Anatomy is an unusual subject because the material we use is human. This gives, at one and the same time, a fascination and a repugnance, simply because the material is human.
'The study of anatomy by dissection requires in its practitioners the effective suspension or suppression of many normal physical and emotional responses to the wilful mutilation of the body of another human being' - Richardson
In other words, in normal society, outside the medical school we would probably be locked up for dissection, and its not very nice anyway, is it? The name given to the ability to suppress physical and emotional responses is 'clinical detachment'. Clinical detachment is the way in which we deal, as anatomists, with the repugnant, the distasteful, and what, if we did it to a living human being, would be criminal. It is acquired slowly, bit by bit, and to different extents. William Harvey, discoverer of circulation of the blood, dissected both his father and his sister. Few of us would wish to be so clinically detached.
If we did it to a living human being is the key phrase. The cadaver is not a living human being but neither is it a pound of offal.. Perhaps we should examine our attitude to our own, and other peoples' bodies.
Man has always been fascinated by the interior of his body. The first written documents to survive are clay tablets from around 4000BC in Nineveh. The cuneiform script impressed upon these tablets can be translated, and tells us many things. Some tablets are inventories for warehouses, some are the equivalent of laundry lists, and some tell us about the insides of men and animals opened in a form of fortune telling - trying to predict the future.
The next landmark was anatomical detail set down by Galen in the second century AD. This was meagre, distorted and bore little relationship to the dissected body.
In the Renaissance a change of attitude occurred: in Italy this took the form of patronage and the setting up of schools of anatomy, notably at Padua, and the work of the first two great anatomists, Leonardo da Vinci and Versalius. Da Vinci's work was hidden until the late eighteenth century but Versalius De Humani Corpus Fabrica, published in 1543 was the first anatomy textbook as we know it, drawn from life (or death), accurate and painstaking.
England, as usual in things European, lagged behind, but Scotland granted royal patronage to the Edinburgh College of Surgeons and Barbers in 1506. England followed suit in 1540. (Surgeons thus have a long connection with barbers: this is because medical men denied them professional status, and leads to the inverted snobbery of the consultant surgeon whose title is still MR . The low status of the surgeon, which dated from the Council of Tours edict in 1163 whereby the church abhorred the spilling of blood. Ecclesiastics who were also medics were thus discouraged from surgery, although they continued to practice medicine, and subcontracted surgical procedures to others, often barbers, who performed blood letting, tooth drawing and later midwifery.)
It is at this point that things get complicated and that Anatomy starts to get a bad name. Part of the patronage given by James IV of Scotland was the bodies of certain executed criminals for dissection. In England Henry VIII granted the annual right to the bodies of four hanged felons. Charles II later increased this to six . Now bodies had to come from somewhere, but the conjoining of anatomy and hanging offences was very bad news, and the basis of an association which lasted until the first Anatomy act in 1832. Dissection was now a recognised punishment, a fate worse than death to be added to hanging for the worst offenders.
The dissections performed on hanged felons were public: indeed part of the punishment was the delivery from hangman to surgeons at the gallows following public execution, and later public exhibition of the open body itself. The punishment replaced the earlier hanging drawing and quartering, in which the four quarters were exhibited on spikes in various parts of the city, and differed only in that it was performed by medical men, and, incidentally that anatomical knowledge was obtained. This state of affairs was accepted by surgeons because it was, oddly, good for their image to achieve royal patronage and to be linked with the law. In France, incidentally surgeons acquired respectability by the back door. In 1687 surgeons performed a successful operation for anal fistula on Louis XIV. It was successful, probably because they practised for a year on lesser mortals with the same complaint. In 1752 an act was passed allowing dissection of all murderers as an alternative to hanging in chains. This was a grisly fate, the tarred body being suspended in a cage until it fell to pieces. The object of this and dissection was to deny a grave. After the act the number of available bodies increased, and the act itself was pro anatomy in that the execution had to follow smartly upon conviction, and the body conveyed immediately to the surgeons. Dissection was described as 'a further terror and peculiar Mark of Infamy' and 'in no case whatsoever shall the body of any murderer be suffered to be buried'. The rescue, or attempted rescue of the corpse was punishable by transportation for seven years.
The act benefited anatomists immediately. In 1775 the royal college of surgeons acquired eight bodies at once before rigor mortis had set in: one was 'put in an attitude and allowed to stiffen' by William Hunter, Professor of Anatomy, flayed and a mould prepared. A cast from this is still on view at the Royal Society of Arts in London.
