Exploring the Sick City of London

At the Ministry we love meeting, promoting and participating in all of the exciting multi-disciplinary projects that London has to offer. From Museums Showoff to UCL Researchers in Museums there are so many interesting people doing great things at the moment. So it was only a matter of time before we heard about the Sick City Project supported by the Wellcome Trust. Organized by Wellcome Engagement Fellow Dr. Richard Barnett, the Sick City Project takes the history of medicine in London to the streets. 

Starting out our snowy tour at the Royal College
of Surgeons in Lincolns Inn Field

Building on the cultural and historical geography of our great city, the Sick City projects aims to engage the imagination my immersing participants in the history of medicine by bringing them directly to the places where it happened. Why read about medicine in London when you could walk the streets walked by the historic persons themselves? Get out of the library and get into history!

Heading up the strand towards the heart
of the City 

Sick City offers a variety of tours from exploring tropical diseases in Greenwich to the sex trade of Soho, but I opted to attend Richard Barnett’s ‘Sensational Bodies’ walk organized through the Museum of London. Accompanying the ‘Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men’ exhibition, Barnett took us on a tour of anatomical teaching in the heart of London, covering the rise of the surgery from the four humours to the foundation of the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Even living in London, it’s sometimes hard to really appreciate the physical closeness of medical London. But walking from Holborn along the Strand to St Paul’s and St Bartholomew’s Hospital, its easy to see how the trade in bodies and anatomical knowledge was linked. Surgeons and student, physicians and booksellers, body snatchers and the poor, all milled together within a claustrophobic two miles at the centre of the city.

You can see why people weren't too keen on dissection
in the early eighteenth century. 

I was also thrilled by the amount of emphasis Barnett placed on the importance of the two brothers who revolutionized surgery and anatomy teaching in the 18^th century: William and John Hunter. I know I am incredibly biased, but it made me happy. I also learned that the Hunters’ pioneering anatomy school in Covent Garden was located right where the Apple store is today. The history of London is all around us, if only we knew where to look. Throw in a ghost story or two, and I was one happy girl (despite the terrible weather- a danger of any outdoor adventure in London).

Without sounding like too much of an advertisement (note that the Ministry is not affiliated with Sick City!), you’d be crazy not to try and get yourself on one of these walks! You can find out more about the project at sickcityproject.wordpress.com plus download their app, podcasts and see future Sick City events. You can also follow them on twitter @SickCityProject. 

My History Valentine: John Hunter (1728-1793), surgeon, anatomist,badass

Dearest John,

It is difficult for me to write down these words, even though I know the fact you have been dead since 1793 will impede your ability to read them. At this time of the year when we celebrate love, I find myself sadly underwhelmed by the modern men around me. I know romance probably wasn’t your forte in life, but maybe in death you will be more sympathetic to my love.

Just look at him thinking about how many bodies he could
have cut up in the time it took to sit for his portrait.

I only wish I could have met you. I know you probably never thought yourself much of a romantic with your difficulty speaking to others, your crazy eyebrows, your short neck, or the fact that you probably have syphilis, but I still feel drawn to you. In fact if we ever had met, maybe in the dissecting room... well you probably would have just shouted at me to get out because I am a woman and also because you are famously very rude. But it is that fervor and your unwavering honesty that make you so special to me.

In a world where most men I know spend hours playing video games, you were up by five am in the dissecting room, working through the day teaching or with patients. You questioned where others accepted. Your innovations in dentistry, transplantation and the treatment of gunshot wounds are legendary. In fact, I think we can safely argue you, my love, one handedly revolutionised surgery and undoubtably have saved millions of lives, even if you didn’t quite get that whole antiseptic thing. The fact that even modern surgeons don’t know who you are makes me weep. Ignorant sots.

When I think back on your life, there are so many things I love about you. Say it’s right or wrong, but I found your whole grave robbing phase so sexy. Your habit of riding asian buffalos into town is nothing short of pimpin’. And I’ll never forget your testimony at the murder trial of John Donellan. When lesser men were quick to accuse him of poison just because they needed someone to blame, you never backed down from your faultless examination of the forensic evidence. Sure they may have condemned him for the murder of his brother in law, but your badass-ness cannot be denied.

My darling you remain one of histories great enigmas: brilliant surgeon, body snatcher, naturalist, military man, Scot, industrious anatomist, really crappy teacher, and fairly unethical experimenter on non-consenting patients. I forgive you your faults because your brilliant mind makes me hot. Although we can never meet, at least I can still be amongst your collection at the Hunterian Museum in London (not that one in Glasgow, you are way cooler than your brother).

Let’s maybe let this love between us stay an intellectual one, that whole you giving yourself syphilis thing is still a bit of a deal breaker.

With all my love for Valentine’s day,

Kristin

If you also want to fall in love with John Hunter, I’d recommend reading Wendy Moore’s 'The Knife Man: Blood, Body-Snatching and the Birth of Modern Surgery'

Or to learn more about poisoning and early forensic science, you could try Elizabeth Cooke’s ‘The Damnation of John Donellan: A mysterious case of death and scandal in Georgian England’

Astley Cooper is still a jerk

In Digging up the Dead: Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon Druin Burch attempts to exonerate this infamous surgeon from centuries of bad press. I don’t really think it worked.

