Notes 1 Chalk on the Coffin: Re-Reading the Anatomy Act of 1832 1. ‘The Weather in London’, Times, 23 February 1858. 2. ‘Mean Temperatures at Camden Square London at 9 am, 1858–1881’ in Anon. (1882), London Winter Temperatures from 1858 to 1881 (London: John Murray), pp. 1–2. 3. The first spring flowers were reported to have bloomed at Helston, Cornwall in The Times, 14 January 1858. By February London parks had spring colour from ‘more than 100 blossoms’. 4. ‘John Welsh, 1824–59, meteorologist’ in S. Lee, ed. (1860), The Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 60 (London: John Murray), p. 239. 5. S. Wise (2008), The Blackest Street: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum (London: Random House) recounts typical social conditions. 6. M. Brodie (2004), The Politics of the Poor: The East End of London, 1885–1914, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), for essential context. 7. R . R ichardson (20 08), The Making of Mr. Gray’s Anatomy: Bodies, Books, Fortune and Fame (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 117–39. 8. There is an extensive historiography on the Medical Act (1858). An excellent appraisal of the literature can be found in K. Waddington (2003), Medical Education at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital 1123–1995, (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer), pp. 13–44. 9. ‘The New Medical Act’, Times, 23 October 1858. 10. Ibid., for a useful summary of its stipulations. 11. M. W. Weatherall (1996), ‘Making Medicine Scientific: Empiricism, Rationality and Quackery in Mid-Victorian Britain’, Social History of Medicine, IX, pp. 175–94, explains the new education standards. When the Medical Act was extended in 1885 all doctors then had to qualify in both medicine and surgery; this was applicable to midwives too. 12. See, S. V. F. Butler (1981), ‘Science and the Education of Doctors during the Nineteenth Century: A Study of British Medical Schools with Particular Reference to the Development and Uses of Physiology’ (unpublished Ph.D., UMIST). 13. D. Burgh (2007), Digging up the Dead: Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon (London: Random House), p. 3. 14. See, E. T. Hurren and S. A. King (2005), ‘Begging for a Burial: Form, Function and Conflict in Nineteenth Century Burial’, Social History, XXX, pp. 321–41. 15. Contemporary attitudes are elaborated in N. Jones and P. Jones (1976), The Rise of the Medical Profession: A Study of Collective Mobility (London: Croom Helm); M. J. Peterson (1978), The Medical Profession in Mid-Victorian London (Berkeley: University of California Press); A. Digby (1994), Making a Medical Living: Doctors and Patients in the English Market of Medicine, 1720–1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); T. Bonner (1995), Becoming a 312 Notes 313 Physician: Medical Education in Britain, France, Germany and the United States, 1750–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 16. M. J. Durey (1976), ‘Body Snatchers and Benthamites: The Implications of the Dead Body Bill for the London Schools of Anatomy, 1820–42’, London Journal, II: pp. 200–25. 17. Summarised in, R. Richardson (1991), ‘ “Trading Assassins” and the Licensing of Anatomy’, in R. French and A. Wear, eds, British Medicine in the Age of Reform, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 74–91. 18. See, notably, J-M. Strange (2005), Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870– 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 19. All of the quotations in Rex versus Feist [1858] have been reconstructed from record linkage work on www.oldbaileyonline.org, The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court, 1674–1913. All quotations hereafter are taken from the original OB case number: t18580222–354. Reports in Times, 21 January, 25 February, 5 March, and write-up of the quashed judge- ment 24 April 1858, are also used. To test for bias in the court and news- paper record, poor law accounts have also been consulted at the London Metropolitan Archives (hereafter LMA), St. Mary’s Newington, P92/MRY. 20. For a brief summary, see D. W. Meyers (2006 edn), The Human Body and the Law: A Medico-Legal Study (Chicago: Aldine Transactions), p. 107; it is also cited, but not analysed, in H. MacDonald (2009), ‘Procuring Corpses: The English Anatomy Inspectorate, 1842–1858’, Medical History, 53, III, pp. 379–96. It is regrettable that in recent years the popular end of the pub- lishing market has tended to exploit pauper stories like this by not doing anywhere like enough record linkage work. This book argues that such strat- egies compound the problem of the voices of the poor not being heard in their proper historical context. Chapter 4 returns to Rex versus Feist with new scholarship. 21. LMA, St. Mary’s Newington, P92/MRY, 1858; Southwark Local History Library, Parish of St Mary Newington, ‘Legal Papers about the Indictment of Alfred Feist, Workhouse Master, for the Removal of Paupers’ Bodies to Guy’s Hospital School of Anatomy, 1858’; Lambeth Police Court, Monday, 20 January 1858 and ‘Copy of evidence taken by Mr. Farnall, Poor Law Inspector, on 22 January 1857’. 