Possessing the Dead: The Artful Science of Anatomy (review)

Recent scholarship has transformed the history of anatomy in the same way as it has transformed history of the environment. What was once viewed as terrain to be drawn, mapped, and named for its first discoverers—whether Pike's Peak or Monro's foramen—is now contested ground. Helen MacDonald has already delineated this territory in her prize-winning book, Human Remains.¹ In Possessing the Dead, she moves to the bleeding heart of the fray: the actual workings of Britain's 1832 Anatomy Act, juxtaposing its victors, the anatomical establishment, and its victims, the poor who provided its cadavers.

The Anatomy Act is usually presented as the culmination of years of reform, pushed through Parliament after the Burke and Hare murders, and those of the London Burkers, had made it clear to a shocked nation the dangers of the existing black market in cadavers for medical schools. In theory, the act was supposed to regulate the sale of cadavers. "In practice," as MacDonald notes, "the Anatomy Act left so many vital matters ambiguous that it did no such thing" (p. 17). The two Inspectors of Anatomy were under the authority of the Home Office, but their territory was too vast for them to be able to investigate all the teachers of anatomy, let alone every cadaver. They had little power to intervene even if they found unacceptable practices. The most striking deficiency of the act came in the authority of the Inspectors over actual cadavers: as MacDonald explains, they had none. Whatever the law might say or custom might suggest, officials at hospitals and workhouses behaved as though the cadavers originating in their institutions belonged to them, to dispose of as they wished. Perhaps they might provide a Christian burial, if a family required it; perhaps they would give the cadaver to one or another anatomist; perhaps they would sell it to the highest bidder. The one thing they were under no compulsion to do was accede to the requests—for they could be no more than that—of the Inspectors of Anatomy.

The result, in all three regions MacDonald examines—Scotland, England, and Australia—was that anatomists' desire for cadavers routinely overpowered the right of Christian burial for those who died in charitable institutions. In Scotland, funeratories were established, explained to the public as hygienic places to store cadavers from workhouses and hospitals until they could be buried. Any bodies not claimed within forty-eight hours could simply be turned over to anatomists, with none of the publicity that would attend a similar procedure in a hospital. In England, charitable institutions employed all sorts of subterfuges to prevent relatives from claiming bodies for burial. MacDonald provides a chilling account of the case of Albert Feist, master of the workhouse at St. Mary, Newington, who in 1858 was charged at the Old Bailey for unlawfully selling cadavers for dissection while deceiving relatives into thinking he was burying them. Feist was found guilty, but the conviction was overturned because, according to the Anatomy Act, a master of a workhouse was legally in possession of its cadavers. He was therefore authorized to dispose of them for dissection unless relatives "in express words" (p. 93) refused to allow it.

By the late nineteenth century, anatomical dissection had been firmly established in south Australia. So too had contravening the South Australian Anatomy Act of 1884, which had a "decency clause" requiring students to "examine corpses in an orderly, quiet manner and avoid unnecessarily mutilating them" (p. 187). A series of scandals showed that cadavers were cut up, improperly buried, and used for forensic experiments. Aboriginal bodies were looted for parts, turned into souvenirs, and shipped overseas as part of a network for professional opportunity. Yet when Inspector of Anatomy William Ramsay Smith was investigated for allowing these and other improper practices, he defended himself by stating that they were usual and customary. The result was to leave Australian anatomists, like their [End Page...