The lesions from these two specimens are from an early stage of smallpox in 1776. The disease is likely to have been contracted in utero. From the Hunterian Collection, Royal College of Surgeons, London.

DEFINITION: Smallpox is an acute contagious disease caused by variola virus, a member of the orthopoxvirus family. Smallpox, which is believed to have originated over 3,000 years ago in India or Egypt, is one of the most devastating diseases known to humanity.

For centuries, repeated epidemics swept across continents, decimating populations and changing the course of history. In some ancient cultures, smallpox was such a major killer of infants that custom forbade the naming of a newborn until the infant had caught the disease and proved it would survive…

Smallpox had two main forms: variola major and variola minor. The two forms showed similar lesions. The disease followed a milder course in variola minor, which had a case-fatality rate of less than 1 per cent. The fatality rate of variola major was around 30%. There are two rare forms of smallpox: haemorrhagic and malignant. In the former, invariably fatal, the rash was accompanied by haemorrhage into the mucous membranes and the skin. Malignant smallpox was characterized by lesions that did not develop to the pustular stage but remained soft and flat. It was almost invariably fatal. [World Health Organization]

Face of child who died from smallpox, 18th century [not related to infant specimens above]

DESCRIPTION: ‘December 30, 1776, I was sent for to Mrs. FORD, a healthy woman, about twenty-two years of age, who was pregnant with her first child. She had come out of the country about three months before. Soon after her arrival in town she was seized with the small pox, and had been under the care of Messieurs HAWKINS and GRANT, who have favoured me with the particulars here annexed.

I called upon her in the afternoon; she complained of violent griping pains in her bowels, darting down to the pubes. On examining I found os tinsae a little dilated, with other symptoms of approaching labour. I sent her an anodyne spermaceti emulsion, and desired to be called if her pains increased. I was sent for. The labour advanced very slowly; her pains were long and severe; she was delivered of a dead child, with some difficulty.’ [John Hunter, ‘Account of a Woman who Had the Small Pox during Pregnancy…’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 70 (1780): pp. 129-130.]

Read the article recently featured in Wellcome History (pp. 12-13) about The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice!

For many, there is nothing to be dreaded more than a trip to the dentist’s office.

So it probably came as a surprise when I asked Dr Timothy King to take pictures of a procedure I was undergoing this past week. After all, most people would like to forget the experience as soon as it is over. But as I lay there—my mouth stretched into an inhuman grimace—I started to think back to the 17^th century, and to the barber-surgeons who used to be the guardians of oral health.

Just like today, tooth decay was an unpleasant part of life in the past. Unlike today, however, there was not a lot that could be done to prevent it. Most people who found themselves with a toothache ended up in the hands of the local barber-surgeon, who would then extract the rotten tooth sans anaesthetic. Before the 18^th century, this often involved tying a string around the tooth; a drum might be played in the background to distract the patient, getting louder as the moment of extraction grew nearer.

To advertise their services as ‘tooth-pullers’, many barber-surgeons hung rows of rotten teeth outside their shops. In 1727, the poet John Gay, wrote:

His pole, with pewter basins hung,

Black, rotten teeth in order strung,

Rang’d cups that in the window stood,

Lin’d with red rags, to look like blood,

Did well his threefold trade explain,

Who shav’d, drew teeth, and breath’d a vein.

As time wore on, new techniques were invented for extracting teeth. The tooth key (right) was first mentioned in Alexander Monro’s Medical Essays and Observations in 1742. The claw was placed over the top of the decaying tooth; the bolster, or the long metal rod, was placed against the root. The key was then turned and, if all went well, the tooth would pop out of the socket. Unfortunately, this did not always go to plan. Often, the tooth shattered as the key was turned and had to be plucked from the bleeding gum tissue piece by piece.

Of course, the loss of a tooth could leave a person aesthetically challenged.  Wealthy patrons were increasingly unhappy to go around in public with missing teeth. In the 18^th century, surgeons began experimenting with implants. Patients who could afford it might choose between ‘live’ or ‘dead’ teeth.  With the former, the recipient would have his or her rotten tooth removed before a ‘selection of donors’, who would then have their own teeth extracted until one was found that was ‘deemed acceptable in appearance’. Afterwards, the tooth was inserted into the empty socket and fixed using a silver wire or silk ligatures. [1]

Although desirable, having a ‘live’ tooth implanted into one’s mouth was a costly endeavour. For the thrifty costumer, teeth extracted from the mouths of the dead proved cheaper. According to one resurrectionist, ‘It is the constant practice to take the teeth out first…because if the body be lost, the teeth are saved’. [2] During the 19^th century, a good set of teeth could fetch as much as 5 guineas. Indeed, the practice was so profuse that one Professor of Anatomy at Trinity College remarked, ‘very many of the upper ranks carry in their mouths teeth which have been buried in the hospital fields’. [3]  Unfortunately for some unlucky recipients, syphilis and tuberculosis were unknowingly transmitted into their mouths from infected donors.

Dentistry, as we understand it today, did not emerge as a licensed profession until the end of the 19^th century. That said, one need not suffer in the past with a toothache as long as a barber-surgeon was at hand. For little cost and a lot of pain, the rotten tooth could be extracted and put on display in front of the barber’s shop.

