“We know that when it comes to history, the horrible bits are the best.” So runs the strapline on the website of the London Dungeon.
The hordes of undead prepared to queue for hours at London Bridge and then stump up the £26 admission fee would seem to prove them right. So would the Horrible Histories television series and, in a lighter vein, Tony Robinson’s Channel 4 programme, The Worst Jobs in History.
Ghoulishness and rather a lot of strawberry jam helps the historical medicine go down. From Bloody Mary through Sweeney Todd to Jack the Ripper, London has more than its fair share of ghoulish episodes for the dungeon to exploit.
But what of the Museum of London? How should a museum go about addressing the very worst job in history: that of the early 19th-century “resurrection man”, who dug up freshly buried bodies by night, and flogged them to medical schools by day, for the purposes of dissection?
Such men have been the focus of a work of serious history, Ruth Richardson’s Death, Dissection and the Destitute as well as the 2010 John Landis film, Burke and Hare, which celebrated two Edinburgh “resurrectionists” who were caught selling bodies they had procured, not by the usual grisly means, but by murdering (“burking”) those they thought would not be missed.
Scholarly basis
In 2006 archaeologists working for the Museum of London uncovered 262 burials in what had been the graveyard of the London Hospital.
Many of these bodies, which included a monkey and a tortoise, bore scalpel cuts and other evidence indicating that they had come from the hospital’s dissection tables. The find directly inspired the exhibition Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men, and was the source of many of its exhibits.
This provided a scholarly foundation for the show, but given ongoing debates over the display of human remains, it did so at great potential cost: get it wrong and you run the risk of being accused of exploiting your visitors and those who were recently interred in the hospital’s burial ground at Whitechapel Road.
A suitably sombre mood for the exhibition is set by the use of black or grey walls, which in some rooms are splashed with other colours, perhaps intended to give the feel of a freshly swabbed dissection room.
The exhibition opens with a map indicating sources of supply (East End churchyards) and the many hospital and private medical schools that competed so fiercely for bodies.
Although a 1752 act had stipulated that medical schools were to receive the bodies of hanged criminals, by the Regency, demand had far outstripped this meagre supply. Resurrection men got to work.
The competition for fresh bodies did not just reflect an increase in the number of schools supplying a rapidly growing metropolis and nation with doctors and surgeons. It also reflected a shift in how medical students were trained.
Under the “Paris system”, students were to be allocated a body a piece. In practice many were short-changed. One letter on display has a medical student complaining that he only had one leg and thigh to himself.
A third room focuses on London’s most notorious burkers, John Bishop, Thomas Williams and James May. A short video features a contemporary ballad, illustrated with broadsides of the time.
Other displays show how resurrectionists were depicted in prints, as well as in lurid scenes of the London underworld such as George Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London.
An interactive allows visitors to compare these fictional accounts with the rather more workaday, if no less chilling, diary of one resurrectionist, Joshua Naples.
Such accounts reveal the ties linking these lowlife criminals with “respectable” surgeons such as Sir Astley Cooper, whose aura of professional pride is reflected in the gleaming surgical implements in the next gallery.
Ethics
The focus of the exhibition now shifts to the findings of the 2006 London Hospital dig. A long gallery has a number of bodies laid out in vitrines, positioned so as to resemble the serried tables of a dissection room.
Labels point to signs indicative of dissection, as well as to traces of the conditions that had brought these working class Londoners to the hospital in the first place.
The exhibition then considers the debate over the 1832 Anatomy Act, which stipulated that the bodies of those who died in hospitals or workhouses could be used for dissection, providing no relative objected.
The act effectively ended the trade in bodies. But at some cost. In the 1830s all but the poorest received medical care in their homes, and home was where most died. Only the working class and the destitute entered hospitals.
The Anatomy Act made the word “hospital” synonymous with dissection, a procedure that was not only associated with capital punishment but popularly believed to deny the victim an afterlife.
Was the act a simple case of utilitarian reform to improve public health, or a case of “legalised burking” of the poor, as working-class opponents claimed?
There is an opportunity for visitors to hear arguments for and against the measure presented on screens, in an area of the gallery arranged like an anatomy theatre.
Respectful display
Some of the objects on display reminded me of ones I had seen in recent Wellcome Collection exhibitions, or in the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
I found myself wondering if the story being told was about the history of medicine, rather than one about London. There were certainly shared strands relating to the use of different media in medical training.
On entering the final room, whose walls are white, rather than black, one finds a timeline, video and comment board addressing the economics and ethics of organ donation in today’s world: again, in a style of presentation the Wellcome Collection has almost made its signature.
One way of relating the story more directly to London would have been to note the emergence of Kensal Green and its various imitators. In addition to being the first example of planned suburbs, these “garden cemeteries” marketed themselves as a secure resting place.
Taken as a whole, Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men is a gripping exhibition, and the curators are to be congratulated for having nicely judged the balance between the sheer horror of this episode, and the wider social and ethical dilemmas it throws into such sharp relief.
As the extracts from Charles Dickens and the images by Thomas Rowlandson demonstrate, Regency and Victorian authors and artists acknowledged and at times exploited the reactions elicited by the trade in the dead.
The human remains here are respectfully displayed, while the final room invites us to ask the extent to which we, then and now, can lay claim to our own bodies after death.