With a fairly standard biographical approach, Burch takes us through the life and times of Sir Astley Cooper, Norfolk boy, student of John Hunter, surgeon to the king, and general cad. If you know anything about Cooper, you probably remember him for this quote: There is no person, let his situation in life be what it may, whom if I was disposed to dissect, I could not obtain. The law only enhances the price, it does not prevent exhumation. It’s probably a good summary of Cooper’s life. Incredibly powerful surgeon, enormously conceited man. (Fun fact, Cooper was buried in a locked coffin in a crypt in St. Thomas' Hospital so he could never be snatched. Is that irony? Hypocrisy?)

If anything, Burch hurts himself by trying to humble Cooper. We learn plenty about his personal life, his wife, his adopted children, even his idyllic sounding Norfolk childhood. Burch paints a picture of a beautiful child with curly golden ringlets. I don’t feel empathetic, I feel sick.

Admittedly I learned more about Cooper than I knew before. I learned about his days as a raging Democrat, traveling abroad to experience the hey day of the French Revolution before being chased away as an English Aristocrat. I also found Burch’s re-examining of John Keat’s medical career fascinating. Is it possible that the great poet actually found surgery and his art compatible? Burch argues that Keats always believed he could return to medicine if he desires, and that he was a competent surgeon. It is a perspective not often forwarded by other academics but the arguments seem sound.

There can be little doubt that Sir Astley Cooper is an important figure in the development of surgery, that much Burch makes clear. It is also true that most people don’t credit Cooper for the amount of free work he did for poorer patients. At the end of the day, Cooper still comes across as superficial, self-absorbed and occasionally cruel (particularly in his constant vivisections). I also found the book lacked in cultural geography and context. I want to understand more about the medical field at the time and Cooper’s place the very small world of late 18th century London.

For me with my particular interests, I wanted more John Hunter and I wanted more body snatching. I’m sure Burch was trying to separate Astley from his eminent (and clearly much more awesome) tutor by allowing Hunter to flow in and out of the narrative. I would argue everything of use Astley learned from Henry Cline and John Hunter, so don’t hide it. Equally, we get very little detail of Cooper’s dealing with the body snatchers. This has become much of Cooper’s legacy as he spearheaded the Anatomist Club: a gathering of powerful London surgeons anxious to form a union against the greedy body snatchers. If you are going to call this book ‘Digging Up the Dead’, you’d better damn well give me what I want Druin Burch. It is not possible to make Cooper seem sweet and cuddly, but you could have made him seem the master of London’s underworld trade in human flesh. Go for that one, I’d read that book.

In his afterword, Burch describes his own work in surgery and his fondness for this ‘vain egotistical, nepotistic and rather wonderful old man.’ I think that sums Astley Cooper up quite nicely. Overall it’s a well written and interesting book, if slightly apologetic and narrow in it’s focus. I genuinely appreciate that it was written by an actual surgeon as I find some people in the medical profession have very little interest in or respect for medical history. If Astley Cooper is your hero, then I say good for you Druin Burch.

Book Review: The Italian Boy

The year is 1831 and a fuss is being kicked up in the cold hallways outside the King's College anatomy theatre. Three men stand over a large basket, thinking they are about to make a sale of their fresh 'Subject' when the police superintendent storms in and informs them they are being arrested on suspicion of murder. Superintendent Thomas asks who's property was the 'Thing' (as bodies were known) which seemed to suspiciously fresh that the surgeons had alerted the authorities. 'The Subject is the property of that gentleman,' says James May pointing at his partner John Bishop. 'I only came with him to get the money.' Thomas then asks Bishop how he came by the body. Bishop snaps in reply, 'I'm a bloody bodysnatcher.'

It sounds like fiction, but Sarah Wise's in-depth research allows her to tell the story of London's infamous most infamous grave robbers in their own words drawing on the testimonies, court documents and contemporary journalism surrounding the trial for murder known as the 'Italian Boy' case. While most of us find the profession of 'body snatching' synonymous with Edinburgh's Burke and Hare, the capital had it's own version only 3 years later. 'Burking' as it came to be known, was the act of committing murder to supply the insatiable market for fresh corpses created by London's numerous private schools of anatomy and teaching hospitals. Although we may not remember James May, John Bishop and Thomas Head (alias Williams), Wise's The Italian Boy brings the reader into the hysteria which surrounded the trial and harsh light thrown on the enormously profitable trade in 'resurrected' human bodies. We meet the resurrection men in the favourite haunt in the Fortune of War pub and follow them into the slums of Bethnal Green to the house of murder later known as 'Burkers Hole' and eventually to the corridors of London's prestigious medical institutions. Along the way, Wise explores the close relationship between the century's most eminent surgeons and the gangs of successful body snatchers who emptied the city's cemeteries.