As Dr King began drilling into my tooth, I was blissfully unaware of any pain.  In fact, sitting there in the heated office as the novacaine worked its magic, I nearly fell asleep.

I have never felt happier to live in the 21^st century… Although I do think Dr King should consider putting the rotten teeth of his patients on display outside his office door!

1. Roger King, ‘John Hunter and The Natural History of Human Teeth: Dentistry, Digestion, and the Living Principle’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 49 (1994), p. 510.

2. York Chronicle, 1831. Originally quoted in Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (1987), p. 67.

3. Quoted in Richardson, Death, p. 106.

Fears over premature burial were ubiquitous in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  In 1792, the first ‘safety coffin’ was constructed for Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick which included a window to allow light in and a tube to provide a fresh supply of air. The lid of the coffin was then locked and two keys were fitted into a special pocket sewn into his burial shroud: one for the coffin itself and one for the tomb.  Similar constructions followed, including coffins designed with signalling mechanisms to allow the person buried below to notify those above that he or she was not dead.

Perhaps even worse than premature burial was the thought of being dissected while still alive. The 19^th-century physician and surgeon, Sir Robert Christison, complained that dissection in St Bartholomew’s Hospital was ‘apt to be performed with indecent, sometimes with dangerous haste’.  He wrote:

It was no uncommon occurrence that, when the operator proceeded with his work, the body was sensibly warm, the limbs not yet rigid, the blood in the great vessels fluid and coagulable [sic]. I remember an occasion when [William] Cullen commenced the dissection of a man who died on hour before, and when fluid blood gushed in abundance from the first incision through the skin…Instantly I seized his wrist in great alarm, and arrested his progress; nor was I easily persuaded to let him go on, when I saw the blood coagulate on the table exactly like living blood’. [2]

The 17^th and 18^th centuries were rife with stories about executed criminals who had ‘returned from the dead’ just moments before being dissected.  In 1651, Anne Greene was hanged in Oxford for infanticide. For thirty minutes, she dangled at the end of the noose while her friends’ thump[ed] her breast’ and put ‘their weight upon her leggs [sic]…lifting her up and then pulling her downe againe with a suddain jerke’ in order to quicken her death. Afterwards, her body was cut down from the gallows and brought to Drs Thomas Willis and William Petty to be dissected. Just seconds before Willis plunged the knife into her sternum, Anne miraculously awoke. [For more about Anne Greene, click here]. [3]

Anatomists, themselves, worried about the precise moment of death when cutting open the bodies of the recently dead. To avoid disaster, Winslow suggested that a person’s gums be rubbed with caustic substances, and that the body be ‘stimulate[d]…with Whips and Nettles’ before being dissected. Furthermore, the anatomist should ‘irritate his Intestines by Means of Clysters and Injections of Air or Smoke, as well as ‘agitate…the Limbs by violent Extensions and Inflexions’. If possible, an attempt should also be made to ‘shock [the person’s] Ears by hideous Shrieks and excessive Noises’. [4]

To our modern sensibilities, these measures may seem extreme, even comical, but to Winslow, this was no laughing matter. In fact, he went even further, recommending that the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet be pricked with needles, and that the ‘Scapulae, Shoulders and Arms’ be scarified using fire or sharp instruments so as to ‘lacerate and strip [them] of the epidermis’ [5].  Indeed, when reading Winslow’s work, one gets the innate feeling that he took pleasure in imaging new ways to torture the dead.

That said, it wasn’t just medical practitioners who came up with ways of testing whether a person was dead or not. Family and friends of the deceased also devised methods for ensuring that their loved ones were not prematurely buried, including shouting the name of the person and poking his or her eyes. Most commonly, the body of the recently deceased was watched for a period of 3 days before burial, during which time putrefaction and decay would have become evident.

Of course, there were situations that warranted immediate burial of the body, as in the case of plague victims. In these instances, there was no time to wait for the body to begin decomposing. In his book, Winslow recalls the story of a man in Rome whom, upon being ‘accounted dead’, was to be ‘interred with the utmost Expedition’. As his body was being carried over the Tiber River to the plague pit, the boatman ‘discovered some Signs of Life’ and brought the young man back to the hospital ‘where he perfectly recovered Life’. Two days later, however, the man fell back into a similar state and was ‘judged irreparably dead’. His body was ‘without any farther [sic] Hesitation laid among those destin’d for the Grave’. Once again, to the horror of those around him, the man ‘returned to Life’ and escaped premature burial for a second time. [6]

Recently, archaeologists found evidence that bronze pins were implanted in the ‘palmar surface of the hands, scapular area, under the plantar surface of the feet, and…under the toe nails’ of plague victims in Marseilles.  The position of the skeletons in the mass graves also suggest that the dead were given ‘fast burials’ as rigor mortis, which typically appears six hours after death, had not set in before the plague pit was covered over.  In the midst of a plague outbreak, one can easily imagine how some people may have been mistaken for dead before being dumped into a pit of rotting corpses. [7]

Today, our societal fears over premature burial have dwindled considerably. However, new debates have arisen over the very definition of death itself with the emergence of ‘beating heart cadavers’. Though considered dead in both a medical and legal capacity, these ‘cadavers’ are kept on ventilators for organ and tissue transplantation.  Their hearts beat; they expel waste; they have the ability to heal themselves of infection; they can even carry a foetus to term.  Crucially, though, their brains are no longer functioning. It is in this way that the medical community has redefined death in the 21^st century. [8]

Yet, some wonder whether these ‘beating heart cadavers’ are really dead, or whether they are just straddling the great divide between life and death before the finally lights go out.

