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“Indecent and Demoralising Representations”: Public Anatomy Museums in mid-Victorian England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2012

A W Bates
A W Bates
Affiliation:
Department of Histopathology, Royal Free Hospital, London NW3 2QG; e-mail: [email protected]
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Medical History , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , 01 January 2008 , pp. 1 - 22
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Copyright © The Author(s) 2008. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

1 The Times, 19 Dec. 1873, p. 11.

2 Jonathan Reinarz, ‘The age of museum medicine: the rise and fall of the medical museum at Birmingham's school of medicine’, Soc. Hist. Med., 2005, 18: 419–38, pp. 419–22. On the anatomical basis of disease, see Russell C Maulitz, Morbid appearances: the anatomy of pathology in the early nineteenth century, Cambridge University Press, 1987, esp. pp. 109–33.

3 Frederick John Knox, The anatomist's instructor, and museum companion, Edinburgh, Adam and Charles Black, 1836, p. 7.

4 Alfred Rosling Bennett, London and Londoners in the eighteen-fifties and sixties, London, T Fisher Unwin, 1924, pp. 343–4. On Sarti, see Scalpel, 1851, 3: 118; The Times, 28 Mar. 1839, p. 5; 2 July 1847, p. 8.

5 Richard D Altick, The shows of London, Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press, 1978, pp. 54–6, 339–42; Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The facts of life: the creation of sexual knowledge in Britain 1650–1950, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1995, pp. 138–9. For an account of popular anatomy in America, see Michael Sappol, A traffic of dead bodies: anatomy and embodied social identity in nineteenth-century America, Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. 169–211.

6 Maritha Rene Burmeister, ‘Popular anatomical museums in nineteenth-century England’, PhD thesis, Rutgers University, 2000, pp. 209–39.

7 Susan C Lawrence, ‘Anatomy and address: creating medical gentlemen in eighteenth-century London’, in Vivian Nutton and Roy Porter (eds), The history of medical education in Britain, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1995, pp. 199–228, on pp. 200–2.

8 Anita Guerrini, ‘Anatomists and entrepreneurs in early eighteenth-century London’, J. Hist. Med. Allied Sci., 2004, 59: 219–39, pp. 221–6.

9 R C Dallas, Elements of self-knowledge: intended to lead youth into an early acquaintance with the nature of man, by an anatomical display of the human frame, London, Murray and Highley, 1802, pp. 3–4, 413.

10 T Clive Lee and Elizabeth Allen, ‘Anatomical wax modelling and the Northumberland Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland’, J. Irish Coll. Phys. Surg., 1992, 21: 213–18, p. 214.

11 Desnoües learned techniques from Gaetano Giulio Zumbo (1656–1701), whose waxworks, according to Desnoües, depicted “all the horror of a tomb”: Thomas Schnalke, Diseases in wax: the history of the medical moulage, trans. Kathy Spatschek, Singapore, Quintessence, 1995, p. 29; Monika von Düring, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Marta Poggesi, Encyclopaedia anatomica, Cologne, Taschen, 2004, pp. 10–12, 20–25.

12 Burmeister, op. cit., note 6 above, p. 31; Bodleian Library, John Johnson Collection (hereafter JJC), Waxworks 3 (45, 46, 64–6); G Thomson, Syllabus: pointing out every part of the human system; likewise the different positions of the child in the womb, &c. as they are exactly and accurately shewn in the anatomical wax-figures of the late Monsieur Denouë[sic]; to which is added, a compendium of anatomy, London, J Hughs, [1739].

13 A catalogue and particular description of the human anatomy in wax-work, and several other preparations; to be seen at the Royal-Exchange, London, T White, 1736; Altick, op. cit., note 5 above, p. 56; Schnalke, op. cit., note 11 above, pp. 31–3.

