The body trade of anatomy schools in Victorian times that underpinned the expansion of medical education has been neglected. This article examines dissection records of insane paupers, sold to repay their welfare debt to society. Each cadaver was entered in an ‘Abnormalities and Deformities’ dissection book. Student doctors paid fees to anatomists to be taught the pathology of insanity under the Medical Act. Anatomists also dissected cadavers to do further brain and eye research on epilepsy and glaucoma in the insane. These bodies were often dissected to their extremities. Their fragmentary remains were then disposed of in a common grave. This secret body trade and its asylum supply-chain merit further work in disability studies and the history of psychiatry.
Leicestershire Record Office (LRO): North Evington Infirmary (NEI), G/12/85/1, Order dated 29 Jan. 1907.
5.
Northamptonshire Record Office (NRO): Oundle Union Poor Law letter book, 249p/216.
6.
Oxfordshire Record Office (ORO): Botley Cemetery Records, ENG/1/A1/2. MSS, DD. Par. Rotherfield Grey, Anthony Harris case reconstructed from: folio c. 11/1-8, & c. 11/24.
7.
St Bartholomew’s Hospital Archives (St B): Dissection Registers, MS/81-6; Medical School financial records, MS/42.
8.
The National Archives (TNA): Anatomy Inspectorate Reports, MH/74/10, MH74/15 (4 Nov. 1843, p. 53).
9.
BaconGM (1868) Cambridge County Asylum: insanity and poverty. British Medical Journal1(380): 356.
10.
BartlettP (1999) The Poor Law of Lunacy: The Administration of Pauper Lunatics in mid-19th Century England. Leicester: Leicester University Press.
11.
BartlettPWrightD (1999) Outside the Walls of the Asylum: The History of Care in the Community, 1750–2000. London: Continuum International Publishing Group.
12.
BentonT (2008) Wallace’s dilemmas: the laws of nature and human spirit. In: SmithCHBeccaloniG (eds) Natural Selection and Beyond: The Intellectual Legacy of Alfred Russel Wallace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 368–390.
13.
ClarkDH (1983) The Story of a Mental Hospital, Fulbourn, 1858–1983. London: Process Press, ch.2.
14.
DouglasM (2002) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, 2nd edn.London: Routledge; originally published in 1966.
15.
GillJ (2009) The pauper lunatic population of the Cambridgeshire Lunatic Asylum, Fulbourn, 1858–1901. Unpublished Masters dissertation, Cambridge University.
16.
HurrenET (2004) The pauper dead-house: the expansion of Cambridge Anatomical School under the late-Victorian Poor Law, 1870–1914. Medical History48(1): 69–94.
17.
HurrenET (2007) Protesting about Pauperism: Poverty, Politics and Poor Relief in late-Victorian England. Woodbridge: Boydell, Royal Historical Society series.
18.
HurrenET (2008) Whose body is it anyway? Trading the dead poor, coroner’s cases and the business of anatomy at Oxford University, 1885–1929. Bulletin of the History of Medicine82: 775–819.
19.
HurrenET (2011) Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and its Trade in the Dead Poor, c. 1832 to 1929. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
20.
HurrenETKingSA (2005) Begging for a burial: form, function and meaning in nineteenth century funeral provision. Social History30(3): 321–341.
21.
KingSA (2000) Poverty and Welfare in England: A Regional Perspective. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
22.
KingSATomkinsA (2005) The Poor in England 1700–1850: An Economy of Makeshifts. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
23.
JacksonM (2000) The Borderland of Imbecility: Medicine and Society and the Fabrication of the Feeble Mind in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
24.
LanzoniS (2005) The asylum in context: an essay review. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences60(4): 499–505.
25.
MacalisterA (1885) Man physiologically considered. In: Anonymous (ed.) Present Day Tracts, No. 39. London: John Murray, 1–48.
26.
MacalisterA (1891) A History of the Study of Anatomy in Cambridge: A Lecture [pamphlet, 28 pp.]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
27.
MacalisterA (1901) Sections of anatomy and physiology: introductory remarks by the President on the Anatomy Act and the teaching of anatomy. British Medical Journal2(2128): 1064–1065.
28.
MacDonaldH (2006) Human Remains: Dissection and its Histories. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
29.
NettleshipE (1875) The state of the eyelids in the orphan and deserted children as compared to those who have parents. In: 4th Annual Report of the Local Government Board Report, 1874–5. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 113–131.
30.
PorterR (1985) The patient’s view: doing medical history from below. Theory and Society16: 175–198.
31.
RichardsRJ (2003) Darwin on minds, morals and emotions. In: HodgeJRadickG (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Darwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 92–115.
32.
RichardsonR (1988) Death, Dissection, and the Destitute. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
33.
RussellJ (1862) Illustrations of hospital practice, metropolitan and provincial, Birmingham General Hospital. British Medical Journal1(62): 249–251.
34.
ScullA (1979) Museums of Madness: The Social Organisation of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century England. London and New York: Allen Lane.
35.
ScullA (2005) Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
36.
StrangeJ-M (2005) Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
37.
Suzuki (1998) The household and the care of lunatic patients in eighteenth century London. In: HordenPSmithR (eds) The Locus of Care: Families, Communities and Institutions, and the Provision of Welfare Since Antiquity. London: Routledge, 153–175.
38.
ThomsonM (1998) The Problem of Mental Deficiency: Eugenics, Democracy and Social Policy in Britain, 1870–1959. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
39.
VaidyaJH (1921) A point in favour of Professor Arthur Thomson’s theory of the production of glaucoma. British Journal of Opthalmology (5), 172–175.
40.
WeatherallM (2000) Gentlemen, Doctors and Scientists: Medicine at Cambridge, 1800–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
41.
WrightD (1996) From Idiocy to Mental Deficiency: Historical Perspectives on People with Learning Difficulties. London: Routledge.
42.
WrightD (2001) Mental Disability in Victorian England: The Earlswood Asylum, 1847–1901. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
