British Anatomy Act. Waste-talk featured in nineteenth-century discussions of dissection in two ways. It was deployed in the utilitarian sense favoured by those advocating increasing supplies of corpses for medical schools. To these people, any corpse that left an institution to be buried rather than dissected was a wasted thing. Second, waste featured as the detritus that was created in dissecting rooms. In highlighting what became of the devastated remains left behind following a dissection, the Anatomy Act’s critics effectively mobilized opposition to the statute.

Disposing of the Dead

The Anatomy Act’s burial clause appeared clearly to set out how a corpse was to be removed to a school from the place in which the death had occurred, and subsequently interred. This clause had been a late inclusion in the Act, which was surprising given that thwarted burials of one kind or another had been instrumental in bringing the legislation into being. Initially, the Bill’s promoter parliamentarian Henry Warburton had expressed the view that a burial service was only important to the living, and since under his Bill only ‘unclaimed’ corpses would be sent to the schools there was no need to provide for their subsequent interment. The burial clause was only included when it became clear to Warburton that some of the Bill’s parliamentary critics would support the legislation if subjects for dissection were ultimately disposed of in consecrated ground.5

The clause was designed with an eye to notions of public decency. Every corpse was to be ‘placed in a decent Coffin or Shell’ for removal to a school, and following the anatomical examination it was to be ‘decently interred in consecrated Ground, or in some public Burial Ground in use for Persons of that religious Persuasion to which the Person whose Body was so removed belonged’. Then, a burial certificate was to be sent to the Inspector of Anatomy.6

For the rest of the century, Section XIII caused the inspectors appointed under the Anatomy Act no end of trouble, for perversely it used the word ‘body’ to describe what would ultimately be interred. This implied that dissected remains retained a form of identity and integrity which, after six weeks in a dissecting room, was not the case. It was as if words had failed the parliamentarians or, more likely, that using a more accurate descriptor of the contents of those coffins needed to be avoided lest it raise the spectre of waste in people’s minds. The end products of a dissection – the mess of fats, fluids, tissues and bones that actually remained to be disposed of – needed to be disguised and using the word ‘body’ accomplished that. It enabled The Times to assure readers that dissection did not destroy a corpse as the ‘parts may afterwards be put together and decently conveyed to the earth’.7 In practice, little remained of a body to bury at its conclusion and this became a potent weapon for the Act’s critics for the rest of the century.

Repugnance to Dissection

First, though, who was this public that was opposed to dissection and therefore feared by the Act’s promoters and mobilized by its critics?

Demand for corpses during the nineteenth century outstripped the number that could be obtained under the Anatomy Act. Hardly anyone donated their own bodies or those of their relatives to be dissected, to the point that when a few people did so, theirs was considered to be an idiosyncratic choice.8 Dissection was therefore talked about from a base understanding that ‘the public’ was strongly opposed to it. This public was frequently invoked as if it comprised pretty much everyone – or at least everyone whom the Act had made vulnerable to being dissected. During parliamentary debates in 1829 and 1831/1832 dissection was said to be ‘extremely unpopular out of doors’ (outside parliament) and offensive to ‘the community’.9 ‘The great mass of the British public’ argued Mr Sadler in the House of Commons ‘was alive to this subject, and they contemplated with extraordinary disgust any advancement in science that was to be made at their expense’.10 More specifically, parliamentarians believed that ‘destitute’ people felt ‘the most unconquerable objection to the dissection of their bodies’.11

After the Anatomy Act had passed, the anatomy inspectors appointed under it also strongly believed that most lay people abhorred corpses being sent from institutions to schools to be dissected.12 They therefore strove to keep any discussion of the practices that arose under the Act out of the public domain. More specifically, the inspectors worried about certain elements of the British population whose prejudices they thought were particularly strong. In Scotland, home of the infamous Burke and Hare murders that had supplied Robert Knox’s anatomy school prior to the Act passing, Inspector James Somerville was particularly wary of the immigrant Irish population and the ‘lower orders’.13 He believed that the ‘peculiar difficulties’ experienced in obtaining corpses north of the border were due to the fact that the ‘poorer classes’ there had strong kindred ties and so did not lose sight of relatives who entered poor houses. But Somerville thought that an abhorrence against dissection also existed more widely – among ‘all classes of the Community’ – and had been ‘heightened by the exposure of the means by which the Schools were supplied’.14

In this context, quiet arrangements needed to be made by those promoting the Anatomy Act, as that legislation enabled, rather than compelled, institutions’ officials to send corpses to medical schools, and they often declined to do so. This left the inspectors needing to persuade parochial officers, which they did by discreetly contacting them to ask them to ‘comply’ with the Act, and trying to ensure that when they agreed, body removal was stealthily ac...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• The Body Divided in Time and Place: An Introductory Essay
• 1 A Body Buried is a Body Wasted: The Spoils of Human Dissection
• 2 Cadavers and the Social Dimension of Dissection
• 3 Dissection, Anatomy Acts and the Appropriation of Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Australia: ‘The Government’s Brains’ and the Benevolent Asylum
• 4 Bodies of Evidence: Dissecting Madness in Colonial Victoria (Australia)
• 5 A Judicious Collector: Edward Charles Stirling and the Procurement of Aboriginal Bodily Remains in South Australia, c.1880–1912
• 6 The Leprosy-Affected Body as a Commodity: Autonomy and Compensation
• 7 Gifts, Commodities and the Demand for Organ Transplants
• 8 Science Fiction, Cultural Knowledge and Rationality: How Stem Cell Researchers Talk About Reproductive Cloning
• 9 Inventing the Healthy Body: The Use of Popular Medical Discourses in Public Anatomical Exhibitions
• Epilogue
• Index