14 A brief description of those curious and excellent figures of the human anatomy in wax … the works of the late celebrated Mons. Denoue[sic] now to be seen at Mr. Rackstrow's, statuary, opposite Serjeant's-Inn, in Fleet-Street, at one shilling each., n.p., n.d., pp. 3–12; JJC, Waxworks 3 (65); A descriptive catalogue … of Rackstrow's Museum: consisting of a large, and very valuable collection, of most curious anatomical figures, and real preparations … with a great variety of natural and artificial curiosities. To be seen at no. 197 Fleet-Street, London, 1782; Altick, op. cit., note 5 above, pp. 55–6; Burmeister, op. cit., note 6 above, p. 35.

15 T Percy C Kirkpatrick, History of the medical teaching in Trinity College Dublin and of the School of Physic in Ireland, Dublin, Hanna and Neale, 1912, pp. 130–1.

16 F J Cole, ‘History of the anatomical museum’, in Oliver Elton (ed.), A miscellany presented to John Macdonald Mackay, LL.D. July, 1914, Liverpool University Press, 1914, pp. 302–17, on p. 305.

17 Catalogue of the preparations illustrative of normal, abnormal, and morbid structure, human and comparative, constituting the anatomical museum of George Langstaff, London, John Churchill, 1842, p. iii. On the function of museums, see Tony Bennett, The birth of the museum: history, theory, politics, London, Routledge, 1994, p. 35, and Michel Foucault, ‘Of other spaces’, Diacritics, 1986, 16: 22–7, p. 26.

18 George C Peachey, John Heaviside surgeon, London, St Martin's Press, 1931, p. 20, quoting from The picture of London for 1806.

19 After Heaviside's death, the museum's 2,644 specimens were sold for some £1,240: ibid., pp. 25–6. On gentleman collectors and anatomists, see Lawrence, op. cit., note 7 above, pp. 202–5.

20 Altick, op. cit., note 5 above, p. 27.

21 Returns relating to medical museums in the United Kingdom, PP 1857, XIV, p. 5.

22 This was not difficult to obtain; on Easter Monday 1853 there were 200 visitors: Med. Circ., 1853, 2: 277.

23 Charles Newman, The evolution of medical education in the nineteenth century, London, Oxford University Press, 1957, pp. 74–5. Candidates for the diploma had to attend at least three courses of anatomy and two of dissection: The medical calendar: or student's guide, Edinburgh, Maclachlan and Stewart, 1828, p. 119.

24 Adrian Desmond, The politics of evolution: morphology, medicine, and reform in radical London, University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 102–10, 152, 157–65. London anatomy schools charged between three and seven guineas for a course of dissection: Medical calendar, op. cit., note 23 above, pp. 80, 83, 89, 94, 102, 107, 108.

25 Knox, op. cit., note 3 above, p 3.

26 Desmond, op. cit., note 24 above, pp. 162–3.

27 R H Syfret, ‘Some early reactions to the Royal Society’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond., 1950, 7: 207–58, p. 233.

28 S T Coleridge, The statesman's manual: a lay sermon, London, s.n., 1816, p. xvi; [W A Greenhill], Address to a medical student, London, Rivingtons, Churchill, 1843, p. 137; Ruth Richardson, ‘A necessary inhumanity?’, J. med. Ethics, 2000, 26: 104–6; Roy Porter, ‘Happy hedonists’, Br. med. J., 2000, 321: 1572–5, p. 1573.

29 “Aesculapius”, The hospital pupil's guide, 2nd ed., London, E Cox and Sons, 1818, p. 38.

30 Ibid., pp. 38–44; Anon., Signor Sarti's celebrated Florentine anatomical Venus: together with numerous smaller models of special interest to ladies, showing the marvellous mechanism of the human body, n.p., n.d., p. 2 and [Joseph] Kahn, The evangel of human nature; being fourteen lectures, on the various organs of the human frame, in health and disease, London, James Gilbert, 1855, p. 1.

31 William Chamberlaine, Tirocinium medicum; or a dissertation on the duties of youth apprenticed to the medical profession, London, privately printed, 1812, p. 65.

