The Work of the Dead by Thomas W. Laqueur

Author:Thomas W. Laqueur
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-05-04T04:00:00+00:00

5.29. Head of Jeremy Bentham. Special Collections, University College, London.

Many pages are devoted to defending the importance of anatomy to an audience that still regarded it as a dodgy business. In a few decades, its arguments would be commonplace: if doctors were going to be able to cure people they needed to understand what makes them sick, and this can be discovered only in the body. And furthermore, if they were going to intervene through surgery it was better to practice on the dead than on the live poor. Anatomy was the royal road to modern medicine. The question, once this was established, became how doctors were going to procure bodies honorably. A reliance on criminals—or, more precisely, on those who were being criminalized for providing a socially necessary but distasteful service—was no answer. Handling the dead is always suspect: exhuming them for one’s private use was distasteful and unseemly; exhuming them for sale was outrageous. The only answer was for the state to intervene to ensure a culturally legitimate supply of bodies. Three things needed to happen. First, dissection had to be destigmatized by decoupling it from punishment; dissection was a medical, not a juridical, act. Second, the supply of bodies had to be regulated, one source suppressed and a new one opened up. Exhumation was to be made illegal and a category of legally acceptable, dissection-appropriate bodies identified. Mackenzie’s suggestion was capacious: the body of anyone who died in any hospital, workhouse, poorhouse, house of correction, or foundling hospital in designated large cities, or, if supply was short, in any town or country parish should be available for dissection as long they were “unclaimed by immediate relatives” or who had “decline[d] to defray the expenses of burial.” These were the bodies that no one owned or even wanted to own for the purpose of a proper burial: the pauper in purest form. Instead of marling the fields as Heraclitus had suggested, they could be of use on dissection tables.

Mackenzie’s proposals were taken up wholesale by other advocates. Thomas Rose, surgeon of the St. James Parochial Infirmary, argued for this administratively straightforward solution before an 1828 parliamentary committee on the subject. It solved the supply problem in one stroke. In 1827, 3,744 people died in the workhouses alone of London’s 127 parishes, he pointed out; 3,103 of these were buried at public expense and thus would be in principle eligible for dissection; 1,108 bodies were attended to the grave by no one. Sending those in this last category to the anatomy theater would thus offend no one. But all of them owed their bodies to society. Rose thought that relatives of the dead had forfeited any rights they might have had to “interfere,” as he put it, with the disposal of their kin’s bodies because they had failed to provide for them while they were alive. Their corpses were, in short, payment for society’s providing a roof under which to die.241

Southwood Smith was sympathetic but not entirely supportive of Mackenzie’s and Rose’s views.

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