22. S. Lewis, ed. (1848), A Topographical Dictionary of England (London: Institute of Historical Research), pp. 389–93, recounts poor law arrangements, parish boundaries and population size. 23. ‘Sick Poor’, British Medical Journal, 26 September 1868, II, p. 348, summarises medical care standards across London for the decade 1858–1868, including St. Mary Newington. 24. For the most recent summary of Poor Law rules and regulations, see E. T. Hurren (2007), Protesting about Pauperism: Poverty, Politics, and Poor Relief in Late-Victorian England (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer), pp. 17–58. 25. All figures taken from ‘The Poor Law Statistics in the Metropolis’, Times, 22 April 1858, issue 229874, p. 12, column d. 26. See ‘London Destitution and Its Remedy – Letter to the Editor from An East End-Incumbent’, Times, 2 February 1858, issue 22906, p. 9, column f – states that pauperism returns commonly show ‘that certain portions of London are almost exempt from poor and poor rates, and that other portions – the 314 Notes destitute ones alluded to – are overwhelmed with the burdens which they cannot possibly support’. 27. LMA, St. Mary’s Newington, P92/MRY, 1858. 28. OB, case number: t18580222–354, 22 February 1858. 29. S. Tarlow (2007), The Archaeology of Improvement in Britain, 1750–1850, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 142–8, for basic architectural layout of Dead Houses. 30. J. Litton (2002), The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral since 1450 (London: Robert Hale Ltd). 31. See another common example in The Examiner, 17 October 1848, p. 686, which contains a report of the suicide of a young woman at Twyford in Winchester called ‘Rebbecca Mabbett’ who died ‘from taking poison’ aged just ‘seventeen’; she was accompanied to the grave by a crowd who checked that her name was chalked on the coffin and that her corpse went into the earth: ‘The coffin consisted of a few thin boards, hastily nailed together, but a white cloth for a pall, was thrown over it, and the mourners had provided themselves with crape hat-bands ... a heavy clod [of earth] was thrown in [to the grave] which seemed as if it would break the fragile coffin and a shudder of horror ran through the spectators’. The mourners waited until the grave was ‘covered with turf’. Chapter 2 revisits this theme. 32. OB, case number: t18580222–354, 22 February 1858; verified in LMA, St. Mary’s Newington, P92/MRY, 1858. 33. Ibid. 34. His full address was given in an early report of the allegations, ‘The Dead Bodies of Paupers, Extraordinary Revelations’, Liverpool Mercury, 8 January 1858, issue 3087, p. 1, column a; evidence cross-checked to LMA, St. Mary’s Newington, P92/MRY, 1858 and Census Returns, 1861. 35. OB, case number: t18580222–354, 22 February 1858. All the quotations now come from the same source and are hereafter not footnoted individually. 36. See ‘Police report’, Times, 21 January 1858, issue 22896, p. 11, column f. 37. It was opened in 1853 and closed in 1876, being located in Hackney, Bullards Place, in East London, not far from Bow, just opposite the western end of Old Ford Road. Its burial records are held at The National Archives (hereaf- ter TNA) RG8/42–51, where registers are arranged alphabetically. 38. The original allegations as reported proved remarkably accurate in court. See early editions all printed on 9 January 1858 in regional newspapers like Manchester Times, issue 5, Leeds Mercury, issue 6740, Bristol Mercury, issue 3538. 39. The Times reported the case extensively on 21 January, 25 February, 5 March, 1858. 40. Bodleian Library (hereafter Bodl. Lib.), University Archives (UA), Anatomy Department Records (ADR), HA89, Thomson to Home Office, report, 17 February 1920, reported Arthur Thomson, head of anatomy at Oxford University, that since the Anatomy Act had been passed in 1832 the body certification system was ‘unworkable’. Chapter 6 elaborates this context. 41. R. Richardson (2001 edn), Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London: Phoenix Press), first identified the ‘bureaucrat’s bad dream’, pp. 239–61. 42. OB, case number: t18580222–354, 22 February 1858. 43. For example, in the TNA, MH12 series of poor law records, they were pinned by civil servants to pauper complaints. Likewise in the Macalister Notes 315 Papers, Human Anatomy Department, Cambridge University, discussed in Chapter 5. 44. E. Higgs (2004), The Information State in England: The Central Collection of Information on Citizens, 1500–2000 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan) provides important context on how bureaucracy can betray what it wants to hide. 45. This new methodology providing empirical evidence of the anatomy trade was first established in E. T. Hurren (2004), ‘A Pauper Dead-House: The Expansion of Cambridge Anatomical Teaching School under the late Victorian Poor Law, 1870–1914’, Medical History, 48, I, 69–94.