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RUTH RICHARDSON, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 453 pp.
If you have read Robert Louis Stevenson's short story The Body Snatcher, you will understand a little of what life was like for persons who obtained corpses illegally and the anatomists who received them for dissection before the passage of the Anatomy Act in 1832 in Great Britain. Richardson's book traces the social and political events that led to the passage of the Act as well as the events following its passage.
The Anatomy Act apparently passed Parliament under some of the same circumstances that some legislation is passed today: private interests influencing lawmakers, secrecy of information from the public, lying, and misrepresentation of facts. The Act made legal the taking from poorhouses and workhouses the bodies of the deceased who were too poor to pay for their own funerals or who were unclaimed. The Act made the "unclaimed" bodies of the poor legal commodities. The sole legal source for corpses for dissection prior to the Act was the gallows. Dissection was made particularly odious to the public because judges handed it down as a postmortem punishment of criminals. Richardson points out that what had been a punishment for crime (dissection) was now a punishment for poverty.
The social circumstances prior to the passage of the Act were enormously complex. The author analyzes the social, medical, and commercial context of the corpse and its parts in popular sentiment and superstition (fascinating anthropology to this reviewer) as well as the apparent clinical detachment from the plight of the poor by the medical establishment. Rarely were remains donated to science, which meant that the means of obtaining corpses, largely through grave robbery and murder, were not questioned as long as the body was reasonably fresh. Interestingly, grave robbers were called "resurrectionists," an unfamiliar term today, at...