32 Desmond, op. cit., note 24 above, pp. 8–9.

33 Lancet, 1831–32, i: 481–6, p. 481; 1836–37, i: 280.

34 Desmond, op. cit., note 24 above, p. 9.

35 Lancet, 1826–27, 11: 295–301; The Times, 20 Feb. 1826, p. 3; Zachary Cope, ‘The private medical schools of London (1746–1914)’, in F N L Poynter (ed.), The evolution of medical education in Britain, London, Pitman, 1966, pp. 89–110, on pp. 95–6.

36 In 1832, hospital schools were at the London Hospital, St Bartholomew's, Guy's, St Thomas's, King's College and London University; private schools were in Aldermanbury, Aldersgate Street, Charterhouse Square, Dean Street, Little Dean Street, Gerrard Street, Giltspur Street, Golden Square, Greville Street, Grosvenor Place, Great Windmill Street, Little Windmill Street and Webb Street: National Archives, Kew (hereafter NA), HO 44/25. For 1871, see Ruth Richardson, Death, dissection and the destitute, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987, p. 287.

37 Returns relating to medical museums, op. cit., note 21 above, pp. 8, 11; Desmond, op. cit., note 24 above, p. 83; S T Anning and W K J Walls, A history of the Leeds School of Medicine: one and a half centuries 1831–1981, Leeds University Press, 1982, p. 34; John Langdon-Davies, Westminster Hospital: two centuries of voluntary service, 1719–1948, London, Murray, 1952, pp. 116–17; H Campbell Thomson, The story of the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, London, John Murray, 1935, pp. 34–5.

38 Elizabeth T Hurren, ‘A pauper dead-house: the expansion of the Cambridge anatomical teaching school under the late-Victorian poor law, 1870–1914’, Med. Hist., 2004, 48: 69–94, pp. 93–4.

39 Lawrence, op. cit., note 7 above, pp. 200, 207–8.

40 British Library, 1269.h.38., ‘Exhibitions of mechanical and other works of ingenuity’ [newspaper cuttings], p. 109.

41 Altick, op. cit., note 5 above, p. 339. On French waxwork makers and pornography, see Pamela Pilbeam, Madame Tussaud and the history of waxworks, London, Hambledon and London, 2003, pp. 5, 16, 29.

42 ‘Exhibitions’, op. cit., note 40 above, pp. 52–3.

43 G Knox, Description of an artificial anatomical figure, constructed by the Chevalier Auzoux, M.D. exhibited in 1832 before the King, in London, Madras, Church Mission Press, 1834, pp. 3–11, 19–20.

44 In 1830s Edinburgh, Dr Shirreff advertised a course of anatomy taught using plaster casts to avoid the “terrible and disagreeable duty” of dissection, only to be lampooned by Robert Knox: Thomas Brown, Alexander Wood M.D., F.R.C.P.E., &c. &c: a sketch of his life and work, Edinburgh, MacNiven and Wallace, 1886, pp. 37–8. Wax models were seldom used in medical schools: NA, HO 45/4884, letter from the London and provincial inspectors of anatomy, 14 July 1853. A life-size model cost £120 in 1832: ‘Teaching anatomy by means of an artificial human body’, Ann. Rev., 1832: 20.

45 In 1832, Dr Halma-Grand, professor of anatomy in Paris, recommended a display of anatomical waxworks for the “unprofessional” public in England: The Times, 1 Feb. 1832, p. 3. On continental modellers, see Schnalke, op. cit., note 11 above, pp. 27–92. The most notable British anatomical modeller, Joseph Towne, worked at Guy's Hospital from 1826: Thomas Bryant, ‘Joseph Towne: modeller to Guy's Hospital for 53 years’, Guy's Hosp. Rep., 3rd series, 1883, 26: 1–12; D Mendis and H Ellis, ‘Joseph Towne (1806–1879), master modeller of wax’, J. med. Biog., 2003, 11: 212–17.

46 Peter Cunningham, Hand-book of London: past and present, London, John Murray, 1850, pp. 74, 348.

47 The Times, 28 Mar. 1839, p. 5; Tussaud's economical guide to London, Paris, and Brussels, London, W J Cleaver, 1852, pp. 19–20.

