Part 17

1. That from and after the ----, the bodies of all persons convicted of felony, and who, in consequence of such conviction, shall die in any place of confinement, in the United Kingdom, may be sold for dissection. The sale to be by public auction, the proceeds to be paid to the treasurer of the county in which the prison shall be, and applied in aid of the county rates.

2. So also the bodies of all under commitment for felony, if not claimed within ---- hours after death.

3. So also the unclaimed bodies of those who die in hospitals and workhouses.

4. Suicides.

5. Unclaimed bodies of persons found dead.

6. To legalize the sale by persons while living, of their bodies after death.

7. To secure the due delivery to the purchaser on demand.

8. With certain exceptions, no dissections of the bodies of persons dying in Middlesex, or in certain parishes in Essex, Kent, and Surrey, to be permitted before the body shall have been exhibited at an appointed place, with evidence of name, residence, cause of death, &c. satisfactory to a magistrate assisted by a surgeon.

9. That the magistrate be one of the police magistrates in his turn, and that the attendance be every day at ---- except Sunday, and for so long a time as may be needful in respect to bodies brought in before that hour.

10. That the magistrate give a certificate of his satisfaction as to the death, and a permit for removal and dissection.

11. That the body permitted be branded, or otherwise marked indelibly, upon the skin of every part which is commonly purchased by students who have not occasion for the whole.

12. That a register be kept of the name, residence, and cause of death, and of every person whose body is produced.

13. That the only exceptions allowed to this course be the _post mortem_ examinations by dissection under the special directions of a coroner or other magistrate, or which are performed in the dwelling of the deceased, with the knowledge and consent of the family.

14. That whoever shall dissect a body, or any part of a body, as a separate portion, not being duly marked, or shall be possessed of them, shall be subject to ----.

15. That the forgery, or aiding or abetting, of the brand or mark, of the certificate or permit, shall subject the party to ----.

16. That similar provisions be made for other parts of the kingdom.

'I have the honour to be, Sir, Your very humble servant, J. SEWELL.'

_21, Cumberland-street, Portman-square, December 8._

In corroboration of the plan of Sir J. Sewell, the following very able remarks were addressed to the Editor of _The Times_.

'SIR,

'Having read Sir John Sewell's "Suggestions for a new Act of Parliament as to the Supply of Bodies for Dissection," I trust to your kindness in enabling me to express publicly my humble opinion on the same, conceiving them to be good and just in every respect excepting one, the idea of which I cannot but believe must disgust very many: I allude to the public sale of the body. Why, may I ask that gentleman, need it be sold at all, much less in so offensive a manner? Surely there can be no necessity whatever. Let, then, the bodies, as they ought in every instance, be presented gratuitously. Wheresoever the death may occur, or the inquest be held, let the coroner of the district be empowered to assign the body to the hospital of that district, or to bequeath it for the public good, according to any other satisfactory arrangement that may be concluded on the occasion.

'To Sir J. Sewell I would say, by presenting, instead of vending, you would go far towards annihilating the traffic of the "resurrection man" whose profits must thereby be materially diminished, as what hospital would they find anxious to purchase subjects of them at all, much less at the price they must necessarily demand, to compensate them for the risk encountered in procuring them, when these establishments can be sufficiently supplied in a lawful manner gratis?

'In conclusion, I humbly conceive that a law, based on Sir J. Sewell's "Suggestions," severally and collectively (save the one assumed to be offensive), would effect the utmost good; and if really so, ought accordingly to satisfy the people.

'It is, in every respect, such a plan as can alone defeat the sanguinary designs of body-snatching monsters; and once made law, would, no doubt, in a short time destroy their infernal commerce altogether.

'I am, Sir, Your obedient Servant, W. H. E.'

_Saturday, December 10._

'P. S. With regard to Sir J. Sewell's suggestion as to the workhouse, in accordance with which the bodies of all such as have been maintained, and are about to be buried, at the parish expense, are to be given up for anatomical purposes, I am inclined to believe it would, if adopted, be productive of a twofold service, inasmuch as the practice might tend also to diminish the numbers of this class (who generally speaking prefer a life of degraded ease to one of honourable employment), by its inciting (which is likely) those most sensitive on the "subject" to work out an independent subsistence by their own assiduity; and with respect to such as cannot exist but by poor-house maintenance, their bodies, I should say, might nevertheless, in justice, be rendered serviceable after death, on the score of the important benefits experienced by them whilst living.

'W. H. E.'