Jonathan Conlin teaches history at the University of Southampton
The hordes of undead prepared to queue for hours at London Bridge and then stump up the £26 admission fee would seem to prove them right. So would the Horrible Histories television series and, in a lighter vein, Tony Robinson’s Channel 4 programme, The Worst Jobs in History.
Ghoulishness and rather a lot of strawberry jam helps the historical medicine go down. From Bloody Mary through Sweeney Todd to Jack the Ripper, London has more than its fair share of ghoulish episodes for the dungeon to exploit.
But what of the Museum of London? How should a museum go about addressing the very worst job in history: that of the early 19th-century “resurrection man”, who dug up freshly buried bodies by night, and flogged them to medical schools by day, for the purposes of dissection?
Such men have been the focus of a work of serious history, Ruth Richardson’s Death, Dissection and the Destitute as well as the 2010 John Landis film, Burke and Hare, which celebrated two Edinburgh “resurrectionists” who were caught selling bodies they had procured, not by the usual grisly means, but by murdering (“burking”) those they thought would not be missed.
Scholarly basis
In 2006 archaeologists working for the Museum of London uncovered 262 burials in what had been the graveyard of the London Hospital.
Many of these bodies, which included a monkey and a tortoise, bore scalpel cuts and other evidence indicating that they had come from the hospital’s dissection tables. The find directly inspired the exhibition Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men, and was the source of many of its exhibits.
This provided a scholarly foundation for the show, but given ongoing debates over the display of human remains, it did so at great potential cost: get it wrong and you run the risk of being accused of exploiting your visitors and those who were recently interred in the hospital’s burial ground at Whitechapel Road.
A suitably sombre mood for the exhibition is set by the use of black or grey walls, which in some rooms are splashed with other colours, perhaps intended to give the feel of a freshly swabbed dissection room.
The exhibition opens with a map indicating sources of supply (East End churchyards) and the many hospital and private medical schools that competed so fiercely for bodies.
Although a 1752 act had stipulated that medical schools were to receive the bodies of hanged criminals, by the Regency, demand had far outstripped this meagre supply. Resurrection men got to work.
The competition for fresh bodies did not just reflect an increase in the number of schools supplying a rapidly growing metropolis and nation with doctors and surgeons. It also reflected a shift in how medical students were trained.
Under the “Paris system”, students were to be allocated a body a piece. In practice many were short-changed. One letter on display has a medical student complaining that he only had one leg and thigh to himself.
A third room focuses on London’s most notorious burkers, John Bishop, Thomas Williams and James May. A short video features a contemporary ballad, illustrated with broadsides of the time.
Other displays show how resurrectionists were depicted in prints, as well as in lurid scenes of the London underworld such as George Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London.
An interactive allows visitors to compare these fictional accounts with the rather more workaday, if no less chilling, diary of one resurrectionist, Joshua Naples.
Such accounts reveal the ties linking these lowlife criminals with “respectable” surgeons such as Sir Astley Cooper, whose aura of professional pride is reflected in the gleaming surgical implements in the next gallery.
Ethics
The focus of the exhibition now shifts to the findings of the 2006 London Hospital dig. A long gallery has a number of bodies laid out in vitrines, positioned so as to resemble the serried tables of a dissection room.
Labels point to signs indicative of dissection, as well as to traces of the conditions that had brought these working class Londoners to the hospital in the first place.
The exhibition then considers the debate over the 1832 Anatomy Act, which stipulated that the bodies of those who died in hospitals or workhouses could be used for dissection, providing no relative objected.
The act effectively ended the trade in bodies. But at some cost. In the 1830s all but the poorest received medical care in their homes, and home was where most died. Only the working class and the destitute entered hospitals.
The Anatomy Act made the word “hospital” synonymous with dissection, a procedure that was not only associated with capital punishment but popularly believed to deny the victim an afterlife.
Was the act a simple case of utilitarian reform to improve public health, or a case of “legalised burking” of the poor, as working-class opponents claimed?
There is an opportunity for visitors to hear arguments for and against the measure presented on screens, in an area of the gallery arranged like an anatomy theatre.
Respectful display
Some of the objects on display reminded me of ones I had seen in recent Wellcome Collection exhibitions, or in the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
I found myself wondering if the story being told was about the history of medicine, rather than one about London. There were certainly shared strands relating to the use of different media in medical training.
On entering the final room, whose walls are white, rather than black, one finds a timeline, video and comment board addressing the economics and ethics of organ donation in today’s world: again, in a style of presentation the Wellcome Collection has almost made its signature.
One way of relating the story more directly to London would have been to note the emergence of Kensal Green and its various imitators. In addition to being the first example of planned suburbs, these “garden cemeteries” marketed themselves as a secure resting place.
Taken as a whole, Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men is a gripping exhibition, and the curators are to be congratulated for having nicely judged the balance between the sheer horror of this episode, and the wider social and ethical dilemmas it throws into such sharp relief.
As the extracts from Charles Dickens and the images by Thomas Rowlandson demonstrate, Regency and Victorian authors and artists acknowledged and at times exploited the reactions elicited by the trade in the dead.
The human remains here are respectfully displayed, while the final room invites us to ask the extent to which we, then and now, can lay claim to our own bodies after death.
Jonathan Conlin teaches history at the University of Southampton
Project data
- Cost £300,000
- Funder Wellcome Trust Peoples’ Award £20,000
- Media partner The Guardian
- Exhibition design Drinkall Dean
- Curators Jelena Bekvalac; Julia Davidson
- Exhibition ends 14 April
