by Sarah Wise
Anatomist Joshua Brookes was frequently attacked by resurrectionists for failing to pay them properly.
Joshua Brookes, an unlucky man in so many ways, comes down to us as the London anatomist most closely connected with public fury. Perhaps he did not have the guile to be as circumspect as other medical men; perhaps he was too proud to care about discretion. One night, date unknown, disgruntled resurrectionists, angry that Brookes would not pay them a retainer, dumped two badly decomposed bodies near his school. Two “well-dressed ladies” stumbled over them in the dark, and their screams caused a mob to assemble outside the Brookesian; the anatomist, afraid of a lynching, sought refuge in the Great Marlborough Street police court and magistrates office.24 Brookes’s refusal to agree to resurrectionists’ financial terms got him into trouble on at least one other occasion, when a resurrection gang broke into his school at night and slashed to pieces a body lying on his dissection table; again, Brookes needed help from Great Marlborough Street. In addition to his having to flee to the magistrates office for protection, it was reported that Brookes’s school was frequently raided by constables from that very police office. He is likely to have been the victim of informants, both snatchers and Bats, having managed to arouse the dislike of both.
Brookes is the nearest London has to a Dr. Knox figure. When Knox was discovered to have been the buyer of Burke and Hare’s victims and suspected of having known how the corpses had been obtained, he was besieged in his Edinburgh home by crowds and his windows were smashed, while his effigy was hanged, then torn apart; in another part of the city his image was burned. But the greater damage was done to Knox by his peers; gradually, colleagues and acquaintances began to withdraw support, and Edinburgh’s most brilliant surgeon found himself unable to obtain the humblest post. The social shunning forced him to leave Edinburgh for London, where he was also ostracized, and dwindled into poverty and a lonely death in 1862. Brookes, too, died poor and alone, in 1833, but without the ignominy endured by Knox.25
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There are other, smaller, ripples. Here is poet Thomas Hood’s 1826 portrayal of Londoners’ anxieties about the fate of their bodies after death:
’Twas in the middle of the night
To sleep young William tried;
When Mary’s ghost came stealing in
And stood at his bedside.
Oh, William, dear! Oh, William, dear!
My rest eternal ceases;
Alas! my everlasting peace
Is broken into pieces.
I thought the last of all my cares
Would end with my last minute,
But when I went to my last home
I didn’t stay long in it.
The body-snatchers, they have come
And made a snatch at me.
It’s very hard them kind of men
Won’t let a body be.
You thought that I was buried deep
Quite decent like and chary;
But from her grave in Mary-bone
They’ve come and bon’d your Mary!
The arm that us’d to take your arm
Is took to Dr. Vyse,
And both my legs are gone to walk
The Hospital at Guy’s.
I vowed that you should have my hand,
But Fate gave no denial;
You’ll find it there at Dr. Bell’s
In spirits and a phial.
As for my feet—my little feet
You used to call so pretty—
There’s one, I know, in Bedford Row,
The other’s in the City.
I can’t tell where my head is gone,
But Dr. Carpue can;
As for my trunk, it’s all packed up
To go by Pickford’s van.
I wish you’d go to Mr. P.
And save me such a ride;
I don’t half like the outside place
They’ve took for my inside.
The cock it crows—I must be gone;
My William, we must part;
But I’ll be yours in death, altho’
Sir Astley has my heart.
Don’t go to weep upon my grave
And think that there I’ll be;
They haven’t left an atom there
Of my anatomie.26
* * *
The link between anatomists and resurrection men had become part of urban folklore. “If you go to stay at the Cooks, they’ll cook you!” Anne Buton told her grandmother on 19 August 1831. The impoverished eighty-four-year-old Caroline Walsh had decided to take up the offer made to her by one Edward Cook and his common-law wife, Eliza Ross, of a bed in their rooms at Goodman’s Yard, Minories, east London. Buton told Walsh that the pair were body snatchers, warning, “They’re sure to sell you to the doctors.”