On Thursday, the 15th, in the House of Commons, Mr. Warburton moved for leave to bring in a bill to regulate schools of anatomy. He reminded the House, that in 1829 he had introduced a bill of the same kind, which had passed this House, but had been rejected in another place. The political changes which had occurred since had occasioned him to defer the renewal of the attempt. The bill he now proposed to introduce differed in some respects from the other. It was more simple. Instead of requiring anatomical professors to obtain licenses, which had been objected to, he proposed the appointment of anatomical inspectors, by the Home Secretary, to whom returns were to be made, and who should inspect the schools. It had been objected to the former bill, that it made a distinction between the poor and the rich; his present bill was equally applicable to all; and he hoped, when it was considered what had been the enormous and necessary consequence of the present law,--the law was one thing and necessity another,--prejudices would give way, and that schools would be supplied with the subjects necessary for the promotion of science, and at reduced prices.

Mr. Hunt said, that unless this bill was materially different from the last, he should oppose it to the utmost. He hoped that a clause would be introduced to legalize the sale of a person's own body, which was now the property of his executor.

Mr. Sadler said that so far from the repugnance referred to being a prejudice, it was a principle which pervaded the whole world, and could not be eradicated without injury to the best feelings of our nature. Let the Bill be confined to those who were liberated from those prejudices. The poor would not bear it; the Bill would be unpopular, and justly so, and would tend to close the houses of mercy. It was said that a neighbouring country had overcome those prejudices: then let the principle of free trade be called into action, and our schools of anatomy be supplied with subjects from abroad.

Sir R. Vyvyan observed that there was a want of a clause in the former bill, repealing the law which subjected criminals to anatomy; for till that law was repealed, the public never would endure that other bodies should be exposed to what was thus made an indignity. Whatever might be in the bill, he hoped there would be nothing to offend the prejudices of the poor. Those who died in a poor-house or hospital were equally entitled to have their bodies respected as those who died elsewhere.

Mr. Warburton said that his bill would apply equally to rich and poor: no body would be given for dissection without the consent of the person when alive, or of the nearest relative after death.

Leave was then given.

On the bringing in of the Bill, Mr. Perceval recommended, that the mere possession of dead bodies should be held to be felony. The knowledge of surgery, he said, could not be lost in the space of two years, and if they were to try an experiment for that time, he was sure that medical men would then resort to the dissection of animals, and obtain, while conducted under proper regulations, all the knowledge necessary for their profession.

We have before, in another work, had the satisfaction of exposing the folly of this fungus of a legislator, when he attempted to impose upon the fasting mechanics and labourers of this country, a religious fast-day, or a general propitiation to Heaven for all the sins and crimes which have been committed generally and individually, since the time that fast-days went out of fashion! We did then hope that we should have heard no more of him; but in Mr. Warburton's Anatomy Bill being brought in, we were again enlightened by the sagacity and profundity of his remarks. Mr. Perceval certainly forms a component part of the legislative wisdom of this country, and certain it is (poor man!) that he is a specimen of it, that will not tend much to exalt the character of it. His recommendation that the mere possession of a dead body should be held to be a felony, is a lamentable specimen of folly, which makes us heartily rejoice that all the framers of our laws are not of the same mind, with the _right_ honourable and _downright_ nonsensical member of whom we are now speaking. Suppose Mr. Perceval's good lady, or one of her children, were to die, does the poor silly man wish to make himself guilty of felony, for having the dead body in his possession, when, morally, he would not be one jot more of a culprit than he is at present? The latter part of the paragraph, from his speech, is equally remarkable for its absurdity. He gives it as his opinion, that the knowledge of surgery would not be lost in two years, if, during that period, its study were discontinued. The Honourable Member's opinion on this point is, we fear, the result of self-examination. He, perhaps, finds that his own stock of knowledge remains the same, whether he studies or not; he discovers, perhaps, that he does not know one jot more about legislation and civil policy than he did many years ago, when he first ornamented St. Stephen's Chapel with his presence, and enlightened the members of it with the profundity of his researches. He argues, that as he has not gained anything by study--and no one will be so rude as to contradict him--there is nothing to be lost by not studying; but we have some reason to suppose, that he is as much mistaken in this particular as he is in the very view which he seems to have taken of humanity. Dissection of dead bodies he opposes as a matter merely of feeling; and at the same time expresses a hope that the surgeons will take to cutting up animals, by the torture of which Mr. Perceval trusts that science will be equally advanced without resorting to the revolting practice of human dissection. Putting, however, out of the question the savageness of this proposition, how would it work in other respects, to the end proposed by this most enlightened legislator. It would, he says, provide all the necessary anatomical knowledge; which in other words is saying, that there exists so strong an analogy between the anatomy and diseases of a man and a dog, that it is only necessary for the medical student to employ a Bishop or a Williams to burke a dozen of the canine species, and all the diseases incident to human nature will be fully developed, the treatment of them ascertained, and all the ends of science fully accomplished. Here again we see the danger of a person forming a judgment from his own individual self. It is the opinion of Mr. Perceval that, in point of utility, a beast is any day as useful as a man--consequently the honourable member regards the one in about the same light as he does the other. Alas! the consciousness of his own true value has made him exceedingly libellous upon the rest of the race to which he has the honour of belonging.

