The Italian Boy (52 page)

8
. Sir Astley’s price list is according to
Lancet
, 3 November 1832.

9
. The Brookesian building survived until the early 1920s, having served as offices to a publisher and then an architectural practice. Blenheim Steps is today Ramillies Street, and the school was near the eastern corner with Great Marlborough Street. In his back garden, Brookes had constructed his Vivarium, a grottolike folly built of rock to which were chained live birds and animals, including an eagle, a hawk, an owl, pheasants, foxes, racoons, and a tortoise. The site of the garden is now 1 and 2 Ramillies Street (“Joshua Brookes’s Vivarium” by Tim Knox, in
London Gardener; or, The Gardener’s Intelligencer
3 [1997–98]).

10
. Joseph Constantin Carpue (1764–1846) was of Spanish descent, born in Brook Green, Hammersmith, and had been a priest, a bookseller, a barrister, and an actor before entering the medical profession; later he became a Liberal member of Parliament. A tall, ungainly, gray-haired man, he always dressed in black with a huge white neckerchief. He was said to be among the best anatomical draftsmen in London but nevertheless was one of a number of anatomists/surgeons ostracized by the medical establishment. A pioneer of plastic surgery, he published his
Account of Two Successful Operations for Restoring a Lost Nose from the Integuements of the Forehead
(1816). Carpue’s other specialty was galvanism and he was present at the attempt, on 18 January 1803, to pass an electrical current through the body of the executed George Foster, hanged at Newgate for murdering his wife. Foster opened one eye, wiggled his legs, and clenched his right hand but failed to be revived (
The Newgate Calendar
, ed. George Theodore Wilkinson, vol. 2 [1962], pp. 80–82).
    In 1800, painters Benjamin West, Richard Costway, and Thomas Banks asked Carpue to nail up a just-executed criminal (a murderer called Legg), who was still warm, so that they could take a plaster cast of how the body hung, in order to produce more realistic Crucifixion scenes; a cast of the crucified Legg is in the Royal Academy, London.
    Edward William Tuson (1802–65) trained at Carpue’s school and at the age of twenty-two became a surgeon at the Middlesex Hospital—close to the Little Windmill Street School, where he gave private lectures in anatomy. (Little Windmill Street is plain Windmill Street today, running between Tottenham Court Road and Charlotte Street; Tuson’s school was at Nos. 8–10, now demolished.) While still in his twenties, Tuson published his celebrated work
Myology
, which revealed the various layers of muscles; he was said to have gone through a great many Subjects in his research for
Myology
.

11
. Exeter ’Change, built in Tudor times, was pulled down in 1829; Exeter Street is near the spot today. Joshua Brookes was involved in the notorious Chunee incident in 1826, when an enraged elephant of that name burst out of another menagerie, owned by one Edward Cross, close to that of Brookes’s brother. After Chunee had finally been destroyed by armed troops, and when his corpse had lain stinking in the Strand for days, Brookes publicly dissected the beast and later angrily denied newspaper reports that he had grilled and eaten a slice of Chunee as part of his investigations (
Memoirs of a Bow Street Runner
by Henry Goddard). Chunee had been brought from India in the ship
Lady Astell
and had worked at Astley’s Theatre in Lambeth; Astley’s sold him to menagerie owner Stephen Polito (sale negotiated by Mr. Norman, the clown); on Polito’s death, Chunee passed to Edward Cross, who succeeded Polito at the menagerie (Manuscript diaries of William Clift, housed in the Library of the Royal College of Surgeons).

12
. Sir Astley Cooper himself was the proud owner of a chunk of intestine, featuring a fungal growth, that he claimed was a section of Napoleon’s gut. Its authenticity was uncertain at the time and will always remain so since it was destroyed when the Royal College of Surgeons was hit during an air raid in May 1941, in which Chunee’s skeleton also perished.

13
.
Lancet
, 24 November 1832.

14
. Reported in
The Memoirs of John Abernethy
by George MacIlwain (1853), p. 305.

15
.
Lancet
, 23 July 1833.

16
. Ibid., 1 October 1831.

17
. Sir Benjamin Brodie—a member of the Royal College council and, later, RCS president—was the son of a rural clergyman and became a baronet on the strength of his being made surgeon to William IV; Sir William Blizard, president of the Royal College in 1831, was the son of an auctioneer and had no formal education until his late adolescence; Sir Charles Bell had been excluded from the Edinburgh medical elite and subsequently suffered seven years of being overlooked in London before gaining respect for his work on nerve function; George Guthrie had been a child prodigy, becoming an RCS member at the age of fifteen before going off to the wars as a surgeon, his skills coming to the notice of the duke of Wellington (Guthrie turned down a knighthood).

18
. The
Lancet
gives a slightly different version of the story, claiming that the Anatomical Society pushed the price of bodies
up
so as to destroy Grainger and that, when the resurrectionists heard this, they decided to supply Grainger for free in order to make Webb Street flourish and so force the prices paid by hospitals even higher (
Lancet
, 24 November 1831).

19
.
Report of the Select Committee on Medical Education
, vol. 13, part 2, Q6602, p. 192. The 1828 Select Committee on Anatomy put the number of medical students in London at one thousand in 1823 and eight hundred in 1828 (
Report of the 1828 Select Committee on Anatomy
, p. 4).

20
. Richardson,
Death, Dissection and the Destitute
(1988), p. 163.