1. Jacques-Bénigne Winslow, The Uncertainty of the Signs of Death, and the Danger of Precipitate Interments and Dissections (1746), pp. 1-2.

2. R. Christison, The Life of Sir Robert Christison (1885-6), pp. 192-3. Originally quoted in Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (2000), p. 98.

3. Richard Watkins, News from the Dead (1651), p. 2.

4. Winslow, The Uncertainty of the Signs of Death, p. 21.

5. Ibid., p. 23.

6. Ibid., pp. 4-5.

7. Georges Leonetti, et al., ‘Evidence of Pin Implantation as a Means of Verifying Death During the Great Plague of Marseilles (1722)’, in Journal of Forensic Science 42:4 (1997), pp. 744 – 748.

8. For more on ‘beating heart cadavers’ and new definitions of death, see Dick Teresi, The Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating-Heart Cadavers—How Medicine is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death (2012).

She clutches her midriff, staring at the bottle of arsenic before her. For a moment, she imagines she might weather the storm. But then she glimpses her future self, dirty and unkempt, selling her body to rough men in the back-alleys of London in order to feed her and her baby. Her cheeks burn in shame. There is no way out.

She picks up the vial, closes her eyes, and swallows the contents. Her hands tremble slightly as she reaches for an uncorked bottle of wine by her bed. She drinks nearly a quart to calm her nerves.

She waits.

Around 1 o’clock in the morning, she begins screaming in agony. Terrible pain tears through her stomach. She doubles over and begins vomiting. The household is awakened and a doctor is called to her bedside. She complains of excessive thirst and is given several quarts of brandy and water. She thrashes around in bed, breaking out into a cold sweat, as her body tries to purge itself of the poison. After hours of excruciating pain, she slips into unconsciousness. At 1 o’clock in the afternoon, her body begins convulsing as saliva collects in her throat. She looses the ability to swallow, and starts to drown in her own fluids.

Thirteen hours after ingesting the arsenic, Mary Hunt dies a violent, agonizing death. [1]

Suicide—or ‘self-murder’ as it was sometimes called—was not uncommon in 18^th-century England. Indeed, the English were renowned for it. The French philosopher, Montesquieu, once quipped: ‘We do not find in history that the Romans ever killed themselves without a cause; but the English are apt to commit suicide most unaccountably; they destroy themselves even in the bosom of happiness’. [2] Others agreed. The writer, Beat Louis de Muralt, claimed that the English ‘die by their own hands with as much indifference as by another’s’ and for reasons ‘that would appear to us but as Trifles’. [3]

While this characterisation may not be entirely accurate, there is some truth in it. Despite the social stigma associated with suicide, people were still finding new (and terrible) ways to end their lives in the 18^th century. Consuming arsenic was just one of them.

For reasons unexplained in the case records, Mary Hunt’s body ends up in the hands of the surgeon, Thomas Ogle. It may be that Mary had no family, and that her employer was unwilling to take on her burial costs. The fact that she had committed suicide also meant that it was unlikely Mary would have been afforded a Christian burial, although this certainly wasn’t always the case. For these reasons, however, it is likely that her employer may have found it easier (and more profitable) to hand her remains over to Ogle, who then performed an autopsy and dissection.

In his report, Ogle remarked that her stomach contained ‘a greenish fluid, with a curdy substance…an effect produced by the arsenic’. He also noted that there was ‘an uncommon quantity of blood in the vessels of the ovaria and Fallopian tubes’ and that it was ‘evident, from this circumstance, that conception had taken place’. Nevertheless, when told that the date of her last period had only been ‘a little more than a month before her death’, Ogle began to question whether Mary had been pregnant when she died. [4]

Curious to know the truth, Ogle removed the ‘organs of generation’ and gave them over to the famous anatomist, John Hunter, whose interest in pregnant cadavers was well known. Hunter injected the arteries and smaller vessels of the uterus with a wax-like substance so that ‘the whole surface became extremely red’. The uterus was then split open and the ‘inner surface of the cavity…was examined with a magnifying glass’. Hunter noted that it was ‘extremely vascular, and dotted with innumerable whitish spots too small to be seen by the naked eye’. He concluded that the ‘presence of a corpus luteum [essential to establishing and maintaining pregnancy by producing high levels of progesterone], the enlargement of the uterus, the newly-formed vascular membrane…and the history of the case’ sufficiently proved that conception had taken place. [5]

Mary was, indeed, in the very early stages of pregnancy when she committed suicide.