Buton never saw her grandmother alive again, and when Eliza Ross eventually told Buton that Walsh had left Goodman’s Yard after just one day, Buton mounted her own search of east London’s streets, workhouses, and hospitals. By late October, the newspapers had begun to take Buton’s worries seriously, and under the heading “Mysterious Disappearance” the Globe and Traveller of 28 October reported that the old woman may have been “burked for the base object of selling the body for anatomical purposes.” Nine days before the Italian Boy arrests, Ross was taken into custody on suspicion of murder; her twelve-year-old son had told the police that Ross, acting alone, had suffocated Walsh on the evening of 19 August, had put her body in a sack, and had lugged her off to be sold at the London Hospital, three-quarters of a mile away in Whitechapel Road. On 6 January 1832 at the Old Bailey, Eliza Ross was found guilty of murder and was executed three days later.27 Surgeons at the London Hospital vigorously denied that they had bought any cadavers in August, and there is evidence to suggest that Cook and Ross’s neighbors were intent on blackening the couple’s name. One of the lodgers who gave evidence claimed that he had often seen coffins in their parlor—an obvious concoction, since no resurrectionist ever went to the trouble of lugging a coffin up out of the grave.
As with the dead boy in the watch house of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, identity proved problematic in the Walsh case. An old woman who had died on 3 September after being taken to the London Hospital with a broken hip was twice exhumed for Anne Buton to identify. But this old lady proved to be Catherine Welch, sixty-one, originally from Waterford in Ireland; she was tall but stooped and feeble, with no front teeth, feet in very poor condition, and filthy skin and matted hair. She had been wearing a blue gown and a black silk bonnet, all her clothing being verminous. Welch had made her living selling matches in the streets but had broken her hip in a fall in Whitechapel on 20 August. Caroline Walsh, Anne Buton’s grandmother, hailed from Kilkenny, was energetic, did not stoop, had a full set of teeth, and looked clean. She was a peddler of laces, tapes, and ribbons. Her clothing consisted of a black gown, a black bonnet, and a blue shawl (stained), and she wore men’s shoes. In a telling detail of the case, Buton had also searched for her grandmother at the houses of those “who were very kind to her [Walsh] for many years by giving her victuals &c.”
But where had Anne Buton got her notion that burkers cooked or boiled their victims? Poet John Clare, on his first visit to London from his native Northamptonshire in March 1820, learned some “fearful disclosures” from his city-dwelling friend the artist Edward Rippingille, who described to Clare “the pathways on the street as full of trap doors which dropped down as soon as pressed with the feet, and sprung in their places after the unfortunate countryman had fallen into the deep hole … where he would be robbed and murdered and thrown into boiling cauldrons kept continually boiling for that purpose and his bones sold to the doctors.”28 Perhaps Clare’s friend was simply having fun frightening a naive countryman; but as with Anne Buton’s warning to her grandmother, the notion of boiling, cooking, and consuming had become intermingled with the notion of dissection and anatomy. It crops up again in the Nattomy Soup incident of May 1829, in which an inma
te at Shadwell workhouse in east London claimed that the institution’s broth included human remains; a local magistrate sentenced the man to twenty-one days in jail for making such an allegation.29
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Dr. James Craig Somerville, who was teaching at the Great Windmill Street School in the late 1820s, had a curious experience of the public’s anxiety. He told the Select Committee on Anatomy that he had only started to be “annoyed” by locals since the occasion on which he took in a murderer’s corpse to dissect.30 The dissection of a felon was an event that the public could—and did, in great numbers—pay to witness. Many surgeons believed that allowing the public in helped dispel ignorance about dissection; others worried that it would have exactly the opposite result. (Dr. Knox himself believed that “the disclosures of the most innocent proceedings even of the best-conducted dissecting rooms must always shock the public and be hurtful to science.”)31 Somerville said that he was now plagued by members of the public wanting to see each body “whom they believed may be a victim.” A victim of what? Of being resurrected? Of dying accidentally and ending up as a Subject? Or a victim of something more sinister? This tantalizing throwaway remark is the best evidence we have that, even before Burke and Hare, there may have been widespread suspicion that individuals were being killed in order to supply the surgeons.