Hunter was a key figure in Anatomy. He ran his own private anatomy school in Great Windmill St in London where he thought in the 'Parisian manner', each student having access to an individual corpse. He also set up a museum of human and comparative anatomy. The Company of Surgeons was 'intellectually stagnant' at this time, had no hall and was more interested as a City livery company in giving public dinners than offering public dissection. Despite this, in the period between 1701-1744, 24 lecturers in anatomy are known to have been active in London alone. The private schools had no legal status and no legal source of material. The question was, where did Hunter, his brother and the other anatomists setting up private schools get their cadavers - certainly not from official sources. The suspicion, probably justified, was that people were being paid to obtain corpses. The corpse was now a commodity: it had cash value and could be bought and sold. Harvey's solution of keeping it in the family did not become popular: most anatomists bought from the gallows or the grave.
Agents representing surgeons would bargain with condemned prisoners not under sentence of dissection (remember this only happened for murder: hanging was in vogue for stealing a sheep or even a loaf) : occasionally prisoners struck a bargain to pay expenses, to provide for a family or to buy the customary decent apparel for the hanging. Supply was unreliable, however: riots at public hangings became common, partly because of the paltry nature of hanging events, partly from superstition. The body was often reclaimed by relatives and the unpopular anatomists stoned, defeated and out of pocket. Competition was often so fierce that a rival anatomy school carried off the body. Dissection was unpopular and other medical uses were to be found for a recently hung body - the cure of scofula, goitre, wens, ulcers, bleeding tumours, cancers and withered limbs for example. To prevent riots and disorder the Sheriff of London took all bodies of hanged men, except those sentenced to dissection, into his own custody and handed them to the relatives for burial.
However in 1826 592 bodies were dissected by students at London anatomy schools. Most of these must have come from grave robbers. The earliest grave robbers seem to have been the surgeons themselves. In 1721 a clause was inserted into apprentices indentures issued by the Edinburgh college of surgeons forbidding trainee surgeons from becoming involved in exhumation. Later, students accompanied professional body snatchers as observers. In Scotland it was possible to pay fees in corpses rather than in cash. By the 1780s the work was left to the professionals -Ressurectionists or Sack' em up men. A professional gang of 15 body snatchers was rounded up in Lambeth in 1795 . They worked, winter only, serving 'eight surgeons of repute' from 30 burial grounds. Corpses cost two guineas and a crown -?2.35 and children six shillings for the first foot and nine pence for each extra inch. By 1820 the cost was up to 20 guineas for an unremarkable corpse for dissection. Freaks cost a lot more. O'Brien, the Irish giant, well over seven feet tall, who died in 1783 was bought by John Hunter for ?500, despite his wish to be buried at sea to avoid such a fate. He now stands in the entrance of the Royal College of Surgeons in London.
Oddly body snatching was not an offence. The body was not regarded as property, and, once dead, could not be owned or stolen. Occasionally a body snatcher would be whipped, on unclear legal grounds. Only if property - such as a shroud was removed was the robber a thief.
The grave robbers job was easier if the graves of the poor were robbed. Pit burials, or mass graves were common, and often a large square pit up to 20 feet deep would be excavated, filled with coffins gradually over a period of weeks then closed. Stealing bodies from such graves cannot have been difficult. The wealthy, of course could buy a metal coffin (1781), Bribgeman's patent cast iron coffin (1818) or use a mortsafe - a kind of cage of iron bars surrounding a tomb. They could also, and did, employ guards, even armed guards to ensure their eternal rest. The poor, acting in concert to reduce the cost often had a parish mortsafe or 'jankers' where bodies were kept until too high for the anatomist to use.
The demise of the body snatcher is perhaps one of the first cases of consumerism. Since the law was unable or unwilling to help, because of the lack of a clear offence, it was left to the public to intervene. Thus in 1828 two medical students caught attempting to snatch a body were committed to gaol at their own request as they were threatened by a large crowd. The following afternoon a crowd of several hundreds 'assembled round the gaol , provided with axes'. In Yarmouth, Hereford, Greenwich and Lambeth (we are now in the age of steam, and rapid reliable transport, at least by sea) similar scenes ensued. A full scale riot broke out in an Aberdeen anatomy school in 1832 when a dog unearthed human remains. The School was looted and burned. The crowd, estimated at 20,000 denied access to the fire engine.
Anatomy is an unusual subject because the material we use is human. This gives, at one and the same time, a fascination and a repugnance, simply because the material is human.
The next landmark was anatomical detail set down by Galen in the second century AD. This was meagre, distorted and bore little relationship to the dissected body.
In the Renaissance a change of attitude occurred: in Italy this took the form of patronage and the setting up of schools of anatomy, notably at Padua, and the work of the first two great anatomists, Leonardo da Vinci and Versalius. Da Vinci's work was hidden until the late eighteenth century but Versalius De Humani Corpus Fabrica, published in 1543 was the first anatomy textbook as we know it, drawn from life (or death), accurate and painstaking.