Wise's book uses the Italian Boy trial as a lens to further consider not only the history of body snatching, but the emergence of a new police force (the Metropolitan Police), the effects of legislation relating to vagrancy, animal cruelty at Smithfield Market, and even the long lost sights and sounds of London's itinerant street vendors and performers. Although ostensibly about the murder of Carlo Ferrier by May, Bishop and Williams, by half way through the book we seem to have forgotten the trial all together. But it hardly matters, Wise's prose is so readable you don't really mind getting lost in the back-alleys of 1830s London. The reader is brought back with a start to the crux of the issue in the chapter entitled 'I, John Bishop...' which consists almost entirely of the killer's confessions recorded the night before they are hung for murder. Chilling and calculated, it is no wonder that the scandal caused by this trial very quickly brought about the Anatomy Act of 1832 which very quickly brought about the end of the resurrection trade.

Although The Italian Boy is a book about body snatching, I would recommend it to anyone interested in the history of the London in pre-Victorian times. I definitely feel like I know more about the trial of the London Burkers, but Wise also admirably covers the beginning of forensic science and detective work, the prison system, London's rapid urban expansion and human trafficking from the Continent. I sometimes find a broad approach to history writing can be quite distracting, but in this case I think it really works. What is most unique about Wise's book is her use of first person accounts to the text so engaging and relatable. You finish feeling as if you have met the three 'snatchers' on the bench, the prosecutors, the witnesses, and even the crowd outside cheering for a verdict. I only would have wished to get to know the surgeons a little better, but this is perhaps appropriate as the medical profession (shockingly) managed to steer well clear of the bench. It is unfortunate that the Italian Boy case has been lost to history, it is a fascinating snapshot of the development of our medical and legal systems. One thing is for certain, it makes for gripping reading.

Now who wants to go on a body snatchers tour of London with me? Meet you outside the Fortune of War pub or maybe let's find where Nova Scotia Gardens once stood...

The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave-Robbery in 1830s London by Sarah Wise, Pimlico (2005)

In praise of 'Resurrection Men'

Much praise has been lavished on the Museum of London's 'Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men' exhibition. With its gruesome topic, expensive exhibition design, and aggressive Tube advertising scheme, it has been an instant hit. True, it is very well done, visually stunning, thoughtfully laid out and atmospheric. But is it really that good? I would say, yes, yes it actually is. Because not only has the Museum of London delivered a stylish show, it uses visual media to perfection to entertain and engage the visitors with the otherwise dry story of the politics of the human body. 

What the exhibition does so well can be summarized not in any of it's displays of impressive wax works or skeletal remains, but in the media space isolated from the exhibition by red plastic curtains. Visitors are invited to sit in the round (an echo of an operating theatre?) and listen to admittedly simplified versions of the arguments which surrounded the controversial Anatomy Act of 1832. We hear voices from both sides of the issue passionately debating the main topics addressed by the Act, accompanied by evocative sound effects which attempt to bring the visitor directly into the Parliament debate. As I sat and listened to each side passionately condemning or defending surgeons using the bodies of the unclaimed poor in their training, it dawned on me that at no point in the exhibition had the 'resurrection men' actually been condemned. 

Most people come to an exhibition about grave robbers for it's morbid fascination, but the Museum of London has managed to deliver an exhibition that is deliciously dark while actually contextualising the 'unholy' union between London's schools of anatomy and the resurrectionists. It would be far to easy to look back on this period of time in disgust and the exhibit is very careful to at all times ensure that the highest of surgeons is implicated alongside the most notorious of body snatcher. Listening to the arguments for and against the Anatomy Act, it becomes clear that the hunched thieving characters we know today from books and films were very clearly a product of their social context. The interest of the body snatching phenomenon lies as much in the invention of 'man-traps' as it does with the rapid expansion of the urban population in early nineteenth century London, or wide-held religious beliefs around literal resurrection. Quite rightly, the exhibition ends with a meditation on issues of consent and our bodies as it stands today, and we can see that the issues faced by some of our most memorable surgeons and their unfortunate 'Subjects' is very much still applicable today. 

18th century waxwork anatomical model used to train surgeons
on display at the Museum of London

I think the Museum of London has really tied together some of the things that the museum field is trying to achieve in it's temporary exhibitions. It's a crowd pleaser for sure with it's macabre subject matter, anatomy inspired wall-paper and well-designed interactives. But the exhibition never patronises the audience and never criticizes part people for their actions, but rather presents them in the social context. My only criticism is I wish there had been more human remains to supplement the very well placed archival material and wax models. I know using human tissue is in itself a bit contentious, but if you are going to have some (which the exhibition does) then use it to effect. My heart goes out to rooms and rooms of disused wet specimens from bodies hawked by the resurrection men to London's most famous surgeons. Maybe I just love pots more than bones.

Resurrection Men is a well designed and immersive exhibition with plenty to take away. You could go and just enjoy meeting some of London's most famous body-snatchers in the form of Williams, Bishop and May, walk the streets of medical London, see the bones of anatomised corpses pulled from a hospital graveyard, or have a good think about organ donation in modern medicine. This is a show we'll be talking about for years, so don't miss out!

Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men is on at the Museum of London until 14 April 2013.