48 Scalpel, 1852, 4: 510–11.

49 Anon., Signor Sarti's celebrated … Venus, op. cit., note 30 above. This explanatory pamphlet cost 6d.

50 Thomas Kelly, George Birkbeck: pioneer of adult education, Liverpool University Press, 1957, pp. 114–15.

51 Kahn, op. cit., note 30 above, pp. 3–4. Non-specialist books on anatomy included William Burke's A popular compendium of anatomy, 2nd ed., London, Highley and Son, 1813, and the anonymous A catechism of anatomy; for the instruction of youth in the first principles of that science, London, G B Whittaker, 1825; the latter contains some basic errors, e.g., the diagram on pp. vi–vii.

52 Desmond, op. cit. note 24 above, pp. 203–4.

53 Robert Knox, The races of men, 2nd ed., London, Henry Renshaw, 1862, p. 27; A Sedgwick, ‘Vestiges of the natural history of creation’, Edin. Rev., 1845, 82: 1–85, p. 3.

54 NA, HO 107/1475, fol. 4–9, 1851 census.

55 Paul S Ulrich, ‘“Hunderttausend Thaler”—Öffentliche Vergnügungen in Berlin 1848’ [http://www.zlb.de/projekte/theater/1848/november48.htm, viewed 15 Aug. 2007].

56 Catalogue of Dr. Kahn's Anatomical Museum, now exhibiting at 315, Oxford Street, near Regent Circus, London, W J Golbourn, 1851, pp. iii, 5–6, 26, 28, 30.

57 Daily News, 28 Apr. 1851, p. 1; 23 May 1851, p. 1; 30 June 1851, p. 1; Weekly Dispatch, 29 June 1851, p. 17.

58 Lancet, 1851, i: 474; Med. Times Gaz., 1851, 23: 496. On the readership of these journals, see Desmond, op. cit., note 24 above, pp. 15–16.

59 News of the World, 21 Sept. 1851, p. 1. Kahn added a gallery of ethnological models: John Conolly, The ethnological exhibitions of London, London, John Churchill, 1855, p. 38.

60 Lancet, 1853, i: 590. Reimers' museum toured northern England before moving to Saville House in London. There is no record of it in England after 1853, though it toured Europe until at least 1869: J W Reimers, Catalogue of J. W. Reimer's [sic] Gallery of All Nations and Anatomical Museum, Leeds, Jackson & Asquith, 1853; J. W. Reimers Anatomiska och Ethnologiska Museum, Stockholm, Associations-Tryckeriet, 1869.

61 Reynolds's Newspaper, 11 Sept. 1853, p. 9; The Times, 14 Sept. 1853, p. 10; Central Criminal Court: sessions’ paper, London, George Herbert, 1853, 38, p. 568; Lancet, 1853, ii: 329.

62 [Joseph] Kahn and Dr Sexton, Men with tails: remarks on the Niam-Niams of Central Africa, London, W J Golbourn, [1855], p. 6.

63 F B Courtenay, Revelations of quacks and quackery: a series of letters by “Detector” reprinted from “The Medical Circular”, 7th ed., London, Baillière, Tindall and Cox, [1877], preface and pp. 57, 74; ‘The indecent advertising quacks’, Med. Press., 1867, 3: 192–3.

64 Lancet, 1853, ii: 156.

65 Caplin's museum of “science applied to the female form” warned against tight-lacing: Weekly Dispatch, 8 June 1851, p. 14; Med. Circ., 1854, 5: 167; The Times, 4 Nov. 1854, p. 1; 30 July 1863, p. 1. Sarti's was open to “ladies only” on two days a week and Kahn's on three afternoons.

66 Bennett, op. cit., note 17 above, p. 30, argues that the presence of women “sanitized” public spaces.

67 On women and the “dismal horrors of the dissecting room”, see ‘The lay press on female physicians’, Students J. Hosp. Gaz., 1874, 2: 241–2, p. 241.

68 Jane Clapp, Art censorship: a chronology of proscribed and prescribed art, Metuchen, NJ, Scarecrow Press, 1972, p. 135; The Times, 5 June 1873, p. 10.

