The Study of Anatomy in Britain, 1700–1900 by Fiona Hutton (review)

Fiona Hutton’s study contributes to the lively historiography of British anatomy in the nineteenth century, a field launched in the late 1980s by Ruth Richardson’s groundbreaking study of the 1832 Anatomy Act. Hutton “examines the impact of the 1832 Anatomy Act on the study of anatomy within two very different regions and institutions. The choice of Manchester and Oxford provides a contrast between a new and ambitious provincial center with arguably the first fully organized provincial medical school and a highly traditional center for medical training based on university education” (p. 1). While the need to provide students with dissectible bodies was recognized at Oxford as early as 1549, by the late 1600s anatomical education at this university was in decline. The anatomical professorship was little more than a sinecure, students studied at Oxford to establish social contacts rather than acquire knowledge, and looked for opportunities for practical education elsewhere, mostly in large London hospitals. Manchester emerged as a growing urban center in the eighteenth century and by the early decades of the 1800s had two flourishing private anatomy schools. Before the Anatomy Act, neither in Oxford nor in Manchester did anatomists obtain nearly enough bodies from the only legal source, the gallows. In both towns they had to rely on illegal body snatching, but there were more “opportunities” in Manchester, though also more protests. Riots that surrounded the Anatomy Act, Hutton agrees with other historians of anatomy, were linked to wider social protest: in Oxford, for instance, related to the increasingly desperate situation of agricultural laborers. But even after the Anatomy Act, Oxford offered little—if any—opportunity to dissect. As the comparison with Cambridge shows, lack of dissectible bodies had to do not just with the small size of the town and the protective attitudes of union guardians, but also with professors’ (in the first place Henry Acland’s) view that Oxford should provide classical arts education, and that students should seek practical medical training elsewhere. In Manchester, by contrast, the consolidation of private anatomical schools and, later in the century, establishment of the university secured a better vantage point to negotiate access to bodies. Throughout the century, medical educators viewed Manchester as the place to offer “modern medical education.” Its comparative advantage was easy access to anatomical, pathological, and clinical material.

The book concludes with a chapter on “Some Contemporary Parallels” that briefly sketches recent anatomy-related events that attracted public attention— indeed notoriety—such as the organ retention scandal at the Bristol Royal Infirmary and Liverpool Alder Hey hospitals in the 1990s, or the Body Worlds exhibitions by Gunther von Hagens. It is not clear how these examples were selected, and they need better explaining and contextualizing. For instance, the “anger of Christians” in von Hagens’s “native Germany” (p. 133) at his attempt to sell plastinated specimens online isn’t obvious if we know that, historically, public attitudes toward dissection in German lands ranged from highly critical to neutral and even positive; that “transparent bodies” were produced for public education and entertainment a century before von Hagens; and that anatomists for centuries sold specimens made from human bodies. What, then, was the difference between von Hagens and his predecessors to deserve such a different reception, and what changed in the course of the twentieth century for public attitudes to undergo such a shift?

Hutton convincingly shows that the relationship between the supply of body and medical education was bidirectional: access to bodies influenced anatomical and medical teaching, but also styles of education had an impact on the demand for bodies. The latter contention hitherto received little attention in the literature. It is a pity that Hutton did not use Elizabeth Hurren’s Dying for Victorian Medicine(2012) because they studied the same centers (Hurren also Cambridge and London) during the same period but from different perspectives: Hurren (who was co-supervisor of Hutton’s...