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Sir Astley Cooper’s efforts to shield his activities from public view also testify to the general mood. The ground floor of Cooper’s private house in St. Mary Axe, just east of Bishopsgate, contained a dissecting room, with windows painted so that his neighbors would not be offended or passersby alarmed. Upstairs, in his attic, up to thirty dogs at a time were kept, stolen from the street by Sir Astley’s butler, Charles, who would also inveigle youngsters, Fagin-style, into stealing stray dogs or luring them from their owners, paying the boys half a crown per beast. (And Sir Astley had once called body snatchers “the lowest dregs of degradation.”)32 According to his biographer—and nephew—Bransby Cooper, Sir Astley killed the dogs in order to discover whether a catgut ligature tied around the carotid artery would dissolve (it wouldn’t).33 In a gorgeous example of the hypocrisy and arrogance to which the clan Cooper seems to have been so prone, Bransby makes the perpetrator the injured party: “These circumstances, to which surgeons were unavoidably rendered victims, perhaps may be considered as some of the principal causes which have prevented the members of the medical profession maintaining that rank in society of which the usefulness of their purpose rendered them justly worthy.”
Secrecy such as Sir Astley’s tended to provoke suspicion rather than deflect it. Mysterious attics, rooms with opaque windows, creatures pickled in bottles, body parts in cooking pots, disappearances, strange goings-on after dark: it was the stuff of gothic fiction and fairy tales. A physician, Dr. James Johnson, used another gothic trope when he wrote that in comparison with London hospitals “the cells of the Spanish Inquisition were not sealed up from public observation with a much stricter secresy.”34 But surgeon George Guthrie was having none of this, and in an open letter to the home secretary he claimed that dissection and the teaching of anatomy involved no secrecy or need for circumspection whatsoever: “The doors of every dissecting-room in London are always open, there is nobody to watch them, they swing backwards and forwards on a pulley weight, they may shut of themselves, in case anybody leaves them open; every man may walk in and walk out wherever he pleases; many persons do, but no one gives himself any concern about what is going on. The neighbors care nothing about it, and unless, from some accident, the place becomes offensive, no one interferes; although the resurrection men, for their own purposes, sometimes endeavor to excite a little commotion.… In London … no one knows or cares what is going on, unless he is interested in it.”35
Guthrie’s diagnosis of metropolitan apathy was in keeping with the growing view that Londoners were self-absorbed and unobservant, though it clashed with the simultaneously increasing wariness of the Mob, which dictated a great deal of establishment behavior. But London street protest in these years is notable for the fact that it never truly evolved into systematic revolt. Insulting or striking a constable who was arresting a beggar was a familiar enough rumpus; setting up a hue and cry when a graveyard was discovered to have been plundered by resurrectionists was not unusual. But public outcry at the defeat of the Reform Bill—what had that amounted to in London? One abandoned mass meeting at the bill’s second failure to pass; early closing for the shops of the West End; a few Tory windows put out; smaller meetings and marches here and there. Five hundred Metropolitan Police officers lined Whitehall and Old Palace Yard when Parliament reconvened after the bill had been rejected by the Lords in October 1831: a huge crowd jeered the carriages of the anti-Reform members and cheered the supporters of the bill. The Mob laughed when they realized they should have been jeering, not cheering, Lord Ellenborough. A piece of orange was thrown at the anti-Reform duke of Wellington.36 No soldiers were needed, no firearms. Six months earlier, demonstrators had marched through town and smashed windows where no light was showing on the night of the General Illumination; when they reached Apsley House—Wellington’s London home, at the southern end of Park Lane—and had commenced stoning, they were informed that the duchess of Wellington had died and was lying in state within. The Mob withdrew immediately as a mark of respect.37 There was nothing here to compare to London’s last mass civil action, the Gordon Riots of 1780; only No-Popery seemed to galvanize Londoners, who had shown atypical vigor in the Puritan/Parliamentarian cause during the English Civil War. In the Reform era, the capital’s citizens failed to match the organized, planned mass protests in other British cities and the countryside.
