The Context of Crime and Justice in the 1780s

Before going on to explore the origins of Wilberforce's 1786 Dissection of Convicts Bill in relation to matters of body supply and anatomy, it is first necessary to consider the context of crime and justice at the time of the Bill's introduction, for it had potentially serious implications for penal practice. It proposed to inflict one of the most severe punishments sanctioned by law, not only for murder but also for some of the most common capital crimes, including burglary and highway robbery, as well as high treason, rape, and arson. The Bill stipulated that “the body of each and every offender” tried and convicted of such crimes should be ordered by the judge, upon “application,” to be “delivered by the sheriff . . . immediately after execution to such surgeon or surgeons so applying for the same.” Moreover, that such surgeon should either be a member of the Company of Surgeons or a member of staff at a hospital or infirmary (if the execution be in London), and to be selected by the judge or other proper legal authority (if the execution be in any other part of Great Britain).Footnote ¹⁴ On average, around seventy additional criminals each year in Britain would be subjected to the shame, ignominy, and horror of anatomization under the terms of the Bill.Footnote ¹⁵ Few hanging crimes that regularly resulted in executions were beyond the proposed bounds of the scheme.Footnote ¹⁶ In effect, the Bill proposed to turn death and dissection for capital crimes from the exception to the rule.

The 1786 Bill was also introduced at a time of serious concern about crime and amid growing doubts about the efficacy of the criminal law and the execution ritual as then practiced. In the late 1770s, and especially following the end of war with America in the early 1780s, a wave of criminality seemed to be sweeping over the nation. In response, in September 1782 the government resolved that, without exception, no offenders convicted at the Old Bailey of burglaries or robberies attended with circumstances of cruelty should be pardoned.Footnote ¹⁷ Executions increased largely and rapidly as a result. In 1785, more offenders were hanged in London than at any time since the reign of the early Stuarts.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet the number of prosecutions for serious offences (which contemporaries took as indicative of the level of “real” crime) continued to grow. This combination of mass executions and a continually rising level of prosecutions led to frequent criticisms in the press that the policy of unwavering justice was not working, and that hangings were not having their intended deterrent effect. These criticisms fed into the wider calls for an amelioration of the capital code and a move towards milder, more certain modes of punishment that had been gaining momentum since the publication of Cesare Beccaria's Of Crimes and Punishments in 1767.

In short, the mid-1780s saw a greater attack on the traditional system of hanging and deterrence by terror than ever witnessed before. William Pitt the Younger and his administration were not deaf to such criticisms, and by the summer of 1785, as Simon Devereaux explains, “the government was entertaining serious doubts about the practical value of a policy of enhanced and unswerving severity.”Footnote ¹⁹ In the next five years there were signs that the government had abandoned its policy of mass executions, as the proportion of capital convicts who actually reached the gallows fell sharply (after 1787) and as the government began to explore alternative solutions to the crime problem. These included an emphasis on prevention; reform of the police; renegotiating poor relief and new approaches to vagrancy; transformations in the punishments meted out to convicted offenders; confining convicts on the hulks; and a desperate search for a replacement location for transportation, culminating in the first fleet to Botany Bay in May 1787.Footnote ²⁰

Wilberforce's introduction of the Dissection of Convicts Bill seems therefore to have gone against the prevailing mood in the press and in the government in 1786. To be sure, amid the calls for an amelioration of the capital code and for alternatives to hanging, proposals continued to be made on the contrary for more severe forms of punishment, seeking to stem the crime wave through deterrence by terror. In April 1785, for instance, commodore Edward Thompson, a keen supporter of establishing a penal colony on the West Coast of Africa, had suggested to Thomas Townshend, first Baron Sydney—then serving as Pitt's Home Secretary and the government leader in the House of Lords—that

It was upon this belief that Thompson recommended ordering all executed offenders for dissection. This would also be a means, he added, “of leaving our dead friends at peace in their graves. For at present, for the want of subjects for the surgeons, there are not less than two bodies a day furnished by the resurrection men for dissection.”Footnote ²² Two months earlier, the Times had likewise suggested that a bill would soon be brought into Parliament directing that the bodies of all offenders executed for burglary should be given over for dissection (a motion that did not materialize).Footnote ²³

Nevertheless, by 1786 it seems that the mood of Parliament had shifted away from a belief in the efficacy of further examples of spectacular justice. It is unclear whether Wilberforce's Bill effectively prevented the granting of pardons (and thus whether it would have led to more executions).Footnote ²⁴ Some contemporaries certainly believed that it would. But whatever its potential impact upon the quantity of executions, the Bill undoubtedly proposed a powerful change to the qualitative nature of punishment. The Bill covered a large portion of the most common capital offenses, and would have made aggravated forms of capital punishment the norm. England's “Bloody Code” would, quite literally, be bloodier. The Bill also sits uneasily with what we know about Wilberforce's own views on capital punishment. In 1787, just a year after his introduction of the Dissection of Convicts Bill, Wilberforce complained that “the barbarous mode of hanging has been tried too long and with the success which might have been expected of it.”Footnote ²⁵

