Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-lvtdw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-18T10:37:02.711Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Criminal Corpse, Anatomists, and the Criminal Law: Parliamentary Attempts to Extend the Dissection of Offenders in Late Eighteenth-Century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2015

Abstract

In the later eighteenth century, two schemes were introduced in Parliament for extending the practice of handing over the bodies of executed offenders to anatomists for dissection. Both measures were motivated by the needs of the field of anatomy, including the improvement of surgical skill, the development of medical teaching in the provinces, and public anatomical demonstrations. Yet both failed to pass into law due to concerns about the possibly damaging effects in terms of criminal justice. Through a detailed analysis of the origins and progress of these two parliamentary measures—a moment when the competing claims of anatomy and criminal justice vied for supremacy over the criminal corpse—the article sheds light on judicial attitudes to dissection as a method of punishment and adds to our understanding of the reasons why, in the nineteenth century, the dread of dissection would come to fall upon the dead poor rather than executed offenders.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 London Chronicle, 13 May 1786.

2 Public Advertiser, 13 May 1786. Other subjects discussed that day included the Saint Eustatia prize money, the national debt, and the registry of seamen.

3 House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, http://parlipapers.chadwyck.co.uk, accessed 8 November 2013 (hereafter HOC Papers), Parliamentary Register (hereafter PR), 11 March 1796, 287.

4 Richardson, Ruth, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London, 1988)Google Scholar.

5 For Henry VIII's edict of 1540, see Copeman, W. C. S., “The Evolution of Anatomy and Surgery Under the Tudors,” Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England 32, no. 1 (1963): 7Google ScholarPubMed; Dobson, Jessie, “Barber into Surgeon,” Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England 54, no. 2 (1974): 88Google ScholarPubMed. In 1565, Elizabeth I also granted similar privileges to the Royal College of Physicians and to the anatomy professors of Cambridge University—see Forbes, Thomas R., “A Note on the Procurement of Bodies for Dissection at the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1694 and 1710,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 29, no. 3 (1974): 332CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the development of anatomy teaching in the hospitals, see Lawrence, Susan C., Charitable Knowledge: Hospital Pupils and Practitioners in Eighteenth-Century London (Cambridge, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Loudon, Irvine, Medical Care and the General Practitioner 1750–1850 (Oxford, 1999), 4852Google Scholar.

6 Linebaugh, Peter, “The Tyburn Riot against the Surgeons,” in Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Hay, Douglas et al. (London, 1975), 65117Google Scholar.

7 On the “burking” scandals, see in particular, MacDonald, Helen, Human Remains: Dissection and its Histories (London, 2006)Google Scholar; Rosner, Lisa, The Anatomy Murders (Philadelphia, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wise, Lisa, The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave-Robbery in 1830s London (London, 2004)Google Scholar.

8 On the “ingenuity” of the Anatomy Act in cleverly disguising whose bodies would in fact be made available for dissection, see MacDonald, Helen, Possessing the Dead: The Artful Science of Anatomy (Carlton, 2010), 714Google Scholar.

9 Richardson, Death, Dissection, xv.

10 Ibid., 162.

11 For brief medical histories of criminal dissections, see Dobson, Jessie, “The ‘Anatomizing’ of Criminals,” Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England 9, no. 2 (1951): 112–20Google ScholarPubMed; Schullian, Dorothy M. and Forbes, Thomas R., “To Be Dissected and Anatomized,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 36, no. 4 (1981): 490–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; MacDonald, Helen, “Legal Bodies: Dissecting Murderers at the Royal College of Surgeons, London, 1800–1832,” Traffic: An Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Journal 2 (2003): 932Google Scholar.

12 Gatrell, V. A. C., The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford, 1994), 264–66Google Scholar.

13 On the introduction of the Murder Act, see in particular Beattie, J. M., Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1986), 520–30Google Scholar; Connors, Richard, “Parliament and Poverty in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England,” Parliamentary History 21, no. 2 (2002): 207–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ward, Richard M., Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London (London, 2014), 157204Google Scholar.

14 For a manuscript copy of the Bill, see “An Act for Regulating the Disposal after Execution of the Bodies of Criminals,” 1786, HL/PO/JO/10/2/61, Parliamentary Archives, London, England.

