Dissection & Bodysnatching
“ The body was laid out on two planks with a stretcher and put on display behind a window. Here the public could view the corpse of “Poor Jenny” for a penny.”
Elsewhere on this site I have discussed the history of the Company of Barber Surgeons and their Hall in Newcastle. The Hall was only 130 metres from the walls of Newcastle Gaol and some brethren of the Company served as prison surgeons. The Barber Surgeons were also required to host the dissection of several murderers who had been executed locally, as stipulated by the Murder Act 1751. Indeed, one of the few relics to have survived from the Surgeons’ Hall are a set of surgical instruments that would have been used to explore the inner workings of Newcastle’s dead. So why were Newcastle’s surgeons obliged to dissect some criminal corpses, and what opinions did people have about the anatomists?
Dissection and post-mortem punishment
In 1540 Henry VIII awarded the Barber Surgeons of London an annual grant of the bodies of four executed felons which they could dissect in their hall. This grant set in motion an unedifying link between the criminal justice system and anatomical education over the next few centuries. As medical schools and research expanded in the eighteenth century, surgeons needed a steady stream of bodies in order to practice dissection and teach anatomy to students. There was no culture of consent at the time, nor was there any formal means of donating one’s body for science, as is the case today. More importantly, dissection was held to be a disgraceful thing by most ordinary people who associated it with a “bad death”.
In response to the shortage of bodies available to surgeons and a perceived crime wave, in 1751 An Act for Better Preventing the Horrid Crime of Murder (Murder Act), was proposed and passed into law in 1752. The Act was intended to tackle "the horrid crime of murder" and it dictated that it was "necessary, that some further terror and peculiar mark of infamy be added to the punishment of death." This "further terror" was that, after execution, criminals would be dissected in the local Surgeons’ Hall or gibbeted (Hung in Chains). A further provision was that criminals would be refused burial after dissection. The Act remained in force until the Anatomy Act 1832 allowed surgeons to dissect the bodies of unclaimed paupers from workhouses and hospitals.
Those dissected in Newcastle under the Murder Act were: Ewen MacDonald (1752), Dorothy Gatenby (or Catinby) (1754), George Stewart (1764), Thomas Watson (1790), Jane and Eleanor Clark (1792), Thomas Nicholson (1795), Charles Smith (1817), and Jane Jameson (1829). The dissection of MacDonald is interesting in that tradition has it that half way through the dissection the surgeons were called away to the Infirmary and on their return “found Macdonald so far recovered as to be sitting up; he immediately begged for mercy, but a young surgeon not wishing to be disappointed of the dissection, seized a wooden mall with which he deprived him of life”. The legend of “half-hanged” MacDonald was born and the mallet which “killed” him was said to be a showpiece in the Hall. Although there is evidence that several people did survive execution by hanging during this period - or at least were not medically dead by the time of dissection - there is no contemporary evidence to prove this happened in MacDonald’s case.
The case of Charles Smith is even more disturbing because of the evidence trail it has left. Smith was hanged for murder in 1817 and after his public dissection in Surgeons’ Hall a portion of his skin was tanned by a local antiquarian and bound as a page into a book detailing the case. The page of skin, now held in City Library, Newcastle, is a rare and curious example of “anthropodermic bibliopegy”.
The Dissection of Jane Jameson, 1829
One of the earliest inmates in Newcastle Gaol was also one of the most infamous. Jane Jameson was a fish-woman who lived in Sandgate. On January 2 1829 she visited her mother in her room at the Keelmen’s Hospital where, after an argument fuelled by alcohol, Jane stabbed her mother with a hot poker. Before she died, the mother told witnesses it was Jane who did it, but later retracted this. Jameson was remanded in the gaol and tried at Newcastle Guildhall in March. She was found guilty and sentenced to death to be followed by public dissection (the details of her execution including the expenses were detailed in Moses Richardson’s c19th history of Newcastle)
Two days later Jameson was led on a cart, sitting on her coffin, to the Town Moor where 20,000 people had assembled. She was dressed simply in a black dress, black hat, and green shawl. The execution of a woman was rare in Newcastle and there had not been an execution since Charles Smith 12 years previously. After prayers the halter was placed around her neck and the cart moved away; she seemed to die instantly. Jameson hung for almost an hour and was brought back to the town where, according to later recollections, the body was laid out on two planks with a stretcher and put on display behind a window. Here the public could view the corpse of “Poor Jenny” for a penny.