Indeed, Wilberforce's biographers have pointed to another clause of the 1786 Bill that they have taken as more consistent with his character as a humanitarian reformer.Footnote ²⁶ In addition to stipulating the dissection of convicts, the 1786 Bill also proposed to abolish the punishment of burning at the stake for women convicted of high and petty treason.Footnote ²⁷ But far from being Wilberforce's primary motive, this clause had in fact been quickly tagged onto the Bill on 23 June 1786—more than a month after the Bill (containing only the cause for the dissection of convicts) had been originally introduced in Parliament—in the wake of a public outcry surrounding the burning of Phoebe Harris outside Newgate for coining just two days previously.Footnote ²⁸ As Simon Devereaux has convincingly argued, while more enlightened and chivalrous attitudes towards women likely played a part in efforts to abolish the burning of women at this time, it was also crucially abetted by material circumstances such as concerns about the effects of conducting public punishments in the urban heart of the metropolis.Footnote ²⁹ Moreover, it seems that for some the issue was not that women in particular should be punished less severely than men but rather that they should only be treated the same.Footnote ³⁰ By the terms of Wilberforce's Bill, while women convicted of petty treason were spared burning at the stake (in practice carried out only after the woman had first been strangled to death), they would now be liable to the same ignominious and horrifying punishment of dissection as were men.Footnote ³¹

Leaving aside the issue of what the 1786 Dissection of Convicts Bill reveals about Wilberforce as a humanitarian reformer, it is clear that the Bill was introduced at a moment of crisis about crime and capital punishment, and, moreover, that it had serious ramifications for penal practice. Yet as I argue below, it was expressly not intended as a criminal justice measure. In terms of the Bill's origins and introduction, it was clearly instigated with the needs of anatomists and anatomy in mind. The statutory intentions of Wilberforce's 1786 Bill were medical, not judicial.

Motivations behind the 1786 Bill: The Criminal Corpse as Medical Object

When introducing the scheme in Parliament, Wilberforce drew attention to “the extreme difficulty that surgeons experienced in procuring bodies for dissections, and the shocking custom of digging them up after burial.” The bodies snatched from graves were often in such a poor state, he also argued, “that their dissection had proved fatal to the anatomists themselves, and put an end to their lives, instead of contributing to lengthen the lives of others.”Footnote ³² In order to furnish the schools of anatomy with an adequate supply of bodies, Wilberforce believed there could be no objection to extending dissection to include traitors, rapists, arsonists, burglars, and highway robbers. The Bill's title is also suggestive: it was to be an act, “for regulating the disposal, after execution, of the bodies of criminals executed for certain heinous offences.” The title therefore made no reference to the Bill as a means of preventing crime or increasing the terrors of the law, as had been the case with the 1752 Murder Act, which was intended, as the preamble to the statute stated, to “better prevent the horrid crime of murder” by adding “some further terror and peculiar mark of infamy to the punishment of death, now by law inflicted on such as shall be guilty of the said heinous offence.”Footnote ³³

It was instead with an attention to the needs of anatomists and anatomy that Wilberforce (and perhaps also the government) promoted an extension to the practice of dissecting executed offenders. As I show below, surviving records also allow us to delve even deeper into the motivations behind the 1786 Bill, providing us with some initial clues as to why anatomists themselves might have welcomed such a measure. For although it was Wilberforce who introduced the Dissection of Convicts Bill in Parliament, the scheme in fact originated with his close friend and medical advisor, the eminent Leeds surgeon William Hey. A letter from Hey to Walter Spencer-Stanhope (MP for Hull and close political ally of Wilberforce) in May 1785 makes this clear. After noting that he had already taken the liberty of giving Wilberforce “the heads of a Bill” proposing dissection as a punishment for all executed criminals, Hey requested that Stanhope might “assist in carrying it through the House whenever it is presented.”Footnote ³⁴

Born in 1736, the son of a prosperous dry-salter in Leeds, Yorkshire, William Hey rose to become the foremost surgeon of the county. Following apprenticeship to a local surgeon-apothecary, Hey had trained in London under some of the most famous surgeons of the eighteenth century, later returning to Leeds to set up in practice. He played a key role in establishing the Leeds General Infirmary in 1767, serving as the hospital's senior surgeon between 1773 and his retirement in 1812. A man of deep religious convictions, Hey had joined the Methodists in 1754, parting from them in 1781, but remaining a fervent Anglican until his death in 1819.Footnote ³⁵ Hey proposed his scheme to Wilberforce not just as a constituent of Yorkshire but, more importantly, as a close friend, bound by the bonds of faith, morality, and mutual indebtedness. As medical advisor to the Wilberforce family, Hey had supported William through periods of ill health and chronic eye conditions.Footnote ³⁶ Both were engaged in similar social projects; as S. T. Anning notes, Hey was an early protestor against the slave trade, and frequently hosted Wilberforce at his Leeds home, describing the visits as “among the most agreeable occurrences of his life.”Footnote ³⁷

For his own part, Hey seems to have had a number of possible motivations in mind for wanting to extend the practice of dissecting executed criminals. Hey was in many ways unique, and we should be cautious of drawing out conclusions from this case too far. In this respect, efforts will be made to put William Hey and the situation in Leeds within the wider context of anatomy, body supply, and medical education in England as a whole. But at the very least the case of the 1786 Bill and William Hey's motivations behind the measure provide a previously unseen and valuable window onto a fascinating aspect of medico-legal history.