Today, the only thing that remains of Mary Hunt and her unborn child is her disembodied uterus, which is on display at the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Those who visit the collection know nothing of who she was in life, nor why she died at such a young age. They do not even know her name, for only the the word ‘Homo’ [indicating that the specimen is human] and the numbers ‘3590’ are stamped upon the  jar.

1. Story based off details found in Thomas Ogle, ‘The Case of a Young Woman who Poisoned Herself in the First Month of Her Pregnancy’ in John Hunter, Observations on Certain Parts of the Animal Oeconomy (1840), pp. 89 – 92.
2. Montesquieu, ‘Book XIV: Of Laws in Relation to the Nature of the Climate’ in The Spirit of the Laws (1752).
3. Beat Louis de Muralt, Letters Describing the Characterand Customsof the Eng- lish and French Nations … (I726), p. 44. Originally quoted in Roland Bartel, ‘Suicide in Eighteenth-Century England: The Myth of a Reputation’, Huntington Library Quarterly 23 (Feb., 1960), p. 145.
4. Ogle, ‘The Case of a Young Woman’, p. 90
5. Ibid., pp. 90-1.

Although the plague ravaged Europe in the 14^th century, killing nearly two-thirds of its population, the earliest textual description of the mask dates from the 17^th century. Charles de Lorme, chief physician to Louis XIII and likely inventor behind the design, wrote:

The nose [is] half a foot long, shaped like a beak, filled with perfume with only two holes, one on each side near the nostrils, but that can suffice to breathe and carry along with the air one breathes the impression of the [herbs] enclosed further along in the beak. Under the coat we wear boots made in Moroccan leather (goat leather) from the front of the breeches in smooth skin that are attached to said boots, and a short sleeved blouse in smooth skin, the bottom of which is tucked into the breeches. The hat and gloves are also made of the same skin…with spectacles over the eyes. [1]

From this description, it is tempting to conclude that de Lorme was trying to protect himself against germs by wearing something akin to a modern-day biohazard suit. However, a coherent germ theory did not emerge until the mid-19^th century with the experiments of Joseph Lister, Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur. That said, de Lorme was trying to protect himself against something he believed was just as insidious and just as dangerous as we understand germs to be today: miasma, or poisonous vapours associated with decomposition and foul air.

De Lorme imagined that the herbs stuffed in the end of the beak would purify the air and prevent the plague doctor from breathing in the miasma, while the leather overcoat, breeches, boots and gloves would ensure that the skin was not exposed at any time.  The hat [see right] was that which was typically worn by physicians during the early modern period and thus served a purely symbolic purpose. The wooden cane, on the other hand, was likely used to keep patients at a distance, or else direct caregivers on how to move the bodies of infected victims during examinations. It was not used, as some suppose, to beat away the rats who are today widely believed to have carried fleas infected with yersinia pestis, the bacterium better known as plague.

It is difficult to know how ubiquitous the plague mask was in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Most physicians fled the city during outbreaks, leaving the dying to fend for themselves. Those who did remain behind rarely mention it in their writing, making the mask all the more elusive to historians.

Today, the plague mask lives on in the imaginations of artists, writers and film-makers [click here for a stunning example]. Through them, it has been transformed into something altogether different, for the plague mask which was once used to ward off death, has now become the very symbol of it.

1. Quoted and translated in Michel Tibayrenc (ed.), Encyclopedia of Infectious Diseases: Modern Methodologies (2007) p. 680. From M. Lucenet, ‘La peste, fleau majeur’ extraits de la Bibliotheque InterUniversitaire, Paris (1994).

It is half past two in the morning on October 10th, 1777. The new moon casts a bluish light over St George’s burial ground off Hanover Square in London. Two men, clad in dark clothes, enter the cemetery. They have been tipped off by the grave-digger who accompanies them that the body of Mrs. Jane Sainsbury was buried earlier that day.

Carefully, they navigate around the tombstones until they come to the freshly dug grave. With spades and shovels, they begin soundlessly removing the dark, damp earth, digging deeper and deeper into the ground. Within fifteen minutes, they hit a hard, solid structure: the coffin. One man readies a cloth sack while the other two pry the lid open. A terrible odour escapes: the smell of death. The woman’s eyes have sunk deep into her skull. Her jaw hangs open, stretching her lips into a ghoulish grin.

All three struggle to remove the rotting corpse from its wooden enclosure and strip it of its clothes and burial shroud. Slowly, the woman’s fleshy remains are stuffed inside the sack, limb by limb. One snatcher tosses the woman’s possessions carelessly into the coffin while another silently shuts the lid. All three begin to shovel dirt back over the gravesite, hoisting the sack up as the hole slowly fills.

The job is finished in less than thirty minutes. [1]

The word ‘body-snatcher’ conjures up all kinds of sordid images: crude men with fingernails caked in dirt; corpses crammed into sacks, bodily fluids leaking through the cloth; murder. But the truth is that relatively little is known about the men who stole away in the middle of the night to collect bodies for the anatomists and their students in the 18th and 19th centuries. Yet, they are an important and integral part of the history of medicine.

During the 17th century, medical students in London were not required to study anatomy or physiology through clinical dissection. The act of cutting open dead bodies was generally believed to be ‘noe more able to direct a physician how to cure a disease than how to make a man’. [2] This is not to say, however, that medical students knew nothing of anatomy. Many attended public dissections conducted by the Barber Surgeons Company. There, they observed and watched, but did not participate.