15 A total of 735 offenders were executed in England, Wales, and Scotland in the ten years between 1776 and 1785 for the offenses covered by the Bill. This has been calculated for English provinces using Sheriffs' Cravings, T 90/161–165, held at the National Archives, Kew, England (hereafter TNA). The data for Wales has been calculated using the National Library of Wales Crime and Punishment website, http://www.llgc.org.uk/sesiwn_fawr/index_s.htm (accessed 8 November 2013). The data for Scotland is taken from Young, Alex F., The Encyclopaedia of Scottish Executions, 1750 to 1963 (Orpington, 1998)Google Scholar. I am extremely grateful to Simon Devereaux for providing me with the data for London.

16 The most common capital offenses not included within the terms of the Bill included forgery, housebreaking, and animal theft.

17 Devereaux, Simon, “Recasting the Theatre of Execution: The Abolition of the Tyburn Ritual,” Past and Present 202, no. 1 (2009): 127CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Devereaux, Simon, “Imposing the Royal Pardon: Execution, Transportation, and Convict Resistance in London, 1789,” Law and History Review 25, no. 1 (2007): 123CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Ibid., 125–26.

20 For an excellent discussion of this, see Hitchcock, Tim and Shoemaker, Robert, London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690–1800 (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 7, “The State in Chaos.” I am very grateful to the authors for providing me with a manuscript copy of their forthcoming work. On the search for a new transportation location, see Christopher, Emma, A Merciless Place: The Lost Story of Britain's Convict Disaster in Africa and How it Led to the Settlement of Australia (Oxford, 2010)Google Scholar.

21 “Notebook of Letters written by Commodore Edward Thompson, 1 August 1784–9 August 1785, re: Matters Pertaining to his Service on the West Coast of Africa in HMS GRAMPUS,” THM/6, Archives of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England.

22 Ibid.

23 Times, 7 February 1785.

24 The framing of the Bill does not address this point, an issue that (as discussed below) was later leveled against Wilberforce as one of the major faults in the Bill.

25 Quoted in Follett, Richard R., Evangelicalism, Penal Theory, and the Politics of Criminal Law: Reform in England, 1808–1830 (Basingstoke, 2001), 94Google Scholar.

26 Coupland, Reginald, Wilberforce: A Narrative (Oxford, 1953), 53Google Scholar; Hague, William, William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Campaigner (London, 2007), 98Google Scholar; Pollock, John, Wilberforce (Eastbourne, 2007), 66Google Scholar.

27 Radzinowicz, Leon, A History of English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750 (London, 1948–90)Google Scholar, 1:476–99.

28 HOC Papers, Journals of the House of Commons (JHC), 23 June 1786, 930.

29 Devereaux, Simon, “The Abolition of the Burning of Women in England Reconsidered,” Crime, History and Societies 9, no. 2 (2005): 7398CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Ibid., 77.

31 Although Wilberforce had limited his proposal to petty treason (the murder of a husband by his wife), it was suggested by the attorney general, Richard Pepper Arden, that the clause for abolishing burning should also extend to women convicted of high treason, thereby encompassing the offense of coining, for which Phoebe Harris had been burned at the stake in June 1786. This extension was agreed to by the Commons, and added to the final draft of the Bill.

32 HOC Papers, PR, 16 May 1786, 227.

33 25 Geo. II, c. 37.

34 Letter from William Hey to Walter Spencer-Stanhope, 21 May 1785, Spencer-Stanhope MSS, SpSt/11/5/1/2, West Yorkshire Archive Service (hereafter WYAS), Bradford, England. In a biography of their father, Wilberforce's sons likewise noted that Wilberforce “undertook the measure” at the “suggestion” of William Hey—see Wilberforce, Robert Isaac and Wilberforce, Samuel, eds., The Life of William Wilberforce (London, 1838)Google Scholar, 1:114.

35 “Hey, William (1736–1819),” Margaret DeLacy in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, ed. Lawrence Goldman, Oxford, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13163, accessed 8 November 2013 (hereafter ODNB).

36 Josephine Margaret Lloyd, “The Casebooks of William Hey FRS (1736–1819): An Analysis of a Provincial Surgical and Midwifery Practice,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Leeds, 2005), 116.

37 Anning, S. T., “William Hey, FRS: The Father of Leeds Surgery,” Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society 17, no. 5 (1980): 109Google Scholar.