Hey's letter to Walter Spencer-Stanhope in May 1785 is the only direct statement we have from him on his motivations for wanting to extend the dissection of executed offenders. Hey began by arguing that although anatomical science was deemed by many to be “absolutely necessary” to society, the legal supply of bodies currently available to anatomists via executed murderers was nowhere near adequate. Anatomists were thus dependent on body snatchers, “a set of the greatest rascals, whose nightly employ is to commit depredations, sometimes on the living, sometimes on the dead.” The bodies taken from graves, Hey complained, were often so tainted with “infectious matter” that they had proved fatal to the anatomists themselves. Upon such considerations it appeared to Hey that a proper plan would be “to deliver up the bodies of all executed criminals to the teachers of anatomy,” such bodies being “the most fit for anatomical investigation as the subjects generally die in health, the bodies are sound, and the parts distinct.” “Why should not those be made to serve a valuable purpose when dead,” Hey concluded, “who were a universal nuisance when living?”Footnote ³⁸

Ruth Richardson has shown that complaints were leveled against body snatching throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, voiced by both anatomists and society at large.Footnote ³⁹ But within this general context of long-standing concerns, there appears to have been a specific crisis about body snatching in the early 1780s. This may well have been a motivation for Hey to act and for the government's support of the Dissection of Convicts Bill when it came before Parliament in 1786. Concerns arose following the prosecution and conviction in May 1785 of the renowned surgeon and teacher of anatomy in London, Thomas Young, for conspiracy to prevent the burial of a person who had died in the Shoreditch workhouse.Footnote ⁴⁰ “All unprejudiced people are extremely anxious about the fate of the surgeons whose zeal in their profession has subjected them to the lash of the law, for employing persons in the search of dead bodies” the Times had argued in February 1785.Footnote ⁴¹ And indeed, eight months later, a correspondent to the Times recommended that parish officers should be allowed to sell the bodies of executed felons to the teachers of anatomy. For, the correspondent argued, “people seem in general disgusted at the means taken to procure bodies for dissection, and it is essential to the health of the living, that lectures should be held upon the bodies of the dead.”Footnote ⁴²

A deeper examination of Hey's background, moreover, suggests that he may have proposed his scheme with three additional aims in mind. In the first instance, Hey's belief in the importance of dissection and his early experiences as an anatomist must surely have convinced him that executed criminals were a useful source of cadavers. He undoubtedly had an earnest passion for dissection and believed this to be crucial for enhancing medical knowledge and good surgical practice. According to his former student and biographer, John Pearson, Hey “considered anatomy to be the foundation of all medical and chirurgical science” and sought “to acquire a competent knowledge of the human body.”Footnote ⁴³ From his first days of training at St George's Hospital in 1757, Hey devoted himself to anatomical lectures and dissections, and he “seldom employed less than twelve hours daily in the lecture and dissecting rooms during the whole winter.”Footnote ⁴⁴

This commitment to dissection proved crucial to Hey's subsequent professional success. The anatomical knowledge and surgical skill that he acquired from dissections gave Hey an essential advantage over other practitioners in Leeds, in what was then a competitive marketplace for medical services.Footnote ⁴⁵ In the eighteenth century, medical practice was as much a private business as a public profession.Footnote ⁴⁶ Hey was called upon to conduct all the major surgical operations in the town, and his reputation soon reached such heights that patients traveled from across the county, and even as far afield as Cumberland, to be treated by him.Footnote ⁴⁷ As more and more trained surgeons set up practice in Leeds in the 1770s and 1780s, it must have been essential for Hey to continue improving his knowledge and skill in order to maintain his position as the most sought-after surgeon in the area.

As discussed below, the public dissection of criminals was a performative spectacle used by medical men such as Hey to promote their own image. But in practical terms too, dissection was crucial in the development of surgical skill, and it was upon the basis of good surgical practice that medical reputations were increasingly being established in the later eighteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁸ Varying levels of status existed among medical practitioners in this period, even within the category of the formally qualified (and not including the wider world of the “unqualified” and quacks). Status could rise and fall depending upon both the practitioner's ability to heal and his skill in effectively marketing himself above the competition. Of course, in this competitive medical marketplace it is highly unlikely that Hey intended that the criminal corpses made available under his proposed scheme would be distributed equally among medical men within particular locations. As the wording of the 1786 Bill makes clear, the bodies of executed offenders would be given over only to “teachers” of anatomy, as directed by the judge. Only individuals with the kind of prestige and influence enjoyed by William Hey would be able to expect to receive such criminal bodies.

Criminal dissections were almost certainly a prominent feature of Hey's time as a medical student in London, and in pushing for greater use of the criminal corpse he may well have been following the lead of his “anatomical entrepreneur” predecessors.Footnote ⁴⁹ As a student of William Bromfield, demonstrator of anatomy at Surgeons' Hall since 1744, Hey would have attended the dissections of criminal bodies conducted there during the 1750s.Footnote ⁵⁰ Indeed, given that Hey had the honor to be chosen as Bromfield's dresser, it is highly likely that he would have seen such dissections firsthand.Footnote ⁵¹ The fact that Hey himself later conducted public anatomical dissections on the bodies of criminals at the Leeds General Infirmary, as discussed below, akin to those conducted at Surgeons Hall in the 1750s suggests that he was deeply influenced by his early experiences of criminal dissections in London. Indeed, there was a long tradition of public anatomical demonstrations conducted on the bodies of criminals in the metropolis, although, as Anita Guerrini explains, such demonstrations could vary greatly in terms of audience, aims, and content.Footnote ⁵² In the early decades of the eighteenth century, Frank Nicholls undertook public anatomy courses at both Oxford University and in London, using corpses taken from the gallows.Footnote ⁵³ As “the leading teacher of anatomy between 1730 and 1740,” Nicholls had an influence upon William and John Hunter, both of whom likewise promoted the importance of dissection in medical education and in the use of the criminal corpse to this end.Footnote ⁵⁴

