Death, Dissection and the Destitute: The Politics of the Corpse in Pre-Victorian Britain

"Ruth Richardson is one of the most methodical historians I’ve ever come across. This book is not a toe-tapper for a Sunday afternoon, or for lounging on a beach somewhere. She really looked at the entire world associated with anatomy—in which I’m firmly embedded—and how it reflected and impacted upon society at this particular historical moment. Anatomy has always had a relationship with the dead; that’s how we learn. But in the early days of anatomy, most dissections were actually done on animals. The shift to the dissection of humans made for quite an important political, societal, and religious stance. The period Richardson examines was a time not only of political and religious upheaval, but also of scientific enlightenment. Again, there’s an inherent tension: you have these educated, academic people desperate to learn because they see a potential benefit. They know, intuitively, that to better understand the human body is to be able to save lives. So there’s a drive, from an educational and humanitarian perspective—but where do you get the bodies from? Up until that point, the only way that you could legally acquire human bodies for dissection was if they were convicted murderers, cut down from the gallows. Hanging people fell out of favour for a bit; we were much more likely to deport them to colonies. By sending them away, we were getting rid of people we didn’t really want in society while also ensuring they were pioneering the British Empire. Problem was, there now weren’t enough bodies. “You have these educated academic people who are desperate to learn because they can see there’s a benefit in this: if I understand the human body better then maybe we’ll be able to save lives. But where do you get the bodies from?” How do we feed a machine of science and education hungry to move forward when we don’t have the means to learn? Medical books were very expensive and still quite rare. Animal corpses weren’t telling us about the human. With the Anatomy Act of 1832, we could acquire bodies from prisons, poorhouses, and mental institutes. Before, the cadaver came from the criminally convicted; now, it came from the poor. Because that essentially equated the poor with felons, there was a huge societal upheaval about how this was not right. And so people started to protect dead bodies. But nature abhors a vacuum—the minute there’s a commodity of a sellable nature, I’m afraid, human villains will always find a way to exploit it. So, we get into the whole area of acquiring bodies illegally, which captures the human imagination and reverberates through history to this day, whether it’s body snatchers (who were actually removing corpses and stealing them from graveyards) or the extremes likes of Burke and Hare, who decided they’d remove the middleman and not wait for people to die—they’d murder them to provide for the anatomy houses. Richardson is able to condense this huge tapestry of perspectives—of education, government and politics, societal upheaval and tensions, religion and empire—into a book. It is the most incredibly thought-provoking dialogue of the history of anatomy at a time of turmoil. And we learnt enormously from it. We learn and stand on the shoulders of real giants—and one of the real giants of the time was Jeremy Bentham. Bentham advocated that we need to get away from looking at acquiring corpses for study as inherently bad; he thought we needed to change the culture and the perception. He was actually one of the first people who voluntarily chose to donate his body to anatomy on his death. Of course, all anatomy bequeathal is now done on that basis: live individuals make the decision to donate their body to the science of anatomy. In the midst of this, Bentham was a real pioneer who found a way forward, even though it didn’t actually take off as well as it should have done at the time. The real change in anatomy bequeathal came around the Second World War. Tapping into the the country’s patriotism, we were able to say: we need to train our surgeons, we need to train our doctors, because we need to be able to save the lives of our young men who are out on the battlefield. But Jeremy Bentham, right in the middle of this period that Richardson portrays so beautifully, is the one that lit the lantern for the way forward. Where we have unidentified remains, then they must be buried as unidentified remains. They are not passed to anatomy departments. Anatomy departments in the UK can only accept bodies through a bequeathal process. You cannot bequeath your granny; your granny has to bequeath herself. That was a change that came relatively recently, since the new millennium. Prior to that, a family could bequeath granny’s remains without her permission. Now, you can’t do that. This isn’t true in other parts of the world, though. In parts of America, the John Doe or Jane Doe can be donated into the body programme. We can’t do that in the United Kingdom. Absolutely! Somebody needs to do something with it, at the end of the day. I view it as a terrible waste to be worm food, or go up in smoke and increase pollution in the world. We really don’t need that. I would like to choose my own death. We all would. I don’t want it to be a protracted affair; I don’t want it to be medicalised; I don’t want it to be undignified. I want to be in a position of sound mind where my ducks are all in a row and my family all know that this is my way, and I want to decide when I’m ready. I would love to be in a position to be able to take a pill that would allow me to do that, but at the moment in this country that isn’t possible. I accept it’s not for everybody, and I accept that there absolutely have to be legal constraints to ensure the system isn’t abused. But I love to think that we could reach a point of sufficient maturity as a society that we can give people the right to choose. When I die, I want my body to be donated to Dundee University, home of the Thiel embalming process . I really want to be Thiel-embalmed, not with formalin—formalin is really horrible stuff. When they’ve finished dissecting me, I’d like them to collect my bones, boil them down to get rid of the fat, and reconstruct my skeleton. I’ll be a standing articulated skeleton in the dissecting room. That way, I can carry on teaching for the rest of my death. It’s gorgeous! It’s perfectly normal: an anatomist who wants to teach. Quite often you find that when an anatomist retires, they go back and teach part-time. Anatomy is one of the greenest departments in a university because it recycles its staff. They come in, teach, retire, come back to teach part-time, and when they die, come back and teach yet again—albeit silently. “When they’ve finished dissecting me, I’d like them to collect my bones and reconstruct my skeleton. I’ll be a standing articulated skeleton in the dissecting room. That way, I can carry on teaching for the rest of my death.” If you genuinely believe in the principles of what anatomy teaching is about, then, in our slightly unusual minds, it seems perfectly natural. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s a really difficult one. Gunther von Hagens is (was?) a marvellous anatomist. His skill and his techniques are phenomenal. Am I comfortable with human bodies being displayed? Not really. But people have allegedly bequeathed their remains for that purpose. If people choose to do that, that’s entirely up to them. If people choose to view them, that’s entirely up to them. My choice would be not to go and view. I don’t feel that human anatomy is there for entertainment. I feel it’s there for education. I find it a slightly distasteful barrier between one and the other. I can remember in the early stages of the programmes that Gunther von Hagens did on television—he brought in a wooden box on a forklift truck and inside the wooden crate was a frozen human body. And then, on set, with a bandsaw, he sawed the human body down the middle. My question is: why do people need to see that? What do people learn from that? I don’t actually think they learn anything. And if they don’t learn anything then what’s it about? It’s about titivation and it’s about entertainment. That causes me a problem. If, however, the programme is saying: ‘look, here is the heart; here is the anterior interventricular artery—this anterior descending branch is the one most likely to block; how it blocks is because of arterial sclerosis and we get that because of cholesterol in food’, then I can see how you’re using the anatomy dissection to be able to inform the public. And that is about education. So, I’m not against the public viewing anatomy. I’m uncomfortable with what is the ultimate intention ."