Anatomy and Body Snatching in Georgian Britain: William Hunter

London's Soho district has long been notorious as a place where bodies are for sale. Living bodies. Less well known is its connection to the sale of dead bodies. If you walk along Shaftesbury Ave. to the Lyric Theatre, and turn onto Great Windmill Street, you will find this blue plaque on the side wall of the theatre:  

William Hunter (1718-83), who once lived and worked here, was one of the most renowned (and often reviled) anatomists of the 18th century. He was born in Lanarkshire, Scotland. He studied medicine at Edinburgh University under William Cullen, then moved to London to train in anatomy and obstetrics at St. George's Hospital under William Smellie. Dissecting decaying bodies was indeed a smelly business, but the name was merely coincidental.  (Image: William Hunter, by Allan Ramsay)

 

Like all anatomists, Hunter needed dead bodies -- for his own research and for teaching anatomy. The number of legally available bodies, then restricted mainly to persons executed for murder, fell far short of the growing need. The number of anatomy schools, especially in London, was increasing, and with it, the demand for fresh corpses. 

For Hunter, the difficulty of obtaining bodies was compounded by the fact that much of his research was in obstetrics. His most famous work, The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus (1774) involved the dissection of a lot of recently deceased pregnant women. 

Few if any of these bodies could have been obtained through normal legal channels. Executed murderers were not numerous enough, and in any case, pregnant women were rarely executed. They did, however, sometimes commit suicide out of a sense of shame or desperation. 

Most anatomical "subjects" had to be illegally "snatched," often from recent burials, sometimes before burial. In the cartoon at the top of this post, an anatomist, almost certainly Hunter, is shown fleeing after a watchman (at left) has discovered him with a woman's body. 

In 2010, Don Shelton argued that some of the women whose bodies Hunter acquired must have been murdered. Cases of people killing to acquire bodies to sell did occur, most famously that of Burke and Hare in Edinburgh in the 1820s, but there is no evidence that Hunter obtained corpses in this way.  

Anatomists and their students sometimes did body snatching themselves, but gangs of "resurrectionists" or "sack 'em up men" increasingly took over that task during the late 18th century. They took bodies from cemeteries, poorhouses, hospital morgues, and probably just found some lying in the streets or floating in rivers. 

Hunter's anatomy school in Great Windmill Street was a mecca for aspiring surgeons and physicians. A certificate of attendance at his courses was highly valued. Many of the most famous surgeons and anatomists of the next generation trained with William Hunter, or his younger brother John. [Image: Certificate of Attendance at William Hunter's lectures.]

Artists were highly interested in Hunter's work. His friends included famous painters and sculptors. In the painting below by Johan Zoffany, Hunter is pictured at the Royal Academy of Arts, next to Sir Joshua Reynolds (holding his ear trumpet in his arm).

Hunter's work and the source of his research material aroused much suspicion and derision. Cartoonists of the day sometimes made him their subject. The top one here shows Hunter with the mangled bodies of his "resurrected" subjects. The bottom image, by Thomas Rowlandson, shows a scene at Hunter's school. A man, possibly Hunter, is looking at a list of prices for bodies, male, female, and infant.

Further Reading:

Wendy Moore, The Knife Man (London: Penguin, 2006)

Don C. Shelton, "The Emperor's New Clothes," Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 2010: 103: 46-50

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