Eminent anatomists at the established medical centers were thus crucial in inspiring men like Hey. So, too, were the London teaching hospitals that led the way in the development of anatomy education in the eighteenth century by actively fostering students' hands-on experience of dissection. Indeed, Hey's motivation to push for greater use of the criminal corpse may also have been based on a desire to emulate the situation in London by developing similar forms of medical education in the provinces. Even before his attempt to solicit the assistance of Stanhope in May 1785, Hey had evidently sought feedback on his proposal from others in high places, for on 8 April of that year he received a letter from his former apprentice, Richard Walker, who was then serving as apothecary to the Prince of Wales. Having considered the proposal for dissecting convicts, Walker assured Hey that he would be glad to lend any assistance “in promoting so desirable an object.” But he nevertheless made it clear that Hey should not expect any support from the London faculty of anatomists, who feared that such a scheme would facilitate the development of provincial anatomy schools and thus challenge their dominant place within England's medical education system. “Perhaps indeed suspicions of this nature may have their origin in envy and selfishness,” Walker lamented, but “the London practitioners and teachers would be . . . backward to support any measure, that may hereafter supersede the necessity of young men coming to town in quest of anatomical knowledge.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In the competitive market for medical education in eighteenth-century Britain, fee-paying teaching was a lucrative business.Footnote ⁵⁶ Body supply was thus an emotive topic for cash-flow reasons as much as anything else.

Hey evidently took this advice on board, and anticipated medical politics as the key barrier to the success of his proposal. Indeed, in his letter to Stanhope the following month, Hey forcefully denied that increasing the supply of criminal bodies for dissection would allow medical men to establish provincial anatomy schools that might threaten the profits of those in the metropolis. “I know the London teachers will be jealous of such a law,” Hey noted, “imagining it may cause a rivalship [sic] in the country.” Hey continued:

Yet contrary to his denials, there is evidence to suggest that Hey may well have been motivated by a desire to develop medical education in Leeds. In the first place, Hey's defense was somewhat disingenuous: many criminals were in fact executed in March, including those convicted of crimes other than murder. Moreover, Hey was undoubtedly teaching in some capacity by 1786, when he put forward his proposal. Between 1759 and 1804, Hey took on at least nine privately indentured apprentices, charging a substantial fee from each.Footnote ⁵⁸ Apprentices are first mentioned in Hey's medical and surgical casebooks in 1766, with the term “pupil” first used in 1779, and then in the plural. Tellingly, Hey often commented in his medical notes that dissections were carried out in order that pupils might observe.Footnote ⁵⁹

Susan Lawrence has shown that in the London hospitals at this time, while autopsies to establish the cause of death had become officially recognized and authorized by hospitals governors, “practical anatomy” (meaning full dissection of the corpse by students for hands-on experience) by contrast was an open secret that caused a degree of public and professional concern.Footnote ⁶⁰ It may be that this was one of Hey's fears. By the 1760s he was evidently conducting postmortems so that students could observe. Yet he might have worried that allowing students not just to observe but to themselves conduct dissections of dead patients would cause some disquiet. Criminal bodies provided a potential solution to this problem, by allowing students to get practical experience without causing a scandal over the use of patient cadavers.

It was certainly the case that similar forms of medical education to that practiced in London were also being developed in other parts of England besides Leeds in the second half of the eighteenth century, based around the rapid growth of private anatomical lectures and teaching hospitals that allowed students to engage in “practical anatomy.” Some twenty-eight provincial voluntary hospitals were founded in the years 1736–1800, offering a “thriving industry” in medical education, often as a supplement to formal training in the metropolis.Footnote ⁶¹ Hey may well have been inspired by such developments—or was perhaps wary of falling behind the competition. Of course, it would be wrong to subsume the various forms of medical education available in provincial England within a single developmental pattern: the situation in Birmingham and Manchester was very different from the surgeons' guilds in Newcastle and Bristol, for example, or the unique medical of centers of Oxford and Cambridge.Footnote ⁶² The many voluntary hospitals set up outside London in the eighteenth century were founded on similar principles but also had strong local roots that, as Adrian Wilson notes, made for a great deal of variety in actual practice.Footnote ⁶³

The varied developments that were taking place outside London nonetheless do at least offer some suggestions as to the kinds of practices that William Hey might have sought to follow. Inspired by the rapid growth and success of the private anatomy schools and teaching hospitals in eighteenth-century London, similar initiatives were also launched in the provinces, acting as important progenitors for the numerous medical schools later established in the first three decades of the nineteenth century (including Leeds in 1831).Footnote ⁶⁴ As Jonathan Reinarz has shown, for instance, the Birmingham practitioner Thomas Tomlinson (who, along with William Hey, was a student of William Bromfield at Saint George's Hospital in the 1750s) provided his apprentices with the first series of practical anatomy lectures in the town in 1768, with further lectures delivered at the establishment of the Birmingham teaching hospital in 1779.Footnote ⁶⁵ The new provincial hospitals of the eighteenth century, moreover, began to offer instruction in surgery in a similar vein to that provided in London, building upon a widely held belief that public infirmaries were an important feature of any medical education.Footnote ⁶⁶ Criminal corpses may well have figured in such instruction—judicial records make it clear that in the second half of the eighteenth century, the bodies of executed murderers were handed over to several county hospitals, which were based in assize towns, including, among others, the Devon and Exeter Hospital, the Winchester County Hospital and the Worcester Infirmary.Footnote ⁶⁷

