The Chirurgeon's Apprentice

The campaign for Medicine’s Dark Secrets is now over and I am excited to announce that we have surpassed our funding goal, raising a total of $32,552. I can’t thank you enough for your generosity and support.

While this is a lot of money, we will be filming the feature-length documentary on the strictest of budgets. I, along with the director and cinematographer, will not be getting paid for this project. Any extra money we raise will go to making this production even better—more locations, extra contributors, better equipment.

With that in mind, I’m thrilled to tell you about an upcoming event I will be hosting in London on May 21^st to raise further funds for the show.

Curios by Candlelight will be held in the very exclusive Black’s Club in Soho. When you walk through the doors of the 18^th-century building, it will be like walking back in time. There are no electric lights; just candles and roaring fireplaces.

The night will begin with a specially concocted ‘gothic’ cocktail in the downstairs room of the club. Afterwards, we’ll retire to the upstairs, where I will give a short talk on some of the more shocking specimens I’ll be looking at in the television show. This will be followed by an amazing three course meal, during which time I will come to each table to tell you about the strange and wonderful objects I’ve placed there before dinner. Later in the night, you will have an opportunity to buy these curios for your own morbid collection—and enter a raffle to win other macabre prizes.

George Hornsby—the owner of Black’s—has kindly agreed to lend us what is traditionally a ‘members only’ club for the night to help raise money for Medicine’s Dark Secrets. He is one of many people who have generously helped us during this campaign, and for that, I feel truly fortunate. To this list, I must also add Adrian Teal—author of The Gin Lane Gazette—who designed the amazing poster that you see above, and Lisa Rose, who formatted the typeset to give it that authentic 18^th-century feel.

There are only 45 tickets, so don’t wait too long! I promise it will be a dark, morbid night for all!

Click here to reserve your place!

Posted in Casebooks

I have a confession to make. I’m in love.

While recently conducting research on burial shrouds for The Order of the Good Death, I came across some examples of 18^th-century funeral invitations. I have to admit, I wasn’t even aware such morbidly ornate ephemera existed till I stumbled upon one in the catalogue of the Victoria & Albert Museum.

The above funeral invitation dates from 1776. The script—placed at the centre of the design—is flanked by two figures: Death drawing a bow with three arrows and Father Time holding an hourglass. Behind them are black drapes being held up by two cherubs; and at the bottom of the invitation is a funeral scene depicting mourners gathered around a tomb. At the very top of the design is the deceased’s coat of arms.

This got me wondering: when did funeral invitations come into existence? Why? And when did they fall from fashion?

It appears the funeral invitation arose in the 17^th century, and acted mainly as an admission ticket since there would have been limited seating in both the church as well as the funeral feast which followed. Amongst the earliest printed cards were those in which the recipient was ‘desired to accompany’ the corpse, with the end phrase being ‘…and Bring this Ticket with you’ (see left). Pallbearers were often assigned a number on the ticket to signify their position in carrying the coffin.

Early invitations were wood engraved, with the centre remaining blank so the details could be filled in by hand. As technology progressed, however, printers began creating funeral invitations using stock borders and text that could then be adapted to the occasion. Note the second example does not include the deceased’s coat of arms and therefore is a fairly generic design.

By the 19^th century, engraved funeral invitations like the ones above were being replaced with small, embossed memorial cards that were then sent out after the funeral as a keepsake. These were typically white with a silhouette at the centre, surrounded by Classical figures, urns and columns. They would have been mounted on black flock or velvet to set off the design; and were created specifically to be framed.

Which brings me back to my love affair…

For me, there’s nothing like the original design, with its skulls, scythes and hourglasses. Give me a Georgian funeral invitation over a Victorian memorial card any day of the week!

Luckily for me, I have very talented friends. The esteemed cartoonist and 18th-century enthusiast, Adrian Teal—author of the ingenious book, Gin Lane Gazette—has eagerly agreed to design a funeral invitation should I die young…I can’t tell whether this enthusiasm stems from his love of a challenge, or his desire to be rid of me after weeks of calling in favours.

If Mr Teal’s Danse Macabre is anything to go by, my only regret will be that I won’t be around to see what undoubtedly would be a spectacularly morbid and whimsical design!

Perhaps I’ll resurrect a trend. Pun intended.

*We’ve entered the final 48 hours of the campaign for MEDICINE’S DARK SECRETS! It’s not too late to donate! Click here. 

