Dr. Southwood Smith: A Retrospect

by Gertrude Hill Lewes

Without bodies for dissection medical education was impossible, and at that time there was only one legal means by which they could be obtained: those of executed criminals were made over to the medical profession for the purpose of dissection. But this source was, happily, even then a scanty one. Until, therefore, some other provision was made, the employment of "resurrection-men," though against the law, and in itself revolting to the professors of anatomy, was a necessity.

The difficulty was an increasing one. The wretched men whose trade it was to supply the medical schools were punished with imprisonment and heavy fines, and were, not unnaturally, regarded with abhorrence by the mob—such abhorrence that it was often difficult to protect them from its fury when arrested. In Scotland, especially, this popular feeling was so strong that disgraceful outrages were committed against those even suspected of being concerned in exhumation; the churchyards were watched, and the obstacles in obtaining subjects for the schools had become so many that the students were fast deserting them. Indeed throughout Great Britain it appeared as if there would soon be a general desertion of all the native schools, and that students would go to Paris for the education they could not get at home.

In the article by Dr Southwood Smith which first called public attention to these evils, he points out, in a very striking manner, the paramount necessity of a supply of subjects. He reminds his readers of the wild theories of former times when anatomical knowledge was not possessed, and enforces on their attention the fact that this knowledge can only be acquired, with any degree of perfection, by means of dissection. He further reminds them that no operation can be performed without torture to the living, and danger to life itself, by the hand of a surgeon unpractised in dissection; and no clear judgment formed by the physician on the diseases of the human frame—diseases generally seated in organs hidden from the eye—without a study of the internal structure.

After shortly passing over the evils of the system then prevailing, which have just been pointed out—evils which were then very generally known—he suggests the remedy,—a very simple one. It was, to cease to give the bodies of executed criminals for anatomical purposes, and thus in a measure to take off the stigma on dissection; and then to appropriate to that purpose the bodies of all those who die in hospitals and workhouses unclaimed by relatives.

Nothing was done for some time, till in 1828, three years after this paper was written, there came the horrible discovery that the difficulty of obtaining subjects from the churchyards had become so great that two men, Burke and Hare, had resorted to murder to supply the need—the temptation having been the large price to be obtained for bodies.

When things had come to this climax, legislative attention was aroused. At this time the article which had appeared in the 'Westminster Review' was reprinted as a pamphlet, under the title of 'The Use of the Dead to the Living.' In this form it went through several editions, a copy being presented to members of both Houses of Parliament.

The measures recommended in it were mainly adopted by the Legislature, and have proved completely successful.

There is something at first sight sad in a plan which lets anything that is painful in the thought of such an appropriation of the bodies of the dead fall exclusively on the poor. This did not fail to suggest itself to my grandfather's mind. But it is to the survivors alone that such pain comes, and these friendless ones would have none left to shrink from this use of their remains. Such were to be chosen for the necessary purpose, not because they were "poor," but because they were "unclaimed." Neither was any pain arising from this arrangement to be compared with that springing from the forcible seizure of bodies in the old times. Out of that arose, necessarily, scenes of horror revolting to all sense of the respect due to the dead; while their quiet removal from the hospital to the anatomical school, to be followed, after the necessary dissection, by their burial, is widely different. It seemed, moreover, that the interest of the poor specially demanded a widespread anatomical knowledge in medical men, since they, more than all others, suffered when the means of gaining it were limited. "Poverty, it is true," my grandfather writes, "is a misfortune; poverty, it is true, has terror and pain enough in itself. No legislature ought by any act to increase its wretchedness; but the measure here proposed is pregnant with good to the poor, and would tend, more than can be estimated, to lessen the misery of their condition. For it would give knowledge to the lowest practitioners of the medical art—that is, to persons who are at present lamentably deficient, and into whose hands the great bulk of the poor fall. And, after all, the true question is, whether the surgeon shall be allowed to gain knowledge by operating on the bodies of the dead, or driven to obtain it by practising on the bodies of the living. If the dead bodies of the poor are not appropriated to this use, their living bodies must be, and will be. The rich will always have it in their power to select, for the performance of an operation, the surgeon who has signalised himself by success; but that surgeon, if he has not obtained the dexterity which ensures success by dissecting and operating on the bodies of the dead, must have acquired it by making them on the living bodies of the poor."

It was said at the time by objectors that the measure in question would deter patients from entering the hospitals, and add terrors to workhouses, but experience has proved that my grandfather was right: the adoption of his plan has not been found to have the slightest effect of the kind.

In considering the work of this period of my grandfather's life, I ought not to omit to mention his lectures, which were full of the same earnestness and originality that characterised all he did. He was lecturer at the Webb Street School of Anatomy, where he gave a course on "Forensic Medicine," which made much impression at the time. He gave also courses of popular lectures on physiology at the London Institution and elsewhere. To those at the London Institution ladies were admitted—a permission unusual in those times.