Finally, another of Hey's motivations was his desire to carry out anatomical demonstrations on the bodies of executed criminals, not just for the benefit of his pupils but also for the entertainment and instruction of a public audience. Again, Hey was likely inspired to do this by other prominent London and provincial anatomists. According to the Minute Books of the Leeds General Infirmary, in 1773 (Hey's first year as senior surgeon to the hospital) the trustees authorized a payment of £1 15s 0d “to the gentlemen of the faculty for expenses incurred by the procurement of the body [of the executed murderer John Early] from York lately dissected at the Infirmary.”Footnote ⁶⁸ No evidence has been found to suggest that Hey conducted a public demonstration on this occasion. But he undoubtedly carried out at least four such demonstrations on the bodies of murderers in the first decade of the nineteenth century, and he would have done so earlier if a body had been available. In the spring of 1800, according to Pearson,

These lectures were apparently unsuitable for women, for Pearson notes that it was only in the twelfth and final lecture—on the structure of the eye and the theory of vision—that “ladies were admitted.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Hey was also worried about drawing the wrong crowd: in order to prevent the intrusion of “improper persons,” tickets were issued at half a guinea for the course, the clear profits of which were given to the Infirmary, amounting to some £27 6s 0d.Footnote ⁷¹ A second course of public anatomical lectures was delivered by Hey in 1803, this time upon a request from the “judge and counsel” that one of the two murderers recently convicted at York assizes be dissected at Leeds. He was assisted by his son, William Hey junior, who carried out the dissection itself but gave none of the lectures, and the demonstration proved extremely popular. About one hundred tickets were distributed to gentlemen, and some fifty ladies attended the final lecture, again on the eye. This resulted in profits to the Infirmary of £47 11s 6d. A similar course of lectures carried out in 1805 upon the body of the murderer John Wilkinson produced £47 7s 0d.Footnote ⁷²

But it was the fourth and final public anatomical demonstration conducted by Hey in 1809 that netted the greatest profits for the Infirmary, some £80 14s 0d. “The attendance was larger than on any of the former occasions,” commented Pearson, because the subject dissected was one Mary Bateman, the “Yorkshire Witch,” a “woman of atrocious character” whose trial for the murder (by poisoning) of Rebecca Perrigo “had excited great interest.”Footnote ⁷³ Indeed, the Leeds Intelligencer reported that the road from York to Leeds had been “thronged with foot passengers, horses and gigs,” returning from Bateman's execution. Even by eleven at night, “when the cart with her body approached the town, it was met by a number of people.” On the following day her body was exhibited in the Surgeons' Room at the Leeds General Infirmary, with admission charged at three pence per person. “An immense number of people were admitted,” it was reported, “some of whom evinced predominant superstition, by touching the body before they left the room, to prevent her terrific interference with their nocturnal dreams.” The receipts to view the body reportedly amounted to upwards of £30 alone. “Mr Hey is now delivering a course of twelve lectures on the body, for the benefit of the institution,” the Leeds Intelligencer concluded, “and has diffused much edifying information to a crowded auditory.”Footnote ⁷⁴

William Hey was not alone in this endeavor. Indeed, he may well have been inspired by the similar demonstrations conducted by others at this time. In London throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, the Company of Barber-Surgeons publicly dissected the bodies of executed criminals.Footnote ⁷⁵ Hey's lectures share many similarities with those conducted by the Company of Barber-Surgeons, including the public exposure of the executed body and lectures that addressed such topics as the abdominal and thoracic viscera. As the Surgeons' Company lectures began to wane around midcentury, however, private lectures proliferated in the metropolis, the most popular of which were those conducted by William Hunter.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the provinces, too, a number of pioneering anatomists established anatomy lectures. One of the first such instances was that given by the physician and philosopher Erasmus Darwin, who in 1762 delivered a series of anatomy lectures in the West Midlands upon the body of a recently executed offender.Footnote ⁷⁷ In an advertisement placed in the local press, Darwin stated his intention to hold an initial lecture and to “continue them every day as long as the body can be preserved,” and encouraged members of the public—“of whom the love of science may induce”—to attend.Footnote ⁷⁸

As Susan Lawrence has argued, these public anatomical demonstrations were an important means by which surgeon-anatomists attempted to promote themselves as “medical gentlemen” within their localities.Footnote ⁷⁹ Public dissections were heavily performative displays that could attract significant crowds, and formed part of the broader relationship between anatomical and exhibitionary practices that deepened throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁸⁰ Opening up the dissection of criminal bodies to a wide audience served not only to enhance the ignominy of the punishment—in pursuit of the law's stated aim of deterrence by terror—but also to endorse the anatomist as a man of advanced medical knowledge, a master of medical language, and a skilled surgical operator.Footnote ⁸¹ This was particularly relevant for men such as William Hey and Thomas Tomlinson who, in the 1760s and 1770s, were keen to establish themselves as among the foremost surgeons in Leeds and Birmingham respectively.