Jameson was then sent for dissection at Surgeons’ Hall where Dr. John Fife lectured on the condition of her brain to an audience of around 50 medical men. Fife was a young surgeon and radical politician at the time and would go on to become mayor of Newcastle in 1838 and 1843. The dissecting table used at the time was a grey pine table which revolved - a relic that later made its way into the possession of a firm of solicitors on Westgate Road. Fife’s lectures and dissection of the body went on for several days. It is not clear what happened to the body after dissection, but in most cases there was not a huge amount left and it was disposed of as if it were an animal carcass. Tradition has it that the money collected from the display of the corpse was used to plant a tree on each side of the gateway to the Hall, trees which “waved like death-plumes long after the poor creature’s clay was eclipsed by the duty of sepulture”. One of these trees can be seen in Richardson’s drawing of the gateway.
Body-snatching and other dissection controversies
Around the 1780s the surgeons received a letter from George Wilson of Sunderland regarding the removal of his son as an apprentice in that company. Wilson’s son, also named George, had been involved in a “rash and foolish Attempt to take up a Corpse in St. Nicholas-Church Yard in order to dissect it”. Wilson described how his son had experienced the “Odium and Resentment of the Town” and begged he be readmitted after paying any penalties required.
This is an early example of the practice of “body-snatching”, or stealing recently buried corpses from graveyards and cemeteries. This illicit practice grew in scope in the early nineteenth century in response to the expanding numbers of medical students in cities like Edinburgh, London, and Dublin. Newcastle was not immune to this, being an important staging post between London and Edinburgh where prices for corpses were highest. There were several prosecutions and scandals related to body-snatching in Newcastle in the 1820s and the Turf Hotel on Collingwood Street often featured as the scene of gruesome discoveries in the back of travelling coaches and in suspicious-looking trunks. Aside from the case of George Wilson, there is no direct evidence linking Newcastle’s surgeons to body-snatching, but it is highly likely surgeons and students in the town practised dissection using illicitly sourced corpses. In 1996 archaeological excavations on the site of Newcastle’s old Infirmary (now the Centre for Life) revealed a large quantity of human remains in charnel pits showing clear signs of dissection associated with anatomical training.
While the Anatomy Act 1832 reduced the value of corpses, and thereby halted the body-snatching epidemic, it did not mark the end of shady and unethical behaviour among surgeons and medical students. As bodies of the forgotten were now being targeted in institutions, the poor and vulnerable in society were sensitive to any attempts by surgeons to purloin or steal bodies they were not entitled to. We know at least three flashpoints around the claiming of “unclaimed” bodies in Newcastle the 1830s and 1840s, particularly involving the Irish community in Sandgate. This may not have been helped by the lecturers in Surgeons’ Hall permitting the public to view, free of charge, some of the anatomical preparations they had created. In 1839 it was reported that a poor woman of Sandgate had died while lying between her two children, who were also ill from typhus and hunger. The remains of the woman were taken to the Surgeons’ Hall, “but the working men of the neighbourhood suspecting that it would be submitted to the dissecting knife, went in a body and conveyed it thence to the Ballast Hills, where they had it buried”. Very soon after this incident the case of Sophia Quin raised more fears among the poor Irish community that their corpses were at risk. On this occasion they had an unlikely ally in the form of the Tory Mayor John Ridley, who relished his chance to disrupt the goings on at Surgeons’ Hall, the domain of his liberal rival Sir John Fife (recently knighted for putting down a Chartist protest in 1839).
Yet another incident occurred in 1841 when a mob went to Surgeons’ Hall to take back the corpse of Catherine Smith, a young pauper of Sandgate who had not been claimed by friends or relatives. According to the Gateshead Observer, which covered the case, Smith had been a prostitute and had injured public health during her life: “it would have been some atonement to society, had her body been devoted to the purposes of anatomical instruction”. Despite the editor’s disdain for the “superstitions” that the working classes had about dissection, there was almost no desire on the part of wealthier citizens to donate their bodies for medical education during this period. For some people Surgeons’ Hall and the work carried out within its walls was positive, progressive, and crucial for the health of all. But for most, the work of the anatomists had disgraceful connotations, and the journey of corpses to Surgeons’ Hall was a sign of poverty in death as well as life.
