Enlightened Anatomies

Historians of anatomy owe a debt of gratitude to the German impresario Günter von Hagens. While his Bodyworlds exhibits remain controversial, they have revived popular interest in the fate of the body after death (as have books like Mary Roach’s Stiff), even as such events as the UCLA cadaver scandal and the Alder Hey babies in the UK have revealed a darker side of modern anatomical study. The latter cases have demonstrated yet again that the dead body has no intrinsic value; its value inheres in either its scientific use or its emotional resonance. These examples also reveal that moral and personal attitudes toward the dead human body have retained remarkable continuities since the seventeenth century. The three books under review examine the fate of human bodies and their representation in the eighteenth century from varied but complementary perspectives. Fiona Hutton focuses on the impact of the British Anatomy Act of 1832 on anatomical education at two sites, Oxford and Manchester. Anna Maerker looks at the crafting and display of wax anatomical models in Florence and Vienna, and shows that representations of the body can evoke as strong responses as do bodies themselves. The essays presented by Matthew Landers and Brian Muñoz in Anatomy and the Organization of Knowledge look at both the intellectual and the medical impact of dissection, from the Renaissance to the far end of the long eighteenth century.

Knowledge of anatomy, argues Hutton, became an essential aspect of medical education in nineteenth-century Britain. Historians have long contended that the Anatomy Act of 1832—which shifted the sources of cadavers from executed criminals to the unclaimed bodies of the poor in workhouses—played a determining role in the professionalization and modernization of medical education, including a decline in the number of proprietary medical schools. Most work on the impact of the Anatomy Act has taken as its starting point Ruth Richardson’s 1987 book Death, Dissection, and the Destitute; Hutton challenges this narrative, pointing out that Richardson focused almost entirely on London, and that her concern was with the poor rather than with medical education. The Study of Anatomy in Britain looks beyond London and investigates the supply of bodies and its impact on the nature of medical education before and after the act.

The book surrounds its central chapter, which discusses the impact of the Anatomy Act on the poor in Oxford and Manchester, with evenly divided sections covering the periods before and after the act, presenting mirroring chapters on medical education and the supply of bodies. The contrast between the two cities, at least on the surface, could not have been greater. Oxford, of course, was the seat of one of the two great English universities, and a place where, in the seventeenth century, many important events of the Scientific Revolution took place. At that time Manchester was little more than a village, but by the early nineteenth century it had become an industrial metropolis whose burgeoning population and influence were finally recognized with parliamentary representation in the Reform Act of 1832.

Although a medical degree from Oxford or Cambridge was essential for elite medical practice, the content of that degree, particularly in Oxford, remained tied to a humanist emphasis on the classics. While anatomy was a subject of study, it was not at the center of medical education, and independent anatomical lecturers taught aspiring artists as well as aspiring doctors. The establishment of Oxford’s Radcliffe Infirmary in 1770, which might have opened the door to more modern hospital-based education, failed to do so. Independent anatomy schools in Oxford suffered from a lack of bodies, whereas in Manchester body snatching eventually flourished to such an extent that the excess was exported to London. The...