This changed in the 18th century with the proliferation of private medical schools that gave students an opportunity to learn anatomy through dissection. To do this, however, bodies were needed. Lots of bodies.

From what little records exist, we know that body-snatchers required some level of moonlight in order to conduct their work in cemeteries, although not all bodies were obtained through exhumation. The clothes and burial shroud were sometimes removed, for stealing a body on its own was not considered theft since it had no value as property.

The body-snatchers might steal as many as six bodies in a single night and often worked in small gangs which fought each other for ‘a monopoly over the cadaver trade’. [3] This might involve desecrating a graveyard that supplied bodies to a rival gang in order to arouse fury from the local population who would then secure the cemetery, making it difficult for future attempts.

Cemeteries underwent dramatic makeovers as the public’s fear over body-snatching escalated. Mortsafes (right)—or iron grills—were placed over gravesites to prevent snatchers from disturbing the dead. Loose stones were put on top of surrounding walls, making it nearly impossible to scale. Churchyards became fortified with spring guns and primitive land mines. Cemetery ‘clubs’ were formed in which members would watch new graves until ‘decomposition rendered the cadavers useless for anatomical instruction’. [4]

In one instance, a father—grieving over the recent loss of his child—enclosed a ‘small box, [with] some deathful apparatus, communicating by means of wires, with the four corners, to be fastened to the top of the coffin’. As the child was lowered into the ground, he threw gunpowder into the box so that ‘the hidden machinery [was] put into a state of readiness for execution’. [5]

At the same time, people’s fears over being buried alive reached an all-time high. If the following account from 1824 is to be believed, the resurrection men sometimes acted in the role of saviours to those who might otherwise have suffered this terrible fate:

I had been some time ill of a low and lingering fever. My strength gradually wasted and I could see by the doctor that I had nothing to hope. One day, towards evening, I was seized with strange and indescribable quivering…I heard the sound of weeping at my pillow, and the voice of the nurse say, ‘He is dead.’

The man goes on to describe how he was unable to stir himself, even as he realised he was being buried alive.

I felt the coffin lifted and borne away. I heard and felt it placed in the hearse; it halted, and the coffin was taken out. I felt myself carried on the shoulders of men; I heard the cords of the coffin moved. I felt it swing as dependent by them. It was lowered and rested upon the bottom of the grave. Dreadful was the effort I then made to exert the power of action, but my whole frame was immovable. The sound of the rattling mould as it covered me, was far more tremendous than thunder. This also ceased, and all was silent.

Some time passed before he heard a noise. Mistakenly believing that his friends had returned, he soon realised that it was the body-snatchers who had come to steal his body.

They dragged me out of the coffin by the head, and carried me swiftly away. When borne to some distance, I was thrown down like a clod…Being rudely stripped of my shroud, I was placed naked on a table. In a short time I heard by the bustle in the room that the doctors and students were assembling. When all was ready the Demonstrator took his knife, and pierced my bosom. I felt a dreadful crackling, as it were, throughout my whole frame; a convulsive shudder instantly followed, and a shriek of horror rose from all present.

Despite the fact that the snatchers had allegedly saved this man from certain death, his tone when describing them is still laced with disapproval. They are ‘robbers’ who ‘plunder’ the graves of decent people’s loved ones, of ‘parents, and children, and friends.’ They treat the corpse ‘rudely’ when handling it. There is something inhuman about their behaviour. [6]

In newspaper reports from the 19th century, the snatchers are characterised as ruthless thieves with murderous tendencies. Although William Burke and William Hare were never body-snatchers, the fact that they murdered 16 people between 1827 and 1828 for the sole purpose of selling their bodies to the anatomists served to sully further the reputation of the resurrection men. Hysteria over ‘burking’ broke out amongst the general population. In cases where people went missing, body-snatchers were almost always suspected.

The body-snatchers continue to live in the public’s imagination as criminals of the lowest form, partly because so little is known about them. As evidenced above, reports about their alleged activities are often exaggerated in newspapers and literature from the period. In 1824, the surgeon, William Mackenzie, complained that a week rarely passed without ‘the circulation of exaggerated stories of atrocities in the procuring of subjects for dissection’. [7]

Even more frustratingly, historians find it difficult to track body-snatchers as they often use numerous aliases to hide their true identities. One snatcher may appear in multiple court records under half a dozen names. There is simply no way to know.

It is unlikely that many body-snatchers were also murderers. The punishment for stealing a body was too low; the punishment for murder was too high. The payout for a body was the same no matter how one procured it. Yet undeniably, the resurrection men are a part of the medical profession’s dark and sordid past—a past that for the most part has received only cursory acknowledgement.

Still, we must ask ourselves where we would be today without the body-snatchers and the bodies which they stole.

