Over the last few decades the history of morbid anatomy has won the attention of a wide range of scholars, with backgrounds in history of medicine, literary studies, art history, gender criticism and cultural history, among others. But there have been surprisingly few works that combine extensive archaeological evidence with object-based studies of museum history. Anatomical Dissection in Enlightenment England and Beyond delivers that very combination: a mixed collection of new and fascinating studies on osteoarchaealogical findings and museum history relating to anatomical practices. These studies focus on several sites associated with anatomical schools, hospitals, workhouses and museums, from around England, from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth.

The book begins with a chapter by Piers Mitchell that covers briefly what is known about anatomy in that era, what is not known and what is in the following pages. Many activities and techniques of anatomists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Mitchell reminds the reader, are little known. However, this first chapter is neither a conventional nor a thorough introduction, and consequently does not effectively set up the historical questions, major themes and overarching framework of the book. The subsequent five chapters focus on the osteoarchaeological evidence from various burial and charnel sites around provincial and metropolitan England that were associated with historical anatomical schools, hospitals, workhouses or museums. Andrew T. Chamberlain's chapter summarizes the excavation findings from a burial ground connected with the former Newcastle Infirmary, a voluntary hospital founded in 1751 and closed in 1906. The third chapter by A. Gaynor Western details the anatomical activities at the Worcester Royal Infirmary in the nineteenth century through a careful pairing of historical sources with archaeological evidence. A similar blend of source material is examined in Ceridwen Boston and Helen Webb's chapter on the long and colourful history of anatomy in Oxford. A short chapter by Tania Kausmally follows, which considers the only private anatomy school investigated archaeologically: William Hewson's school on Craven Street, London. The final archaeologically focused chapter, by Louise Fowler and Natasha Powers, examines historical accounts and burial remains linked to anatomy at the London Hospital in the early nineteenth century. These archaeologically focused chapters provide detailed observations of the excavated remains and osteological evidence – particularly of specific injuries, surgeries, autopsies or preparations – but contextualized with the histories of specific patients, anatomists and institutions.

The remaining four chapters use written records and museum artefacts to construct their histories. The first of these is Simon Chaplin's chapter: an insightfully argued and extensively researched study of anatomical dissections and displays in London in the late eighteenth century. The subsequent chapter, by Jonathan Evans, is an especially detailed chronological history of the anatomical collections at the St Bartholomew's and Royal London Hospitals. In the penultimate chapter, Mitchell and Vin Chauhan discuss the nineteenth-century contents of the Westminster Hospital's pathology museum, and offer some interesting comparisons with the anatomical holdings at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. The final, short chapter, by Kenneth Lo and Mitchell, is a peculiar deviation from the preceding studies, as it explores doctors’ medical notes, two archival letters and a brain specimen, associated with Tilliard Ward, a patient suffering from advanced neurosyphilis in 1936.

As a whole, this collection exemplifies the many methods available to researchers of anatomy's past. However, many comparisons and observations that could be drawn from the collective findings and arguments made in this book are left underexplored. Mitchell's first chapter does not give an overarching argument for the text. His emphasis suggests that the getting of bodies is a central focus. However, the book is really about anatomical practices on bodies and the disposal or use of anatomized body parts, not the securing of cadavers.

A concluding chapter is notably absent. With an interdisciplinary collection covering such a long chronology, an overarching synthesis of the various findings is needed, especially as many questions introduced in the text are left up in the air. For instance, how do provincial and metropolitan anatomical practices compare? And how representative are these osteoarchaeological findings for ‘England and beyond’? Part of the synthesis and contextualization that is wanting would include more reference to secondary literature about the practice and role of anatomy in England in the long nineteenth century, such as Ludmilla Jordanova's Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1989) or W.F. Bynum's Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (1994). There are some central discoveries and observations resonant throughout this book that deserve note. In particular, many unhealed skeletal cuts have ambiguous interpretations as they could occur from surgical procedures immediately before death or in anatomical practices after; multiple methods were used to dispose of anatomized bodies, such as weighting coffins that contained partial cadavers; there existed a wealth of anatomical activities both inside and outside London; and anatomical practices occupied a prominent position in English society from the 1750s to the twentieth century.

Scholars researching the history of anatomy will find much of this book a useful and welcome addition, particularly its focus both within and outwith metropolitan London, and the archaeological and statistical evidence of some common anatomical practices. For those working on the history of anatomy museums, Chaplin's work on the Hunterian Museum and the ‘museum oeconomy’ is especially important. Those interested in this collection may also refer to Piers Mitchell et al., ‘The study of anatomy in England from 1700 to the Early 20th Century’, Journal of Anatomy (2011) 29, pp. 91–99, which presents the findings of this book in a shortened and more scientific form.