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n I’ve mentioned it before (and there is no reason tonsuppose that I won’t mention it again in the future), but it wasn’t until then17th Century that any real progress was made in medicinal knowledgenbecause medicine, like many other fields of knowledge, was hide-bound by thenscholastic legacy of the Ancients. Doctors were, more or less, obediently andnunthinkingly basing their practices on the writings and theories of suchnAncient Greek authors as Galen, Avicenna or Hippocrates.
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| Galen, Avicenna and Hippocrates |
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nThere was some smallnprogress by the odd individual, and the odd remarkable breakthrough, but itnwasn’t until the Age of the Enlightenment that things really began change. Thengreat leap forward began with such empiricists as Francis Bacon, men who werennot satisfied with simply reading what had been written two millennianpreviously but who observed, experimented and questioned, seeking answers fornthemselves.
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| Sir Francis Bacon |
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nBacon famously wrote that ‘knowledge is power’ and it was thensearch for knowledge that gave doctors the power to treat their patients muchnmore efficiently. The basis of all medical and surgical knowledge comesnultimately from the study of anatomy. Disease is, essentially, disorderednfunction and disordered function cannot be treated without knowledge of healthynfunction, which, in turn, cannot be understood without knowledge of structure,nand structure cannot be understood unless it is examined. You cannot ‘guess’ anatomy; it has tonbe studied and examined.
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nLet’s say you have a pain in your right shoulder. Younmight think that maybe it’s due to sleeping badly or perhaps straining yourselfnwhen lifting something awkwardly and in most cases you’d be right, but it couldnalso be a symptom that there is something wrong with, say, your liver. Why?
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| Nerves |
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nBecause the right phrenic nerve has a branch to the liver, and the thirdncervical nerve, from which the phrenic nerves arise, extends into the shoulder.nIn what is called ‘referred pain’, a disorder in one part of the body actuallynproduces pain in a different part of the body –but you couldn’t guessnthat a dodgy liver is giving you gip in your right shoulder. You’d need to knownabout the physical structure of the nerves. And to do that, you’d need to seenthem. And to do that, until very recently, you’d need to get yourself a body.nPreferably a dead one. Now, in the past, this was a bit of a problem.
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| Brughel – The Triumph of Death |
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nThenChurch, for instance, wasn’t too keen on the idea, not least because you’d neednyour body at the Final Trump when you’d be raised out of your grave for thenFinal Judgement (and diseases were caused by the Devil anyway, so why did younneed to study anatomy when theology was much more efficacious). And thenpopulace also thought that they might need their bodies again at some time innthe future. The bodies of condemned criminals were sometimes made available forndissection (following the 1752 Murder Act) but the former judicial zeal fornexecutions for the most trivial of offences had started to wane by then andncapital sentences had fallen to about fifty per year in Victorian days, but thenmedical and anatomy schools needed around about ten times that amount. So thennecessary deficit was made up by the Resurrection Men, a class of criminalsnthat dug up freshly buried corpses and sold them to the doctors.
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| Resurrectionists at work |
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nIt was an oddncrime really, as the theft of a body was a misdemeanour at common lawnpunishable by a fine or imprisonment (or a whipping in Scotland), rather thannbeing a felony, which carried the punishment of either the death penalty orntransportation for life. The authorities tended, on the whole, to turn a blindneye, providing that the body snatchers were not too blatant, and considered thenwhole sorry business to be somewhat of a necessary evil. The public did try, byna variety of methods, to deter the thefts; cemeteries were patrolled bynwatchmen with guard dogs at night, lookout towers were erected in them, or ironncages, called mort safes, were built over graves and sunk deep into thensoil.
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| Mort safes |
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nPopular public sentiment was almost entirely hostile to thenResurrectionists, painting them as fearsome, ruthless ghouls and the lowest ofnthe criminal low. The doctors were in terrible bind – they needed the bodiesnfor dissection, in order to train future members of the profession.nObjectively, only good could come from the anatomy schools, and mankind as a wholenstood to benefit. But without a steady supply of specimens, they had no othernrecourse but to deal with the criminals. This led to the public tarring thenmedical profession with the same brush, and tales, often unsubstantiated, werencirculated of unscrupulous surgeons getting up to all manner of Frankensteinishnbehaviour.
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| Snatching a Body |
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nThere were a number of sensational cases that kept the practice ofngrave robbing firmly in the public gaze (more of which over the next couple ofndays), but perhaps one of the oddest stories was reported in the NorthamptonnMercury of November 2nd 1811, which told how the whole corps ofnLondon resurrectionists went on strike for a price increase of one guinea pernbody, following the success of a similar action in the previous year, raisingnthe overall cost of a cadaver from three guineas to five guineas! The situationnchanged following the passing of the 1832 Anatomy Act, when greater licence wasngiven to the medical schools, allowing them more access to legitimatenspecimens. In addition to executed criminals, unclaimed bodies from workhousesnand prisons could then be used in dissections, as well as donated corpses fromnthe next of kin (usually in return for the cost of burial later).
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| Body Snatching – 1824 |
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nThere is annexcellent anonymous pamphlet of 1824, reprinted from the Westminster Review,nentitled Body Snatching, which puts forward a sober, considered case fornthe practice of anatomical dissection, presenting the benefits of a sensiblenapproach to this delicate subject and, rightly, pointing out that the illegalnrecourse to the body snatchers could be eliminated overnight if the provisionnof corpses was properly licensed and administered. There was some sentimentalnpublic opposition to the proposals but a couple of particularly grisly casesnaltered the opinions of many people and the Act eventually passed on thenStatute Books and, as predicted, the resurrection men were condemned to thenpages of history.
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