In conducting his public anatomical demonstrations, Hey might also have been following the practice of his fellow surgeon-anatomists in the nearby city of York, who, it is important to note, had privileged access to the bodies of executed murderers in Yorkshire. A telling annotation added to a manuscript copy of Pearson's biography of Hey—which was not actually included in the published edition—states that Hey could only procure a criminal body when there happened to be two executions for murder at any one time in York, “the surgeons of the York hospital always claiming the body when there was but one.”Footnote ⁸² Indeed, James Atkinson, surgeon-anatomist of York, was at a particular advantage in his position as acting medical officer to the county jail (a position he inherited from his father, Charles), the place at which all the capital convicts for the county of Yorkshire were held immediately prior to their execution.Footnote ⁸³ In an advertisement for his course of anatomy lectures in 1786, Atkinson as such noted that “criminals sentenced by law will have lectures read over them at the [York] Hospital for the general good of the pupils.”Footnote ⁸⁴ This situation explains why Hey does not appear to have undertaken a dissection of a criminal body between 1773 and 1800, for in that period no more than one murderer was executed at York at any one time.Footnote ⁸⁵ In short, Hey may well have wanted to conduct a public anatomical demonstration before 1800, but no criminal bodies were (at least formally and legally) available to him to do so.

William Hey evidently had a number of aims in mind for making more criminal bodies available. While we should not assume that Hey was entirely representative of eighteenth-century surgeon-anatomists more widely, we have seen that others in the capital and the provinces were also carrying out dissections of executed criminals for the purposes of both teaching and public anatomical demonstrations. Many anatomists furthermore followed a similar career path to Hey, and may well have shared his motivations.Footnote ⁸⁶ This backdrop sets in context why Hey sought Wilberforce's support for a new piece of legislation on the issue of body supply, to which we now turn.

“A Bill Undoubtedly of the First Magnitude”: Dissection as a Judicial Punishment

In the House of Commons, the Dissection of Convicts Bill received the support of Pitt and key members of the administration. When Wilberforce first raised the issue in Parliament, Pitt helped him to frame the motion for leave to bring in a bill. The proposal then received the sponsorship of Henry Duncombe (Wilberforce's fellow MP for the county of Yorkshire) and Michael Angelo Taylor.Footnote ⁸⁷ Two of the government's leading legal officers subsequently contributed to the drafting of the measure. Appointed to the position of Solicitor General by Pitt in 1784, Sir Archibald Macdonald first drew up the Bill.Footnote ⁸⁸ It was then corrected by the Attorney General, Sir Richard Pepper Arden, whose merit, one commentator claimed, “seemed to consist principally in the strong predilection manifested towards him” by Pitt.Footnote ⁸⁹

The Dissection of Convicts Bill therefore had the (at least administrative) support of several prominent members of the government, not least Pitt who, by 1786, had cemented his position as prime minister with a healthy majority in the Commons and popularity outside of Parliament. Yet the Bill soon came under fire in the Lords, particularly from Lord Loughborough, Alexander Wedderburn, then serving as lord chief justice of the Common Pleas. In the first instance, Loughborough launched a blistering attack on Wilberforce and the “extraordinary manner” in which the Bill had been introduced. He complained of “the loose and inaccurate manner in which the Bill was drawn, a circumstance which sufficiently proved, that the author was not used to the subject upon which the Bill professed to go.” And he reportedly dwelt for some time “on the impropriety of men not conversant with law, turning projectors in respect to it, and in moments of vivacity coming forward with raw, jejune, ill-advised, and impracticable schemes for the alteration of the mode of distributing and carrying into execution the criminal justice of the country.”Footnote ⁹⁰

In the account of the event later published by Wilberforce's sons, Loughborough's criticisms were denounced as the product of a “bitter oppositionist” whose only intention was to “discredit the lawyers who adhered to Mr. Pitt.”Footnote ⁹¹ There is certainly some truth to this. Loughborough was a bullish careerist and political partisan who was not above attacking others to promote his own position. A lawyer on the make, Loughborough used Parliament as a means to rise through the profession.Footnote ⁹² He had been deeply disappointed in 1783, therefore, when his lifelong ambition of becoming lord chancellor was dashed following the demise of the Fox-North Coalition and the political success of Pitt.Footnote ⁹³ It is perhaps evidence of Loughborough's biased and partisan views that several of his criticisms of the 1786 Bill were either exaggerated or inaccurate. If Loughborough's complaint that the proper criminal law authorities had not been consulted was true, Wilberforce assured Hey, “then you would have just reason to complain of my having taken so little pains to ensure the success of your proposal.” “But,” he went on, “the case is directly the reverse: I was aware how necessary it was to secure the concurrence of the gentlemen of the profession, and to put the business a good deal in their hands.” According to Wilberforce, not only was the Bill drawn up by the solicitor general and corrected by the attorney general, it was then transmitted “to one of the most active judges,” who endeavored to put it before the rest of the bench. “Some principal lawyers” were moreover called upon “to bespeak a favourable reception” of the Bill “with any of the judges over whom they possessed influence.” Amendments to the Bill were put to Wilberforce as a result, and while he admitted that he disliked the alterations, he apparently submitted to them “on grounds of policy.”Footnote ⁹⁴

We must therefore treat Loughborough's comments with a great deal of caution and skepticism. But it is nevertheless the case that several of his criticisms were accurate, and that arguments made by Loughborough were echoed by others in Parliament, even those who were closely allied to Pitt and the government. Loughborough's charge against the “loose and inaccurate” wording of the Bill, for instance, was justified. As he argued, the Bill wrongly referred to justices of assize in London and Middlesex, whereas no such positions in fact existed.Footnote ⁹⁵ It is also unclear from the Bill who actually had the power to decide if an offender was to be subjected to dissection, and whether the Bill revoked the discretion of the judges to respite criminals sentenced to death. Legal ambiguities over the dissection of criminals had arisen after the introduction of the 1752 Murder Act, and it may well have been that authorities on the criminal law such as Loughborough were wary of the same problems following any attempt to extend the punishment to offences other than murder.Footnote ⁹⁶ It certainly seems that Wilberforce and others involved in the introduction of the Bill made strategic errors that opened up space for those with personal sensitivities against the government to attack the Bill in the Lords.