The hints which were thrown out by Sir John Sewell, in his letter to the editor of the _Times_, and inserted in a former part of this work, appear to have met with that serious attention which they so well merited. Still, however, in some respects, it must be owned that his plan is defective, and in consequence thereof, some strictures having been made in one of the public journals, Sir John addressed the following explanatory statement to the editor of the _Times_:--

'SIR,

'I am much obliged by your ready insertion of my letter of yesterday, as well as by your reference to, and observations upon it, in your own portion of the paper; in respect to which last I will beg leave to add a few lines in explanation of some parts of what I have already written.

'1. By suicides were intended only those against whom verdicts of _felo de se_ may have been given, and they were introduced not as likely to furnish many subjects, but as something towards the demand, and as a cause which might operate with some towards the preservation of their lives.

'2. The appropriation of the proceeds of the sales to the benefit of the county, was to remove, as much as possible, all temptation to act with harshness to persons not claiming the bodies of their relatives within the exactly stipulated period.

'3. The sale of bodies may be made with equal convenience after having been examined and marked as before.

'4. The bodies being admitted both by the sellers and purchasers to be fresh at the end of forty-eight hours, will allow abundant time for the proposed course to be taken with them.

'5. The want of bodies, by the professors and students at hospitals, going, as is shown in the late case, beyond their own means of supply, a permission to dissect such as may die in them, without examination and the subsequent marks, would leave open a dangerous door for dealers in murder to continue their most abominable traffic.

'With a repetition of my acknowledgments, both on my own part and on that of the poorer part of the public, I have the honour to be, Sir, your very humble servant,

'J. SEWELL.'

'_21, Cumberland-street, Portman-square, Dec. 10._'

The atrocities of Bishop and Williams appeared to endanger the peace of every family, and the public became naturally anxious that measures should be adopted for the purpose of supplying subjects for anatomical lectures, in a manner that might abolish the disgusting, unhallowed, and illegal trade of the resurrectionist, and remove for ever all temptation to the commission of that new and most horrible species of murder called burking. We may boast of the excellence of our legislative enactments,--and in the plenitude of our conceit, we may fancy that we are far superior to all other nations in the construction of our legislative code,--but in what other country than this, professing to be enlightened by civilization, was the crime of burking ever known?--and yet science has advanced as rapidly in those countries where it was never exemplified, as in that where it has been carried to an extent actually appalling to our nature, and disgraceful to the nation in which it has been practised. It is well known that many of the medical students of this country repair to the schools of France, on account of the greater facility which is there offered of perfecting themselves in anatomical science, by the readiness with which subjects are procured, without, at the same time, outraging the feelings of the living, or having recourse to the horrid crime of murder. We merely throw out the hint, whether an establishment like that of La Morgue in Paris would not in itself furnish a regular and ample supply of subjects for all the anatomical schools of the metropolis? The suggestion of Sir John Sewell comes very near to the establishment of an institution like that of La Morgue, and it cannot be a matter of doubt that the same beneficial results would accrue to the interests of science in this country as have been so conspicuously displayed in the schools of France.

