Doctoring the Novel: Medicine and Quackery from Shelley to Doyle

Chapter One: Orthodoxy or Quackery? Anatomy in Frankenstein

17 Chapter One Orthodoxy or Quackery? Anatomy in Frankenstein [T]he degree of perfection with which anatomy has been studied at any successive periods, may be safely taken as the rule, by which the progress of all the other branches of the science may be ascertained. —“Regulation of Anatomy,” Westminster Review, 1832 [Resurrection Men are] the lowest dregs of degradation; I do not know that I can describe them better; there is no crime they would not commit, and as to myself, if they would imagine that I should make a good subject, they really would not have the smallest scruple, if they could do the thing undiscovered, to make a subject of me. —Sir Astley Cooper before the Select Committee on Anatomy, 1828 In 1828, the president of the Royal College of Surgeons, Sir Astley Cooper, testified before the Select Committee on Anatomy. Charged with inquiring into the state of anatomical research , the committee’s report consists of questions by the legislators to various witnesses including surgeons, physicians, hospital authorities, magistrates, and resurrection men. Cooper, the first witness, begins by asserting anatomy’s importance: “[I]t ought to be earnestly cultivated by those who really wish to understand their profession [surgery] and to become respectable in it.”1 Asked if a surgeon ought to perform a new 18 R Doctoring the Novel procedure without practicing first on a corpse, Cooper replies, “[H]e must be a blockhead if he made the attempt” (15). According to Cooper, anatomy benefits more than surgeons: “[T]he cause [anatomy] which you gentlemen are now supporting is not our cause, but your’s [sic]; you must employ medical men, whether they be ignorant or informed; but if you have none but ignorant medical men, it is you who suffer from it” (16). To Cooper, anatomy connotes surgical competence, social respectability, and public benefit. However, Cooper laments the gap between his view and that of the general public, and he blames this gap in perception on the methods of procuring anatomical specimens: execution (legal) and exhumation (illegal), informally called resurrection, grave robbing, or body snatching.2 He complains that “the anatomists of London were completely at the feet of the resurrection men,” who obtained bodies from churchyards by clandestine exhumation or by bribery (17). In the epigraph to this chapter, Cooper calls resurrection men “the lowest dregs of degradation” and states, “I do not know that I can describe them better; there is no crime they would not commit, and as to myself, if they would imagine that I should make a good subject, they really would not have the smallest scruple, if they could do the thing undiscovered, to make a subject of me” (18). To Cooper, resurrection men are not only thieves but also potential murderers (they would make a “subject,” or corpse, of him). On the whole, Cooper seems to view anatomy as the basis of progressive, scientific medicine, which connotes, to him, surgical competence and social benefit. He attaches anatomy’s positive connotations to anatomy itself and offloads its negative connotations (criminality, degradation) to the mode of procuring specimens: hanging and body snatching. In doing so, Cooper minimizes his own criminality, since possession of a snatched body was a misdemeanor, and exaggerates the resurrection men’s criminality (from thievery to murder).3 Of course, Cooper was in the midst of asking Parliament to provide new avenues for obtaining specimens, so it is perhaps unsurprising that he credited Parliament with the ability to purge anatomy of its negative connotations, which, he argues, could be fairly easily jettisoned along with the practices of resurrection and of dissecting felons. For Cooper, anatomy connoted science, progress, professionalism , and beneficence because medico-legal discourse had determined its meaning, a meaning that he advocates as the standard for the public as a whole. Cooper’s testimony exemplifies this often unspoken assumption that official discourses (legal, scientific, medical) determine the meaning of medical practices such as anatomy. 19 R Orthodoxy or Quackery? Anatomy in Frankenstein In her reading of Frankenstein, Ludmilla Jordanova contends that Mary Shelley’s novel explores conflicts within science itself: “Far from being a simple moralistic tale of masculinist, scientific overreaching, drawing on simple definitions of ‘science,’ ‘medicine’ or ‘surgery,’ Frankenstein is a remarkably precise exploration of the internal conflicts felt by practitioners in a variety of fields.”4 The novel is not, Jordanova explains, a “direct critique of science” but an exploration...