But even besides the allegedly poor manner of the Bill's introduction, Loughborough and others were disturbed by the detrimental effects it would likely have in terms of crime and justice. Applying dissection to offenses beyond murder would, it was argued, undermine its effectiveness as a penal measure. The introduction of the 1752 Murder Act “had been found of essential advantage to the community,” Loughborough observed. Even those criminals who were “hardened in vice, and practiced in villainy,” who had “stood with a firm countenance during trial, and had even heard sentence of death passed on them without emotion,” when the judge informed them, “that their bodies were to be deprived of sepulture [sic], and that they were to undergo a public dissection, their countenance changed, they grew suddenly pale, trembled, and exhibited a visible appearance of the extremest [sic] horror.” Such spectacles moreover made a forcible impression upon the minds of bystanders. Loughborough had witnessed this in his own capacity as a judge, and he “was sure every other justice, must have seen repeated instances of the effects” produced by the sentence of dissection. Was it wise, Loughborough therefore asked, “to destroy this salutary effect, by making the deprivation of the rights of burial a common and an ordinary consequence of every conviction of almost every capital offence?”Footnote ⁹⁷

It was also argued that applying dissection as a punishment for virtually all capital offenses would act as an inducement to commit greater crimes. For as Loughborough noted, “if the same punishment were to attend the convict for burglary as for murder, breaking open a house would generally be attended with murder, as robberies in France were, the criminals there knowing that the commission of the one crime was to receive no greater punishment than the other.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Additionally, the Bill would, in the eyes of some, push the English criminal law towards the bloodthirsty penal practices of the continent. Only for the very worst of crimes, that of murder, and that “in a manner giving no great degree of personal pain, was the utmost inflicted by the English law upon convicts.”Footnote ⁹⁹ By contrast, the object of Wilberforce's Bill, in Loughborough's eyes at least, “was not lenity but pure cruelty, and that without a prospect of any the smallest advantage to the community, but a certainty of much serious disadvantage.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Loughborough was undoubtedly an influential figure within the Lords, and his criticisms must certainly have carried some weight. Indeed, the Annual Register for 1786 noted that Loughborough had in that year “taken the lead in the proceedings of the House of Lords, decided upon, and caused the rejection of bills, and seemed to be a moderator of that assembly.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Thomas Townsend, first Baron Sydney, Pitt's Home Secretary and government leader in the Lords, had proven to be less effective than his predecessors in controlling the House. Complaints were made that the government lacked speakers in the Lords who were able to stand up to oppositionists such as Loughborough.Footnote ¹⁰² That said, it would however be an exaggeration to assume that the 1786 Dissection of Convicts Bill failed due to the overwhelming influence of a “bitter oppositionist.” In the first instance, there were at least some government supporters in the Lords, even if their numbers were on the wane in the 1780s, and they were unlikely to have rejected the Dissection of Convicts Bill on the basis of opposition sentiment.Footnote ¹⁰³ Yet despite this support, not a single peer voted in favor of the Bill, and it was defeated without a division.

Moreover, it seems that other members of the Commons and the Lords shared Loughborough's concerns, even those in political alliance with the government. Henry Dundas, commissioner of the Board of Control and the second man in the Commons on the government side, expressed his doubts when Wilberforce first proposed the scheme in Parliament.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ He called on Wilberforce to be specific about the motion, “as the subjecting all bodies that were hanged to the same treatment, would, in a great measure, destroy the intent of the bill,” for “the prejudices of mankind, relative to what came of their bodies after death were very great.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In the Lords, Sydney attempted to rescue Wilberforce's character from Loughborough's imputations. Yet having insisted on Wilberforce's good intentions, Sydney nonetheless conceded that he agreed with Loughborough's arguments, and thought it advisable that the Bill should be deferred.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Similarly, while Henry Bathurst, the second Earl Bathurst, put it to the Lords that greater care had been taken with the Bill's introduction than Loughborough claimed, he nevertheless agreed with a number of the criticisms levelled against the proposal and declared that he was indifferent to the fate of the Bill either way.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ And although the solicitor general, Sir Archibald Macdonald, helped to draw up the Bill, we might well question the extent to which he personally agreed with the measure. Just a year previously, in June 1785, Macdonald had complained that “extreme severity, instead of operating as a prevention to crimes, rather tended to promote them, by adding desperation to villainy.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Even among the legal contingent who drafted the Bill, there were personal reservations, and these came out during its readings. Furthermore, similar concerns were raised just ten years later when another attempt was made in Parliament to extend the practice of dissecting executed offenders.

