Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and its Trade in the Dead Poor, c.1834–1929 by Elizabeth T. Hurren (review)

Elizabeth T. Hurren’s Dying for Victorian Medicine is a much-anticipated follow-up to Ruth Richardson’s Death, Dissection and the Destitute (1987). While Richardson’s work studies the passage of the 1832 Anatomy Act, which allowed paupers who died in a workhouse to be removed to medical schools for dissection, Hurren’s book examines how the Anatomy Act worked in practice. Hurren focuses on the period between 1834 and 1929, when the New Poor Law was in operation, in order to demonstrate the reliance of the Anatomy Act on the machinery of poor relief. This was also a moment when new government legislation regarding the licensing of medical practitioners produced increased demand for corpses to dissect during medical training. The book provides important statistics on the number of corpses required by medical schools to keep up with increasing demand, the number that were available through legal channels, and thus the number of bodies and body parts that must have been bought and sold on the black market.

By following the paper trail, and the money trail, Hurren exposes both the logistics of this trade in the dead poor and the types of people involved to reveal a much larger cast of characters than has previously been acknowledged, including anatomists, workhouse staff, hospital porters, coroners, undertakers, and railway workers. In fact, Hurren maintains that the destitute themselves sometimes became unwitting participants in the commodification of their dead kin. Too poor to afford a burial, they often sold the corpses of family members for anatomical dissection. This saved them the cost of burial, as anatomical remains were required by law to be buried and the cost borne by the medical school itself. But, Hurren tactfully implies, it also allowed them to profit from their own dead. She argues that stillborn children of the very poor were most easily sold in this manner as before 1926 stillbirths were not required to be entered in either birth or death registers. Their bodies were thus not subject to any government regulation and could be legally traded.

One of Hurren’s equally important findings is that the trade in body parts was unregulated and highly profitable. Most medical students, she argues, likely dissected only parts of corpses rather than whole cadavers. These were not only easier to obtain, but less costly to dispose of. When medical students were done with them, what remained of these heads, arms, legs, abdomens, and thoraxes—because they arrived on the slab already dismembered and were therefore no longer persons—need not be buried at all. Instead, they could be discarded like any other waste product. The trade in body parts has gone largely unrecorded and leads Hurren to an intriguing, though difficult to substantiate, rereading of the Ripper murders, not as sex crimes, but as part of a lucrative trade in female reproductive organs.

Hurren’s research into the undertaking business provides a particularly important contribution to Victorian studies. She reveals that many who called themselves “undertakers” were merely body brokers responsible for moving a corpse from a workhouse or other institution to an anatomical school and then removing the scant remains for burial. While much of what they did was technically legal under the terms of the Anatomy Act, they were also experts in deception and often staged funerals for absent or substitute corpses, trading on the ambiguity of the term “pauper burial,” which could mean burial after dissection (51). Hurren’s nuanced reading of the tensions generated by the Anatomy Act around the meaning of pauper burials provides insight not only into how the state and the medical profession justified and managed both the dissection of the destitute and the disposal of their remains, but also into the poor’s own understandings of their rights and needs—and...