38 Letter from Hey to Stanhope, 21 May 1785, Spencer-Stanhope MSS, SpSt/11/5/1/2, WYAS.

39 Richardson, Death, Dissection. See also the works cited in n.7, above.

40 Times, 7 May and 11 May 1785. A similar case emerged three years later; see Times, 12 December 1788.

41 Times, 7 February 1785.

42 Ibid., 21 October 1785.

43 Pearson, John, The Life of William Hey, Esq. FRS (London, 1822), 8Google Scholar.

44 Ibid.

45 Rimmer, W. G., “William Hey of Leeds, Surgeon (1736–1819): A Reappraisal,” Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society 9, no. 7 (1961): 198Google Scholar.

46 Loudon, Medical Care and the General Practitioner, 7.

47 Anning, “William Hey,” 103, 107.

48 Loudon, Medical Care and the General Practitioner, 24; Lane, Joan, A Social History of Medicine: Health, Healing and Disease in England, 1750–1950 (London, 2001), 23Google Scholar.

49 For the concept of “anatomical entrepreneurs,” see Guerrini, Anita, “Anatomists and Entrepreneurs in Eighteenth-Century London,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 59, no. 2 (2004): 219–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 “Bromfield, William (bap. 1713, d. 1792),” Michael Bevan in ODNB.

51 For more on the anatomy lectures at Surgeons Hall, see Lawrence, Charitable Knowledge, 83–90.

52 Guerrini, “Anatomists and Entrepreneurs in Eighteenth-Century London.”

53 Ibid., 227–31; Sinclair, H. M. and Robb-Smith, A. H. T., A Short History of Anatomical Teaching in Oxford (Oxford, 1950), 2631Google Scholar; “Nicholls, Francis [Frank] (bap. 1699? d. 1778), Anatomist and Physician,” Anita Guerrini in ODNB.

54 Sinclair and Robb-Smith, A Short History, 29. For useful overviews of the Hunters, which also note the influence which their predecessors, such as Nicholls, had on them, see Bynum, W. F. and Porter, Roy, eds., William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar, especially 1–34; Peachey, G. C., A Memoir of William & John Hunter (Plymouth, 1924)Google Scholar. For other prominent dissectors of criminal corpses in the first half of the eighteenth century, see Guerrini, Anita, “Alexander Monro Primus and the Moral Theatre of Anatomy,” The Eighteenth Century 47, no. 1 (2006): 118CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Letter from Richard Walker to William Hey, 8 April 1785, Hey Family Correspondence, MS 1990/4, Leeds University Special Collections, Leeds, England.

56 See Digby, Anne, Making a Medical Living: Doctors and Patients in the English Market for Medicine, 1720–1911 (Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar.

57 Letter from Hey to Stanhope, 21 May 1785, Spencer-Stanhope MSS, SpSt/11/5/1/2, WYAS.

58 Lloyd, “The Casebooks of William Hey,” 112.

59 Ibid., 110–14.

60 Lawrence, Charitable Knowledge, 76–90.

61 Wilson, Adrian, “Conflict, Consensus and Charity: Politics and the Provincial Voluntary Hospitals in the Eighteenth Century,” English Historical Review 111, no. 442 (1996): 602Google Scholar. On the “thriving industry” in medical education, see Loudon, Medical Care and the General Practitioner, 49.

62 For Birmingham, see Reinarz, Jonathan, Health Care in Birmingham: The Birmingham Teaching Hospitals, 1779–1939 (Woodbridge, 2009)Google Scholar; Reinarz, Jonathan, The Birth of a Provincial Hospital: The Early Years of the General Hospital, Birmingham, 1765–1790 (Stratford upon Avon, 2003)Google Scholar. For Manchester, see Brockbank, W., Portrait of a Hospital, 1752–1948: To Commemorate the Bicentenary of the Royal Infirmary, Manchester (Manchester, 1952)Google Scholar; Pickstone, John, Medicine and Industrial Society: A History of Hospital Development in Manchester and its Region, 1752–1946 (Manchester, 1985)Google Scholar. For Bristol, see Fissell, Mary E., Patients, Power and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Bristol (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar; Smith, G. M., A History of the Bristol Royal Infirmary (Bristol, 1918)Google Scholar.