1. Based loosely off a true account. The three body-snatchers were eventually apprehended. One was acquitted while the other two were sentenced to six months imprisonment. They were paraded through the streets and whipped publicly. L. Benson, The Book of Remarkable Trials and Notorious Characters (1872?).
2. Probably the fragment of 1668, Anatomie, most of which is in John Locke’s hand. Originally quoted in Andrew Cunningham, ‘The Kinds of Anatomy’, Medical History (1975), p. 3.
3. Ian Ross and Carol Urquhart Ross, ‘Body Snatching in Nineteenth Century Britain: from Exhumation to Murder’, British Journal of Law and Society (Summer, 1979), p. 113.
4. Ibid, p. 114.
5.J.B. Bailey, The Diary of a Resurrectionist: 1811-1812 (1896), p. 80.
6. Ibid., pp. 65-68.
7. MacKenzie, ‘An Appeal to the Public and to the Legislature, on the Necessity of Affording Dead Bodies to the Schools of Anatomy, by Legislature Enactment’, Westminster Review (1824), pp. 83-86. Originally quoted in Ross and Ross, ‘Body Snatching in Nineteenth Century Britain’, p. 113.

Recently, I interviewed the novelist, Caroline Rance, about the rewards and challenges of writing historical fiction. Here’s what she had to say about her fascinating novel, Kill Grief.

Can you tell us about your novel, Kill Grief ?

Kill-Grief is set in 1756 and is about addiction and survival in the chaotic world of a general hospital. The main character is a young woman called Mary, who reluctantly becomes a nurse out of necessity. She has secrets to keep about her past and constantly lives on the brink of being found out. She uses gin as an escape from her fears, and gets deeper and deeper into trouble.

While working at the hospital, however, Mary discovers that she has an aptitude for surgery. Although, as a woman, she is excluded from the established path to qualifying as a surgeon, she begins to wonder whether her abilities might give her a future after all.

Where did you get your inspiration to write it?

I had been trying to write a novel for ages, and kept getting to about chapter 3 and then giving up. Then when I was doing my BA dissertation, I researched the origin of Chester Infirmary, and began to read between the lines of the documents I was studying. There were some tiny but interesting hints about what the patients and staff got up to, and I wondered what they were like as people. I started writing fictional scenes about them – none of which ended up in the book.

Have you always wanted to be a writer?

Nearly always – probably since I was about 12 years old. I went through a phase of wondering whether I was invisible and, although I felt sad that people appeared not to see or hear me, it did mean I could observe them without being noticed. I found I could see through them, and this gave me plenty of ideas for stories.

During my teens, I thought everything I wrote was awful – and I was right! In one way I wish I’d known at the time that this didn’t matter and that every piece of writing was valuable experience. In another way, however, I’m glad I felt that despairing inadequacy, because it made me keep on and on trying.

What is the most challenging part of writing historical fiction?

Staying off the internet long enough to write anything. Apart from that, the main challenge is something that would apply to contemporary fiction too – getting the plot to work so that there is actually a story rather than just a list of events. Real life doesn’t have a plot – to quote Elbert Hubbard, it’s just ‘one damn thing after another’ – so I think a novel has to be more believable than real life. The events need to link back and forth to one another more meaningfully.

And the most rewarding?

The best bit is getting it finished and out the door! The most rewarding part of the writing process, however, is the same as the most challenging one. I love finding ways of connecting aspects of the plot so that there’s a kind of intricacy about everything. I like foreshadowing events and putting in small details that might pass unnoticed by the reader but turn out to be of vital significance.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block and if so, how did you overcome it?

I could dignify it with the term writer’s block but in my case it’s just plain laziness. I get ‘stuck’ sometimes but it’s usually on one particular project rather than on writing in general, so I go and work on something different for a while. I have several pieces of writing on the go at once so if I get bored with any of them there’s always another to get on with. This creates the danger of never actually finishing any of them, of course…

If I’m doing a first draft, the software Write or Die is a great way of getting word count down. I also find the copy-editing stage quite fun – it’s the bit in between, where major revisions are required, that poses the greatest difficulty. I haven’t found a solution other than to keep plugging away.

What is your favourite novel?

I probably answer this question differently every time, but one of my favourites is Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock. It’s hilarious, and I like Scythrop Glowry’s idea of finding the 7 people who have read his book and organising them to change the world. I might do that with my 7 readers one day too.

If you could travel back back into the past, where would you go? Who would you meet? What would you do?

I would like to go back millions of years to see some dinosaurs, because modern popular interpretations of them change so rapidly – the velociraptors of Jurassic Park a mere 20 years ago were big and scaly; nowadays they’re known to be small and feathered, but future discoveries could add even more detail. I’d love to see the truth about their appearance, but I wouldn’t want to stay long enough to get eaten, so I’d set the time machine for London in 1857.

There, I would go to a show by Julia Pastrana, who was promoted as ‘the ape woman’ because of her hypertrichosis and gingival hyperplasia. She performed as a ‘freak’ but I’d like to meet her and find out what she was really like. She has often been romanticised as a beautiful person trapped in an ugly body; someone sweet-natured yet tragic, who just longed to be loved. I suspect she was more complicated than that.

*Caroline Rance is currently studying for an MA in Medicine, Science & Society at Birkbeck, University of London. She runs a website, The Quack Doctor, a collection of panacean powders, pills, potions, procedures and pamphlets, as advertised in historical newspapers. You can purchase Kill Grief here. 