England, as usual in things European, lagged behind, but Scotland granted royal patronage to the Edinburgh College of Surgeons and Barbers in 1506. England followed suit in 1540. (Surgeons thus have a long connection with barbers: this is because medical men denied them professional status, and leads to the inverted snobbery of the consultant surgeon whose title is still MR . The low status of the surgeon, which dated from the Council of Tours edict in 1163 whereby the church abhorred the spilling of blood. Ecclesiastics who were also medics were thus discouraged from surgery, although they continued to practice medicine, and subcontracted surgical procedures to others, often barbers, who performed blood letting, tooth drawing and later midwifery.)
It is at this point that things get complicated and that Anatomy starts to get a bad name. Part of the patronage given by James IV of Scotland was the bodies of certain executed criminals for dissection. In England Henry VIII granted the annual right to the bodies of four hanged felons. Charles II later increased this to six . Now bodies had to come from somewhere, but the conjoining of anatomy and hanging offences was very bad news, and the basis of an association which lasted until the first Anatomy act in 1832. Dissection was now a recognised punishment, a fate worse than death to be added to hanging for the worst offenders.
Agents representing surgeons would bargain with condemned prisoners not under sentence of dissection (remember this only happened for murder: hanging was in vogue for stealing a sheep or even a loaf) : occasionally prisoners struck a bargain to pay expenses, to provide for a family or to buy the customary decent apparel for the hanging. Supply was unreliable, however: riots at public hangings became common, partly because of the paltry nature of hanging events, partly from superstition. The body was often reclaimed by relatives and the unpopular anatomists stoned, defeated and out of pocket. Competition was often so fierce that a rival anatomy school carried off the body. Dissection was unpopular and other medical uses were to be found for a recently hung body - the cure of scofula, goitre, wens, ulcers, bleeding tumours, cancers and withered limbs for example. To prevent riots and disorder the Sheriff of London took all bodies of hanged men, except those sentenced to dissection, into his own custody and handed them to the relatives for burial.
However in 1826 592 bodies were dissected by students at London anatomy schools. Most of these must have come from grave robbers. The earliest grave robbers seem to have been the surgeons themselves. In 1721 a clause was inserted into apprentices indentures issued by the Edinburgh college of surgeons forbidding trainee surgeons from becoming involved in exhumation. Later, students accompanied professional body snatchers as observers. In Scotland it was possible to pay fees in corpses rather than in cash. By the 1780s the work was left to the professionals -Ressurectionists or Sack' em up men. A professional gang of 15 body snatchers was rounded up in Lambeth in 1795 . They worked, winter only, serving 'eight surgeons of repute' from 30 burial grounds. Corpses cost two guineas and a crown -?2.35 and children six shillings for the first foot and nine pence for each extra inch. By 1820 the cost was up to 20 guineas for an unremarkable corpse for dissection. Freaks cost a lot more. O'Brien, the Irish giant, well over seven feet tall, who died in 1783 was bought by John Hunter for ?500, despite his wish to be buried at sea to avoid such a fate. He now stands in the entrance of the Royal College of Surgeons in London.
Oddly body snatching was not an offence. The body was not regarded as property, and, once dead, could not be owned or stolen. Occasionally a body snatcher would be whipped, on unclear legal grounds. Only if property - such as a shroud was removed was the robber a thief.
The grave robbers job was easier if the graves of the poor were robbed. Pit burials, or mass graves were common, and often a large square pit up to 20 feet deep would be excavated, filled with coffins gradually over a period of weeks then closed. Stealing bodies from such graves cannot have been difficult. The wealthy, of course could buy a metal coffin (1781), Bribgeman's patent cast iron coffin (1818) or use a mortsafe - a kind of cage of iron bars surrounding a tomb. They could also, and did, employ guards, even armed guards to ensure their eternal rest. The poor, acting in concert to reduce the cost often had a parish mortsafe or 'jankers' where bodies were kept until too high for the anatomist to use.
The demise of the body snatcher is perhaps one of the first cases of consumerism. Since the law was unable or unwilling to help, because of the lack of a clear offence, it was left to the public to intervene. Thus in 1828 two medical students caught attempting to snatch a body were committed to gaol at their own request as they were threatened by a large crowd. The following afternoon a crowd of several hundreds 'assembled round the gaol , provided with axes'. In Yarmouth, Hereford, Greenwich and Lambeth (we are now in the age of steam, and rapid reliable transport, at least by sea) similar scenes ensued. A full scale riot broke out in an Aberdeen anatomy school in 1832 when a dog unearthed human remains. The School was looted and burned. The crowd, estimated at 20,000 denied access to the fire engine.