63 Wilson, “Conflict, Consensus and Charity.”

64 Anning, S. T., “Provincial Medical Schools in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Evolution of Medical Education in Britain, ed. Poynter, F. N. L. (London, 1966), 121Google Scholar.

65 Reinarz, Jonathan, “The Transformation of Medical Education in Eighteenth-Century England: International Developments and the West Midlands,” History of Education: Journal of the History of Education Society 37, no. 4 (2008): 549–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 For good overviews of medical education in the provincial hospitals, see Lane, Joan, “Medical Education in the Provinces in Eighteenth-Century England,” The Society for the Social History of Medicine Bulletin 41 (1987): 2833Google Scholar; Reinarz, Jonathan, “Towards a History of Medical Education in Provincial England,” Medical Historian 17 (2005–2006): 3037Google Scholar.

67 The names of the surgeons and hospitals to which the bodies of executed murderers were granted are recorded in the Sheriffs' Assize Calendars, E 389/247–252, TNA.

68 Lloyd, “The Casebooks of William Hey,” 120.

69 Pearson, The Life of William Hey, 56.

70 Ibid., 57.

71 Ibid.

72 Ibid., 57–58.

73 Ibid., 58. The case of Mary Bateman is renowned in the historiography of the period. See in particular Davies, Owen, Cunning Folk: Popular Magic in English History (London, 2003)Google Scholar.

74 Leeds Intelligencer, 27 March 1809.

75 Lawrence, Charitable Knowledge, 83–90.

76 Reinarz, “The Transformation of Medical Education,” 556.

77 King-Hele, D., Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement (London, 1999), 1315Google Scholar. For more on Darwin's medical activities, see the various chapters in Smith, Christopher and Arnott, Robert, eds., The Genius of Erasmus Darwin (Aldershot, 2005)Google ScholarPubMed.

78 Reinarz, “The Transformation of Medical Education,” 557.

79 Lawrence, Susan C., “Anatomy and Address: Creating Medical Gentlemen in Eighteenth-Century London,” in The History of Medical Education in Britain, ed. Nutton, Vivian and Porter, Roy (Amsterdam, 1995), 199228Google Scholar.

80 Chaplin, Simon, “Dissection and Display in Eighteenth-Century London,” in Anatomical Dissection in Enlightenment England and Beyond: Autopsy, Pathology and Display, ed. Mitchell, Piers (Farnham, 2012), 97Google Scholar, 101.

81 On the publicity value of surgical skill in the eighteenth century, see Barry, Jonathan, “Publicity and the Public Good: Presenting Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Bristol,” in Medical Fringe and Medical Orthodoxy 1750–1850, ed. Bynum, W. F. and Porter, Roy (Beckenham, 1987), 33Google Scholar.

82 Manuscript Biography of William Hey, MS 504/2, Leeds University Special Collections, Leeds, England.

83 Brown, Michael, Performing Medicine: Medical Culture and Identity in Provincial England, c. 1760–1850 (Manchester, 2011), 129Google Scholar.

84 Ibid., 129.

85 This has been checked through the use of the Sheriffs' Cravings and Assize Calendars: T 90/165–169 and E 389/247–252, TNA.

86 For a similar career path to that of Hey, see Lane, Joan, “Eighteenth-Century Medical Practice: A Case Study of Bradford Wilmer, Surgeon of Coventry, 1737–1813,” Social History of Medicine 3, no. 3 (1990): 369–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87 HOC Papers, JHC, 16 May 1786, 815; The History of Parliament Online, http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org, accessed 8 November 2013 (hereafter HOPO), Biographies of Members (hereafter Members), “DUNCOMBE, Henry (1728–1818).” Taylor was indebted to Pitt for recommending him to the seat for Poole in the same year; see HOPO, Members, “TAYLOR, Michael Angelo (?1757–1834).”

88 HOPO, Members, “MACDONALD, Archibald (1747–1826).”

89 Without such support, it has been suggested, Arden would “never have reached such heights of the law”; HOPO, Members, “ARDEN, Richard Pepper (1744–1804).”

90 HOC Papers, PR, 5 July 1786, 160–65.

91 Wilberforce and Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce, 1:113–15.

92 HOPO, Members, “WEDDERBURN, Alexander (1733–1805).”

93 “Wedderburn, Alexander, first earl of Rosslyn (1733–1805),” Alexander Murdoch in ODNB.