Amongst a collection of medical oddities housed at the Surgeons’ Hall Museum in Edinburgh lies a tattered pocketbook [left], no longer than the length of a man’s hand. It is dark brown—nearly black—with a pebbled texture and gold lettering that has begun to fade with age. To the untrained eye, it is altogether unremarkable in its appearance. However, upon closer inspection, the words ‘EXECUTED 28 JAN 1829’ and ‘BURKE’S SKIN POCKET BOOK’ come into focus, revealing the item’s true origins.

This is a book bound in the flesh of William Burke, the notorious murderer. Between 1827 and 1828, Burke and his accomplice, William Hare, drugged and killed 16 people for the sole purpose of selling their bodies to the anatomist, Dr Robert Knox. During their murder trial, Hare turned King’s Evidence in exchange for immunity. Burke was eventually found guilty of the murders and hanged before [ironically] being dissected in Edinburgh Medical College.

The process of binding books using human flesh is known as ‘anthropodermic bibliopegy’. One of the earlier examples dates from the 17^th century and currently resides in Langdell Law Library at Harvard University. It is a Spanish law book published in 1605. The colour of the binding is a ‘subdued yellow, with sporadic brown and black splotches like an old banana’. [1] On the last page, there is an inscription which reads:

The bynding of this booke is all that remains of my dear friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma [possibly an African tribe from modern-day Zimbabwe, see below illustration] on the Fourth Day of August, 1632. King Mbesa did give me the book, it being one of poore Jonas chiefe possessions, together with ample of his skin to bynd it. Requiescat in pace. [2]

Although it seems macabre to our modern sensibilities, this book was rebound as a way of memorialising the life of Jonas Wright. In this way, it is similar to mourning jewellery made from the hair of the deceased and worn by the Victorians during the 19^th century. It is a poignant reminder of the life that has been lost.

Some people willingly donated their skins for the purpose of binding narratives about their lives after death. James Allen, alias George Walton, was one such person. Allen, a ‘Jamaican mulatto’, was a 19^th-century highwayman. One day, he assaulted John A. Fenno on the Massachusetts Turnpike. Fenno bravely resisted the robbery, even sustaining a gunshot wound in the process. He later became instrumental in the apprehension of his attacker. On his deathbed, Allen requested that his skin be used to bind a book about his crimes, and for this to be presented to Fenno as a ‘token of his esteem’. [3]

Of course, not all books bound in human flesh were done so for the purpose of honouring the donor’s life. Some were done for pragmatic reasons, as in the case of medical texts which were bound using skin from dissected cadavers. There were also those which were covered in the skins of executed criminals, as we have seen with the pocketbook fastened from a piece of William Burke’s flesh. Far from serving as mementos or keepsakes, these items became objects of curiosity for the morbidly inclined.

And then there were books which claimed to be made from the human flesh but were, in fact, not. One example comes from the Wellcome Collection in London [left]. It is a curious little notebook which professes to be ‘made of Tanned skin of the Negro whose Execution caused the War of Independence’.  Presumably, this refers to Crispus Attucks, a dockworker of Wampanoag who was the first person killed by the British during the Boston Massacre. Immediately following his death, Attucks was held up as an American martyr. As a consequence of its alleged origins, this notebook has become a symbol of the American Revolution.

Anthropodermic bibliopegy reached its height of popularity during the French Revolution, when a fresh supply of bodies was always available. All sorts of books were wrapped in human skins, including a collection of poems by John Milton. One of the last known books to be bound in this fashion dates from 1893 and currently resides at Brown University. The binder did not have quite enough skin for the book, and thus split the piece into two – the front cover is bound using the outer layer of skin; the back cover and spine are bound using the inner layer of skin.

If you didn’t know better, you would think it was suede.

1. Samuel P. Jacobs, ‘The Skinny on Harvard’s Rare Book Collection’, The Crimson (2 February 2006).
2. Qtd. from Ibid.
3. Samuel Lowell Rich, ‘Narrative of the Life of James Allen, The Highway Man’, Boston Athenaeum : http://www.bostonathenaeum.org/node/191.

Execution of Father Garnet in 1606 (Wellcome Library).

In 1725, Bernard de Mandeville declared: ‘to be dissected, can never be a greater Scandal than being hanged’. [1] Mandeville—who had successfully demonstrated that ‘private vices are public virtues’ in his ever-famous The Fable of the Bees (1714)—was not just a political economist, a philosopher and a satirist. He was also a physician. It was in this capacity that he provided ‘the first utilitarian defence’ of the dissection of condemned criminals in 18th-century England. [2] In a series of letters to the British Journal, he wrote:

I have no Design that savours of Cruelty, or even Indecency, towards a human Body; but shall endeavour to demonstrate, that the superstitious Reverence of the Vulgar for a Corpse, even of a Malefactor, and the strong Aversion they have against dissecting them, are prejudicial to the Publick; For as Health and sound Limbs are the most desirable of all Temporal Blessings, so we ought to encourage the Improvement of Physick and Surgery, wherever it is in our Power. The Knowledge of Anatomy is inseparable from the Studies of either; and it is almost impossible for a Man to understand the Inside of our Bodies, without having seen several of them skilfully dissected. [3]