The 1796 Motion for the Dissection of Robbers and Burglars

In March 1796, Richard Jodrell proposed to the Commons that a Bill be brought in for handing the bodies of all those executed for burglary or highway robbery over to anatomists for dissection.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ What were Jodrell's motivations for proposing this extension to the practice of dissecting offenders? When introducing the motion in Parliament, Jodrell first advocated it on the basis of crime and justice, warning that robberies and burglaries had lately “increased in a most alarming manner, and required the serious attention of the legislature.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ The dread of dissection would, Jodrell argued, serve to check this wave of criminality. He had consulted some of the highest authorities in the criminal law, including Lord Kenyon, lord chief justice of King's Bench, and John Skynner, the recorder of Oxford, whose ideas, he said, accorded with his own, and from whom he had “received the most flattering encouragement to go on.”Footnote ¹¹¹

But far from being an attempt to harness the criminal corpse for the ends of criminal justice, Jodrell's scheme was in actual fact primarily intended to deal with the problem of body snatching. Along with Wilberforce, Jodrell had keenly supported a Bill for “more effectually preventing the stealing of dead bodies from church yards, burying grounds, and other places of interment,” which had failed to pass through the Commons in June 1795.Footnote ¹¹² The “pernicious practice” of grave robbery had, the preamble to that Bill claimed, reached new heights, owing to the “small and inadequate punishments” annexed to the crime, resulting in “much disquiet, disturbances, and commotions to the great annoyance” of the public. The Bill had stipulated more stringent punishments for body snatchers, as well as greater rewards for anyone assisting in the detection and prosecution of resurrectionists.Footnote ¹¹³ Jodrell lamented the fate of the Bill, and hoped that his own scheme for the dissection of robbers and burglars “would produce all the effects” that the earlier legislation had in view.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Jodrell seems to have been deeply upset by grave robbery, which “from his habits of thinking, and from his education, he entertained the utmost horror.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Indeed, Jodrell's overwhelming concern was to prevent body snatching, rather than to purely benefit anatomists and their craft. The depth of Jodrell's outrage came through clearly in his speeches before the Commons. In defending the Body-Snatching Bill of 1795, Jodrell defiantly asserted that little would dampen the ardor of its supporters, and he thought it disgraceful that the Bill had been so badly treated in the Commons.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Much like the events of 1786, a decade later there was remarkably little discussion of dissecting criminals in relation to matters of medical science and body snatching, despite the fact that this was Jodrell's principal concern. The debates again centered on the implications for crime and justice. Not only did the chief justice of Chester (and former recorder of London), James Adair, think that the scheme would fail to furnish surgeons with the requisite number of bodies; he was more decidedly opposed to the motion upon the basis that, while it might lead to the improvement of anatomy, this “bore no proportion to the importance of other considerations.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ In short, if Adair was indicative of other Members of the Commons, then the debates surrounding Jodrell's motion included little discussion of body snatching because it instead presented more pressing and negative implications for the criminal justice system. The possible benefits to medical science were seemingly far outweighed by the potential damage done to the criminal law. Adair concluded that he was “not such an enthusiast for the promotion of the science of anatomy, as to advance it at such a price and by such means.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

Three main objections were voiced against Jodrell's proposal on the basis of criminal justice. These objections did not consist, however, of opposition to the practice of post-execution dissection per se, but instead a criticism that extending it to other offenses would destroy its deterrent effect in cases of murder and would confound moral distinctions between crimes of a very different hue. Many expressed a continued belief in the efficacy of dissection as a penal measure for the very worst crimes. MPs considered it especially effective in preventing murder. The attorney general, John Scott, observed “that the experience of those who were employed in administering the criminal law of the country must frequently have shewn [sic] them how often the dread of anatomization had arrested the arm uplifted to commit a murder.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Others even suggested that dissection might be effectively extended to other execrable offenses, although not so indiscriminately as to undermine its power of deterrence. Philip Francis thought that it might be added “as a mark of greater severity” to cases of aggravated theft in which “attacks were made and wounds inflicted,” or “in the case of nocturnal attempts at burglary.”Footnote ¹²⁰

Adair moreover argued that Jodrell's scheme would subject the severest punishment permitted by English law equally to the “ragged boy” stealing two pence worth of ribbon through a shop window in the dark afternoons of winter, as to the nocturnal burglar who entered a house while the victims lay asleep in their beds. Neither could he consent to support a scheme that would “break down that barrier which God and nature had established between murder and other crimes.”Footnote ¹²¹ As with the parliamentary debates on Wilberforce's 1786 Bill, in 1796 it was charged that extending dissection to other offenses would lead to the committal of more murders. Among other objections, John Scott noted the scheme's tendency “to increase the crime of murder, by making it immaterial, whether a man, in the commission of a burglary, added murder to it.”Footnote ¹²² George Vanisttart, MP for Berkshire, similarly thought that “criminals might be induced sometimes to commit murders, which they would not otherwise have done, in order to escape detection.”Footnote ¹²³

If there is some possibility that the objections made against Wilberforce's 1786 Bill resulted from partisan politics, there is much less reason to believe this in the case of 1796. The fact that Jodrell's motion was rejected by the House without a division indicates that it had little support from the administration. Moreover, while oppositionists spoke against the measure, so did MPs who in other instances proved to be strong supporters of the government. Although Jodrell voted with the government on all major issues, by the mid-1790s a “degree of truculence” marked his announcements in the Commons, and in 1796 he came into conflict with Pitt over the Curates' Maintenance Bill.Footnote ¹²⁴ In no way then could Jodrell be seen as figure of the administration. There would be little political capital for oppositionists in attacking a minor parliamentary figure such as Jodrell who was only loosely associated with the government side. Jodrell himself admitted that the general sense of the House seemed to be against his motion, and he therefore avowed not to pursue the matter. A second parliamentary attempt to extend the practice of dissecting executed offenders in the space of ten years had thus failed to result in new legislation.