94 Wilberforce and Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce, 1:113–15. The printed Parliamentary Papers indicate that the Commons committee had indeed made several amendments to the Bill—see HOC Papers, JHC, 27–28 June 1786, 942, 945.

95 An Act for Regulating the Disposal after Execution of the Bodies of Criminals, 1786, HL/PO/JO/10/2/61, Parliamentary Archives, London, England.

96 On the legal ambiguities arising from the 1752 Murder Act, see Radzinowicz, A History of the English Criminal Law, 1:207–08.

97 HOC Papers, PR, 5 July 1786, 160.

98 Ibid., 163.

99 Morning Chronicle, 6 July 1786.

100 HOC Papers, PR, 5 July 1786, 164.

101 Reprinted in Montagu, Basil, The Opinions of Different Authors upon the Punishment of Death (London, 1813)Google Scholar, 3:179–80.

102 McCahill, M. W., The House of Lords in the Age of George III (Chichester, 2009), 233–34Google Scholar.

103 Government supporters in the Lords included Charles Mahon, the third Earl Stanhope; Willoughby Bertie, the fourth Earl Abingdon; and James Brydges, the third Duke Chandos.

104 HOPO, Members, “DUNDAS, Henry (1742–1811).”

105 General Evening Post, 18 May 1786.

106 HOC Papers, PR, 5 July 1786, 164.

107 Morning Chronicle, 6 July 1786.

108 Radzinowicz, A History of the English Criminal Law, 1:343.

109 HOC Papers, PR, 23 June 1785, 888. Born in 1745, the first son of Paul Jodrell, Solicitor General to the Prince of Wales, Richard was bred to the bar in the family tradition, but did not persevere with the law, instead making a name for himself as a classical scholar and playwright. Elected as MP for Seaford in 1790, Jodrell did not stand for re-election in the autumn of 1796, and was never again in the House.

110 HOC Papers, PR, 11 March 1796, 287.

111 St James's Chronicle, 12 March 1796; Evening Mail, 14 March 1796.

112 HOC Papers, PR, 16 March 1795, 54, and 3 June 1795, 512.

113 HOC Papers, House of Commons Sessional Papers (SP), 1795.

114 HOC Papers, PR, 11 March 1796, 288.

115 Ibid.

116 HOC Papers, PR, 3 June 1795, 512; Oracle and Public Advertiser, 12 March 1796.

117 Oracle and Public Advertiser, 12 March 1796.

118 HOC Papers, PR, 11 March 1796, 289.

119 Oracle and Public Advertiser, 12 March 1796.

120 HOC Papers, PR, 11 March 1796, 288.

121 Ibid., 289.

122 Sun, 12 March 1796.

123 Oracle and Public Advertiser, 12 March 1796.

124 HOPO, Members, “JODRELL, Richard Paul (1745–1831)”; “Jodrell, Richard Paul (1745–1831),” Gordon Goodwin and S. J. Skedd, in ODNB.

125 For particularly good studies of the medical profession in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Brown, Michael, “Medicine, Quackery and the Free Market: The ‘War’ against Morison's Pills and the Construction of the Medical Profession, c.1830–c.1850,” in Medicine and the Market in England and Its Colonies, c.1450–c.1850, ed. Jenner, Mark S. R. and Walliss, Patrick (New York, 2007)Google Scholar; Corfield, Penelope J., Power and the Professions in Britain 1700–1850 (London, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chapter 6; Peterson, M. Jeanne, The Medical Profession in Mid-Victorian London (London, 1978)Google Scholar.

126 Letter from William Wilberforce to Henry Addington, first Viscount Sidmouth, 5 February 1816, 152M/Box 32/Family/1, Devon Record Office, Exeter, England.

127 Anning, S. T., The General Infirmary at Leeds, vol. 1, The First Hundred Years 1767–1869 (London, 1963), 54Google Scholar.

128 Anning, S. T., The History of Medicine in Leeds (Leeds, 1980), 139Google Scholar.

129 Elizabeth Hurren, for instance, has recently demonstrated how medical science made the most of welfare cutbacks in the late Victorian period, which significantly increased the number of bodies available; see her Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and its Trade in the Dead Poor, c.1834–1929 (Basingstoke, 2012)Google Scholar.