“No one knows or cares what is going on,” said Guthrie, who in his letter went on to state his belief that there was far less popular opposition to becoming a Subject than was generally supposed. “Few individuals really care much what becomes of their bodies after they are dead,” he claimed, adding that he had heard the poor in hospital wards laughing and joking about the idea of their bodies being lectured over or being preserved in bottles. But his assertion that there was nothing secretive about hospital dissecting rooms is hard to fathom. That the doors were not closed is not proof that anyone other than medical men ever passed through them. And against Guthrie must be set the rest of London’s teachers, who certainly acted as though there was very good reason to be cautious. The more secret, the better; the less the public knew, the quicker science could advance.
* * *
The Italian Boy hearings were shining an uncomfortably bright light on the mysteries of the dissecting room. If, as Guthrie claimed, anyone could easily penetrate London’s anatomical theaters, it was quite clear that George Rowland Minshull and other justices had never taken advantage of that freedom. A number of procedural niceties from London’s dissecting rooms were revealed as the evidence against Bishop, Williams, and May piled up: the hampers left by hospital railings for resurrectionists to use; the convivial relationships between the porters and Bishop, May, and Shields; the small-change tips given to porters by resurrectionists; the fact that there was, in October and November 1831, a body glut in London; the preference of anatomists for adult male corpses rather than female; and the acceptability of children in the absence of either.
Such revelations were not likely to inspire confidence in the medical profession. A tailor named West said he had seen strange goings-on in his neighborhood. West lived close by an anatomical theater “near to Golden Square.” (It was not named and could have been one of several in the Soho area.)38 He claimed that three or four days before the arrests at King’s College, he had seen Bishop and Williams bring to the theater the body of a boy “supposed to be about ten.” It seems curious that Bishop and Williams would allow themselves to be spotted carrying about a corpse so badly wrapped that an onlooker could describe its gender and age. The next day, Superintendent Thomas called on the theater in question and was told that Bishop had indee
d sold to the surgeon there a child—though a three-year-old, not a ten-year-old—along with the corpse of a fifty-year-old woman.
The official connivance in the trafficking of corpses could not withstand such direct evidence of doctors’ participation. The testimony of King’s College porter William Hill with regard to the events of Saturday, 5 November, was similarly disturbing.
Hill: “The prisoners then asked me for the money.”
Minshull: “Do you mean the price of the body?”
Hill: “Yes.”
Minshull: “Did you not inquire of the men how they got possession of a body so fresh as they described?”
Hill: “No. We never ask that question. We are not in the habit of doing so.”
Hill had given a similar answer to the Covent Garden coroner: “I did not ask them how they got the body because I never ask such a question. It is not likely they would have answered me truly if I did.”
So far, so good: only the porters had besmirched themselves, and the only anatomist placed in an awkward position had been the unnamed Golden Square private tutor. But an error in the proceedings now forced a hospital surgeon to come forward. John Hilton (nicknamed “Anatomical John” since he was rarely out of the dissecting room and would always do “an inch or so” of dissecting before starting work in the morning) was demonstrator of anatomy at Guy’s.39 He wrote to the Times on 30 November: “Through the medium of your journal and some others, a most unfounded report prevails respecting the teachers of anatomy of Guy’s Hospital having sanctioned an easy disposal of any subject which might have been offered to them for dissection by the prisoner Bishop. It was stated at Bow Street that a female had been recently purchased by us from him. As you have participated in this mistake by giving circulation to it, I trust, in justice to the school, you will insert the following remarks in reply not only to this point, but as a general refutation to several most unmerited errors, at any rate as regards the dissecting-room to which I am attached. Allow me to assure you not one subject of any kind has been purchased of Bishop since October 19th 1829. The last boy dissected was in March 1831, and no bodies were obtained during the past summer of any person, from April 15 to October. Lastly,… detached portions of the body have never been purchased for our dissecting-rooms, although it may be the practice at other schools.”