Posted in Casebooks

Photo by Tony’TK’Smith

I never feel more alive than when I am standing amongst the rows and rows of anatomical specimens at St Bartholomew’s Pathology Museum in London. In one jar floats the remains of an ulcerated stomach; in another, the hands of a suicide victim. Cabinets are filled with syphilitic skulls, arthritic joints, and cancerous bones. The unborn sit alongside the aged; murderers occupy the same space as the murdered.

For me, history should not be experienced through words alone. It should be seen, felt, heard. I believe interacting with historical objects is just as important as reading about them. Not everyone has access to collections like the ones I do, which is why I want to film MEDICINE’S DARK SECRETS.

Through it, I will take you on a visual journey to a time when books were bound in human skin; when surgeons and executioners shared a common goal; and when body-snatchers could make a killing off the dead.

I don’t believe the past belongs only to historians and scholars. I want viewers to experience medical history in a more dynamic way than they might otherwise be able to do from reading about it in a book. Most importantly, I want to maintain the integrity of this project so it doesn’t just become a voyeuristic journey into the past. I want viewers to remember that the specimens I’ll be examining in the show belonged to people with lives like you and me.

I am excited to announce that we have just met our funding target for MEDICINE’S DARK SECRETS! I cannot thank you enough for your generosity and support throughout this campaign.

While $30K is a lot of money, we will be filming the feature-length documentary on the strictest of budgets. I, along with the director and cinematographer, will not be getting paid.

Any further money we raise over the next 4 days will go to making this production even better—more locations, additional contributors, better equipment. For every $1K we raise, we will be able to film one extra day. So please continue to spread the word.

Too many television programmes these days cater to the lowest common denominator. I promise to make this a high quality production that gives you a better understanding of the dark, macabre underworld that is our medical past without having to resort to cheap tricks and stunts.

If this sounds like a project that interests you, please click here to donate.

Posted in Casebooks

*We’ve raised nearly $30k for MEDICINE’S DARK SECRETS!  As a thank you for your support, here’s a short piece on one of your favourite subjects: bodysnatching. There’s 6 days left to the campaign so if you’d like to donate, click here! 

Great Yarmouth, England. 1827.

Thomas Vaughan, a former stonemason, rents a house near St Nicholas Church. He and several other men begin ‘resurrecting’ bodies from the local cemetery on the orders of the famous London surgeon, Sir Astley Cooper—who also happens to be the vicar’s son. Over the next two months, Vaughan and his cronies manage to steal as many as 10 bodies from the small churchyard. In order to avoid detection, they stuff the rotting corpses in cases shorter and narrower than coffins, full of sawdust, until they can be sent by stagecoach to London some 117 miles away.

Then one day, Mr George Black—a local baker—visits the cemetery and discovers the body of his recently deceased wife is missing. What follows is utter mayhem:

[T]he Church-yard became thronged with People who employed themselves in opening the different Graves of their deceased friends or relations. This extraordinary scene continued during three or four days, the result of which was, the discovery of the exhumation of a number of bodies… [1]

Digging up the graves of one’s loved ones may seem like an extreme reaction even for the 19th century; however, incidents like the one in Great Yarmouth were far from unusual. Thirty-two years earlier, in 1795, three men were apprehended in the vicinity of Lambeth burial ground. They had been caught carrying sacks containing the remains of 5 corpses.

As news spread, a mob descended upon the cemetery demanding entrance to the burial ground. Parish officers attempted to hold the crowd at bay, but in vain. Eventually, the angry horde broke through and began frantically digging up the graves of family and friends. The Vestry records state:

Great distress and agitation of mind was manifest in every one, and some, in a kind of phrensy, ran away with the coffins of their deceased relations. [2]

The thought of people running off with coffins may seem comical to our modern sensibilities; and yet, it does illustrate the extent to which people feared the dissection table in the past.

During the ‘Era of the Bodysnatchers,’ a human corpse did not legally constitute property, and therefore punishment for stealing one was not nearly as severe as the general populace thought it should be. In 1832, two medical students in Inversek—a village just outside Edinburgh—were caught trying to steal a body from a local churchyard. After being kept in a private house over night, they were moved to a prison at their own request because they believed it was a ‘place of greater security from the threatened vengeance of the outraged citizens.’ The next day:

…a crowd of several hundreds assembled round the gaol, provided with axes and other implements to break it open, and do execution upon the offenders, who … had been previously remitted to the sheriff. [3]

The general population abhorred bodysnatchers and the surgeons who employed them, and went to great lengths to prevent their loved ones from ending up on the dissection table. Coffin collars, like the one seen on the left, were invented to thwart the inexhaustible efforts of the resurrection men. These was fixed around the necks of a corpse and bolted to the bottom of a coffin, making it nearly impossible to remove the body from its grave.