21
. Ruth Richardson discusses attacks on medical schools in Paisley, Sheffield, Inveresk (near Edinburgh), and—most dramatically—in Aberdeen, where the school of anatomy was burned to the ground upon the discovery of discarded dissected human remains.

22
. This anecdote is told in
Westminster Hospital, 1716–1966
by J. G. Humble and Peter Hansell (1966) and in
Things for the Surgeon
by Hubert Cole (1964).

23
.
Morning Chronicle
, 2 October 1829; I have been unable to find any further reports of this case. In October 1831, Superintendent Joseph Sadler Thomas told George Rowland Minshull that “young medical students had repeatedly annoyed the neighbourhood”; Minshull had just remanded a student for assaulting Thomas in Brydges Street, Covent Garden (
Globe and Traveller
, 20 October 1831).

24
.
Report and Evidence of the Select Committee on Anatomy
, p. 81.

25
. Isobel Rae’s biography
Knox: The Anatomist
is a moving account of Knox’s life, while Owen Dudley Edwards, in
Burke & Hare
(1980), presents an equally compelling, though more hostile, portrait of him.

26
. “Mary’s Ghost,”
Hood’s Whims and Oddities
(1826), a volume of verse on the topics of the day.

27
. Edward Cook was named as “a known resurrectionist” by “a publican who 12 years ago kept a house in West Smithfield,” according to the
Sun
, 14 November, 1831; this house may well have been the Fortune of War. Eliza Ross ostensibly made her money from selling old clothes, reputedly stripped from bodies snatched by Cook; the dealers she sold to, at Rag Fair, near the Tower of London, were able to name a number of articles that tallied with Walsh’s belongings that had been sold to them by Ross at the end of August. Ross’s neighbors in Goodman’s Yard also alleged that she was a notorious cat skinner, stealing and killing local cats and selling the furs at Rag Fair (reports in
Sun
,
Globe and Traveller
, and
Times
, November and December 1831, January 1832).

28
.
John Clare’s Autobiographical Writings
, ed. Eric Robinson (1983), p. 132. It is ironic that when Clare died, insane, in 1864, his friends in the Northamptonshire village of Helpston held a wake for his body, as it had been rumored that a London anatomist intended to get hold of Clare’s brain in order to dissect it and discover how it was that a madman had been able to write poetry (
A Right to Song: The Life of John Clare
by Edward Storey [1982], p. 297).

29
. Ruth Richardson tells this story in
Death, Dissection and the Destitute
, p. 221.

30
.
Report and Evidence of the Select Committee on Anatomy
, p. 47.

31
. Knox’s letter to the
Caledonian Mercury
, written two months after William Burke’s execution, and Knox’s only public pronouncement on the affair; quoted in Isobel Rae’s
Knox: The Anatomist
, pp. 98–99.

32
.
Report and Evidence of the Select Committee on Anatomy
, p. 18.

33
.
The Life of Astley Cooper
by Bransby Cooper (1843), p. 334. An example of one of these experiments is on show in the Gordon Museum at Guy’s Hospital. According to R. C. Brock in
The Life and Work of Sir Astley Cooper
(1952), Cooper kept human corpses in his attic from time to time and had obtained permission to do so from the lord mayor of London, who assured Cooper that he would not be troubled by constables and magistrates.

34
.
Lancet
, 16 October 1831.

35
.
A Letter to the Right Honourable the Secretary of State for the Home Department Containing Remarks on the Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Anatomy
(1829).

36
.
Morning Advertiser
, 11 October 1831.

37
.
British Police and the Democratic Ideal
by Charles Reith, p. 94.

38
. George Douchez, who had also been present at the 6 November postmortem in St. Paul’s watch house, lived—and may have had a theater of sorts—in Golden Square itself; Thomas Copland, surgeon, lived at 4 Golden Square, on its east side; while John Joberns, surgeon, lived at 9 Upper John Street, which led into the square. Joseph Carpue’s school in Dean Street, the Brookesian, and the Great Windmill Street School could have been described as near to Golden Square. But the most likely candidate is George Darby Dermott’s practice; Dermott was working from a theater actually on the square before taking his anatomy academy to Gerrard Street in 1833. The great John Hunter (brother of William of the Great Windmill Street School) lived and lectured at 31 Golden Square (where he had built a dissecting room) between 1763 and 1769, and it is possible that Dermott, or even Douchez, was using Hunter’s former premises.

39
. John Hilton (1805–78) was demonstrator of anatomy at Guy’s from 1828 on. He had a brilliant reputation as an anatomist and later in life became surgeon to Queen Victoria and president of the RCS; he had the honor of performing the postmortem on Sir Astley Cooper when the baronet died in 1841. Hilton was the first surgeon to give a clear account of cerebrospinal fluid; and his book
Rest and Pain
, on the importance of recuperation, was the first to explore in an empirical way the benefits of rest. He himself shunned the notion of empiricism and the “scientific” community and found Charles Darwin’s ideas ludicrous. Hilton believed that life, death, and the spirit could never be understood in chemical or physical terms: “All is darkness to the human understanding,” he said (
A Biographical History of Guy’s Hospital
by Samuel Wilks and G. T. Bettany [1892]). Hilton gave waxwork-maker Joseph Towne detailed anatomical information when Towne was producing his celebrated wax anatomical figures, which are still in the Gordon Museum at Guy’s. Towne habitually worked alone in a locked room with corpses and wax, and his methods died with him.