While Mandeville’s defence of criminal dissection may appear entirely ‘forward-thinking’ and ‘scientific’, we must acknowledge that underlying his argument is a deep hatred of the lower classes. According to the writer, those who attend public executions are ‘[a]mongst the lower Rank’. The ‘most honourable Part of these floating Multitudes’ is apprentices and journeymen of ‘the meanest trade’. ‘All the rest’, he adds, ‘are worse’. [4]

Mandeville’s detestation of the lower classes is nowhere more obvious than when he rationalises: the ‘Dishonour [of dissection] would seldom reach beyond the Scum of the People’. [5] Indeed, he argued that the public was entitled to the bodies of the executed. He asks, ‘When Persons of no Possessions of their own, that have slipp’d no Opportunity of wronging whomever they could, die without Restitution, indebted to the Publick, ought not the injur’d Publick to have a Title to, and the Disposal of, what the others have left?’ [6]

Bernard de Mandeville (1670 - 1733)

Mandeville may have been the first to defend criminal dissection on utilitarian grounds in the 18th century, but he was not the last. In 1795, William Cowley wrote that ‘Mankind in general should be convinced of the necessity and utility of practical anatomy’, and therefore should not ‘obstruct the progress of a science, in which the welfare of all society is so materially concerned’. [7] In particular, he argued, ‘All condemned criminals, after execution, should be delivered to an academy of anatomy, for the sole purpose of instructing students’. Furthermore, physicians and surgeons ‘of public charities should have unlimited power to inspect dead bodies, and be obliged to publish their observations, or transmit the same to the academy of anatomy’. [8]

While writers like Mandeville and Cowley argued that criminal dissection was necessary to the advancement of medical science, neither the Crown nor the legislature felt compelled to make a similar justification. Indeed, this argument undermined the true purpose of criminal dissection as a form of punishment. As historian Peter Linebaugh so vividly remarks, the ‘law passed judgement in sable garments and executed sentence with the red towel of the dissecting room’. [9]

Of course, not all criminals were sentenced to be dissected. Each year, the Royal College of Physicians was allowed ‘the Bodies of One or Six persons condemned to Death’, while the Company of Barber-Surgeons was permitted a further four. Yet, the number of executions in London far exceeded the number of bodies legally allocated to these institutions. Although the bodies obtained by the hospitals and private anatomical schools were often done so illegally, some of the corpses which ended up on the dissection table belonged to criminals who willing gave their bodies over to the surgeons.

In 1747, John Wilkins was sentenced to death for ‘Robbery on the King’s Highway’. Finding himself ‘entirely Friendless, and without any Support’ in prison, Wilkins ‘foolishly enquire[d] after a Surgeon to purchase his Body’ in order to ‘supply his present Necessities’. [10] Five years later, William Signal traded his body for decent clothes on the day of his execution, as he was ‘resolved to die game’. [11]

Most criminals, however, feared the surgeon’s knife. Letters from the condemned to their loved ones are poignant, verging on heart-breaking at times. James Caldclough, who was sentenced to death in 1739 for highway robbery, entreats family and friends to visit him at Newgate Prison, and to attend his execution: ‘I beg if you have any Value for me, not to detain yourself from coming to me, which is all the Comfort I have in this careless World’. [12] Similarly, Martin Gray pleads with his wife to ask his uncle for money lest his ‘Body should be cut, and torn, and mangled after Death’ by the surgeons. Countless more examples exist in court records from this period. [13]

Mandeville and Cowley may have justified criminal dissection on scientific grounds, but most people continued to view this act as a form of punishment. Stephen Roe, Ordinary of Newgate Prison, attended the dissection of Richard Lamb on 4 October 1759. In his written account of the event, Roe expresses an opinion which is not unlike that given by advocates of the death penalty in the United States today:

Let therefore the Anatomical Table in the Surgeons Theatre, be a preacher to all this audience: and should their passions run high, and the voice of reason and religion be forgotten, may this dread table present itself to their view. [14]

Whether or not the threat of dissection ever proved to be a deterrent in the 18^th century is impossible to know.

1.Bernard de Mandeville, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn (1725), p. 27.
2. Peter Linebaugh, ‘The Tyburn Riot Against the Surgeons’, in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (1975; repr. 1988), p. 72.
3. Mandeville, An Enquiry, p. 26.
4. Ibid., p. 20.
5. Ibid., p. 27.
6. Ibid.
7. William Cowley, On the Absolute Necessity of Encouraging instead of Preventing or Embarrassing the Study of Anatomy (1795), p. 12, p. 8.
8. Ibid, p. 13.
9. Linebaugh, ‘The Tyburn Riot’, p. 69.
10. The Ordinary’s Account, 21 January 1747. I am indebted to Linbaugh’s essay for pointing me to the existence of such records.
11. The Ordinary’s Account, 13 July 1752.
12. The Ordinary’s Account, 2 July 1739.
13. The Ordinary’s Account, 3 April 1721.
14. The Ordinary’s Account, 3 October 1759.