Cemetery guns, as well, were designed to keep bodysnatchers at bay. These were set up at the foot of a grave, with three tripwires strung in an arc around its position. Those unfortunate enough to stumble upon one in the dead of night may find themselves in a grave of their own.

As ingenious as these devices were, they only protected the dead whose families were wealthy enough to purchase them. It is not a surprise, then, that many of the bodies that ended up in the hands of the surgeons were those of the poor. Making the jobs of the bodysnatchers even easier was the fact that many paupers were buried in pits which would remain open, sometimes for several weeks. One resurrectionist wrote:

I like to get those of poor people buried from the workhouses, because, instead of working for one subject, you may get three or four; I do not think, during the time I have been in the habit of working for the school, I got half a dozen of wealthier people. [4]

Historian Ruth Richardson points out that the depth of pits varied ‘depending on land available, soil type, and the pecuniary interests of those involved in graveyard “management.”’ [5] Some pits were as deep as twenty feet. In St Botolph’s, Aldgate, two men died at the bottom of one such pit from asphyxiation after stumbling into it in the 1830s. [6]

74 years after the apprehension of Thomas Vaughan—and 69 years after the passing of the Anatomy Act which made bodies more readily available for dissection—another scandal broke in Great Yarmouth. According to a local newspaper, the body of Frank Hyde—a middle-aged man who died in Yarmouth workhouse on 11 April 1901—had gone missing from the local cemetery. The editorial alleged that the ‘body was sent to Cambridge for dissection’ by the Master’s clerk, who made 15 shillings off the corpse and staged a fake funeral when the pauper died.

An investigation ensued, and it was discovered (much to the townspeople’s horror) that 26 paupers had succumb to a similar fate between 1880 and 1901. [7]

Yet another example of the debt medicine owes to the bodies of the poor.

1. Qtd in Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (1987), p. 84. I am greatly indebted to Richardson’s research in the creation of this article, and highly recommend her book for those interested in a more in-depth analysis of this subject.
2. Ibid., p. 78.
3. True Sun, 29-5-1832. Originally qtd in ibid., p. 85.
4.Qtd. in ibid., p. 60.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. For more on this subject, see Elizabeth T Hurren, ‘A Pauper Dead-House: The Expansion of the Cambridge Anatomical School under the late-Victorian Poor Law, 1870-1914′, Medical History 48:1 (Jan 2004), pp. 69-94.

Posted in Casebooks

Thanks to your kind generosity, we’ve raised $18K for MEDICINE’S DARK SECRETS!

We have a little under 3 weeks to go and $12K left to raise.

As a thank you for your support…

Those who donate $75 or above in the next 5 days will automatically be entered in a chance to come on set while the Ravenmaster from the Tower of London teaches me how to tie nooses.

Nooses? The Ravenmaster? ME?! What more could you want? Ok, granted the latter is far less cool than the former two things – but I’ll do my best to entertain. Hopefully the Ravenmaster doesn’t decide to string me up in the end!

Good luck!

The winner will be announced Saturday, April 13th! Click HERE to enter!

*Note: Those who have already donated $75 and above to the campaign will automatically be entered into the contest! The winner will have to make his/her way to set. 

Posted in Casebooks

I’m excited to announce that we have just surpassed 50% of our fundraising goal for MEDICINE’S DARK SECRETS! I can’t thank you enough for your generosity and support on this project.

And as a thank you…

Those who donate $50 or above in the next 72 hours will automatically be entered in a chance to win 1 of 2 taxidermy mice created by the talented Shannon Marie Harmon.

Shannon is the London-based creator of Victorian-inspired taxidermy and vintage-inspired fascinators. She owns Forgotten Feline Taxidermy and Couture and teaches various taxidermy courses for the London Taxidermy Academy and the Last Tuesday Society. Having studied mammal and bird taxidermy for the past year and a half, Shannon has created bespoke pieces for performers, stage sets, and fashion. She is happy to take on personalised commissions, and also offers private taxidermy courses. Her thoughts and experiences of taxidermy can be found at her blog: Of Corpse: Adventures in Taxidermy.

Incidentally, I can’t help but notice that this little fellow is mimicking me by holding a skull for his close-up. Well, they do say that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery!

The winner will be announced Monday, March 25th! Click HERE to enter!

*Note: Those who have already donated $50 and above to the campaign will automatically be entered into the contest!

Posted in Casebooks