It is admitted on all sides that medical students must practise, or, at least, witness, repeated dissections of the human body, in order to obtain a competent knowledge of their profession; there can be, therefore, no question of the propriety of braving the absurd prejudices of weak-minded individuals, rather than permit the present deplorable system of violating the sepulchre, and even of murdering, for subjects to be continued. The choice of two evils is before us,--we cannot but choose the least of them. We have already described the means that have been proposed by several enlightened individuals for legally supplying lecture-rooms with subjects; but suffice it to say, in our estimation their most objectionable features are infinitely preferable to a continuance of the mode, now generally adopted, of obtaining dead bodies by the plunder of the churchyard; because the existence amongst us of gangs of degraded wretches, living by the infraction of the law, is of itself a monstrous evil, even putting the crime of burking altogether out of the question. Poaching and smuggling have long been notorious for their destructive influence on the morals of our provincial population. An indulgence in those comparatively trivial offences, together with the difficulty of obtaining honest employment when known as a smuggler or a poacher, too often lead to crimes of a deeper dye. How much more mischievous then must be the influence of the disgusting avocation of the resurrectionist upon those who are tempted by the high price given for subjects to steal the clay-cold corpse from the grave, at the dead of night? Accordingly we find, that among this class of men are some of the most desperate thieves and burglars of the metropolis. The life of a resurrectionist would be no mean acquisition to the knowledge of the human character in its most depraved and degenerate dispositions; for it may be affirmed, that no man ever took to the horrible avocation of exhuming the putrid corpse until his heart had been previously seared and cauterised by almost every species of crime incidental to humanity. Let us, however, be so far candid as to state, that such is not the case with regard to _all_ those persons from whom our anatomical schools obtain their subjects, for we could point to an individual, who now apparently moves in a respected station of society, who followed the horrible trade of the resurrectionist for a number of years, and having gained a sufficient competency to support him during the remainder of his life, retired from the _profession_ to enjoy his _otium cum dignitate_. This, however, we must confess, may be an isolated case; but when we consider that, taking the calculation of Bishop, if his statement is to be credited, during the few years in which he followed his disgusting avocation, he disposed of nearly one thousand bodies, and that each body, upon an average, brought him ten pounds, we have here the almost incredible sum of ten thousand pounds realised by an individual in a few years, by an illegal and a horrid traffic, and which is in itself sufficient to show, that so long as such a temptation is held forth of acquiring such a property, the trade of the resurrectionist will be assiduously carried on, although the recent disclosures may, by putting the purchasers of the dead bodies more upon their guard, effectually stop the commission of murder. When, however, to the mischievous effects of holding out an inducement to a class of men to commit actions forbidden by the law--excusing the error on the plea that good may be derived from it, yet knowing, as we do, that one crime ever draws on another--we take into consideration the harrowing fact, that murder is actually committed for the purpose of obtaining the ten or twelve guineas given for a subject, the public have a right to demand the interference of the legislature, for the legal supply of the lecture-room, and the effectual suppression of the horrid trade of the resurrectionist.

It is impossible to read the confessions of the homicidal miscreants, Bishop and Williams, without feelings of the deepest detestation. We enter not at present upon the truth or falsity of those statements, for we shall advert hereafter to the anomaly which their confessions presented, of a partial credibility being attached to one portion of them, whilst every exertion was made to invalidate the truth of the other. We have at this moment only to do with the character of the men, and the influence of their crimes on the general interests of society; and it must be confessed, that the cold-blooded and calculating atrocity with which they sought their victims among the destitute, and friendless, and houseless wanderers in the public streets, and tempting them at midnight by promises of shelter and refreshment, to go to that den from which they never were to emerge with life, is only to be equalled by the vampyre horrors that superstitious fancy has invented. Then followed the drugged drink--the retirement and carousal of the ruffians, till the potion had taken full effect. The deep slumber, the short bubbling in the water, and all was over. The cruel and cowardly task was done--the human carcase was prepared for sale! We will not ascribe to accident, the almost miraculous discovery by which these detestable butchers were brought to justice. The deep secresy of their proceedings--the extraordinary precautions which they appear to have taken, might well have promised a long career of impunity. But let us indulge the belief that an all-seeing eye was upon them. The circumstances of the discovery were indeed of an extraordinary nature; the bruise in the back of the neck of their last victim, combined with the freshness of the body generated suspicion, and although the medical witnesses appear to have been in error as to the cause of death--nay, although the identity of the corpse is yet doubtful, the fact of Bishop and Williams having committed murder, was brought home to them by a long chain of evidence as extraordinary, taken altogether, as it was conclusive. Had the wretches been less eager after the price of their crime, had they retained the corpse another day or two in their possession, and preserved it from being bruised after death, they would have escaped detection, and they might in that case have been engaged, at the very moment we are now writing, in the preparation of another human being for their next day's sale. But murder will out sooner or later,--'Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed.' In spite of all their infernal cunning and midnight secresy, justice has overtaken these monsters, and never again may the annals of any age or nation be stained with such revolting criminality.