69 As a result of correspondence from Dr Leach, a disaffected ex-employee of Kahn: Lancet, 1854, ii: 22; i: 654, 684, 700.

70 Lancet, 1854, i: 654, 700; ii: 22; 1855, ii: 483.

71 R and L Perry and Co. [sic], The silent friend; a medical work, treating on the anatomy and physiology of the organs of generation, and their diseases, London, published by the authors, 1847, was substantially the same as Catalogue of Dr. Kahn's Anatomical and Pathological Museum … To which is added, a series of lectures, under the title of “Shoals and quicksands” of youth, as delivered by Dr. Kahn, every evening, at a quarter-past eight precisely. Admission, one shilling. Catalogue, etc., free, n.p., [1856].

72 Kevin P Siena, Venereal disease, hospitals, and the urban poor: London's “foul wards,” 1600–1800, Rochester, NY, University of Rochester Press, 2004, pp. 30–1, 46–8.

73 Courtenay, op. cit., note 63 above, p. 2.

74 The best-known spermatorrhoea remedy was Jordan's Triesemar: Daily News, 25 Jan. 1856, p. 8; News of the World, 17 Feb. 1856, p. 8. On spermatorrhoea as a diagnosis, see Michael Mason, The making of Victorian sexuality, Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 295–8, and Robert Darby, ‘Pathologizing male sexuality: Lallemand, spermatorrhea, and the rise of circumcision’, J. Hist. Med. Allied Sci., 2005, 60: 283–319.

75 Lancet, 1857, ii: 150–3.

76 Lancet, 1857, ii: 175, 557–8. The claim that a “poor” clerk had eighteen consultations with Kahn, and paid £51 for treatment of a condition he did not believe he had, before obtaining a second opinion seems unlikely.

77 Med. Circ., 1854, 4: 84. The content of the museum resembled Kahn's: J T Woodhead, Parisian Gallery of Anatomy: descriptive catalogue of the anatomical and pathological models in the above-named museum: this rare and scientific collection consists of upwards of 400 models and diagrams brought from Paris, Munich and Florence, Liverpool, E Matthews, n.d.

78 Lancet, 1859, i: 569–71; Minutes of the Medical Council, London, 1863, 1: 45. Kahn sold his museum in 1862 and had left England by 1864: Lancet, 1864, ii: 389.

79 Hamilton sold quack remedies and fraudulently claimed to be an MD: The Times, 18 Apr. 1866, p. 11; Br. med. J., 1866, i: 428–9.

80 The French were less permissive; in 1712 Desnoües was instructed by the Parisian parlement to remove the genitalia from his waxworks: Jonathan Simon, ‘The theatre of anatomy: the anatomical preparations of Honoré Fragonard’, Eight. Cent. Stud., 2002, 36: 63–79, p. 65.

81 Burke, op. cit., note 51 above, p. 242.

82 Sappol, op. cit., note 5 above, p. 203.

83 “Obscene” books seized by the police in 1856 included “Dubois on Marriage”, a “medical work of great note”, “Aristotles works” and “Sam Hall Songster”: News of the World, 20 Apr. 1856, p. 5. The Victorian Aristotle's master-piece was a “moral tract lacking the frankness of the eighteenth-century original”: see Roy Porter, ‘“The secrets of generation display'd”: Aristotle's master-piece in eighteenth-century England’, Eight. Cent. Life, 1985, 9: 1–21, p. 4.

84 Montague Summers, in later life a translator of banned books, recalled his disappointment on discovering that a hidden book in the library of his childhood home was a medical encyclopaedia: Montague Summers, The galanty show, London, Cecil Woolf, 1980, pp. 79–80.

85 The Times, 8 May 1854, p. 9.

86 Regina v. Hicklin (1868 LR 3 QB 360), see Norman St John-Stevas, Obscenity and the law, London, Secker and Warburg, 1956, pp. 66–70.

87 Br. med. J., 1860, i: 15. I have been unable to locate any other references to Lloyd, possibly a pseudonym.

88 David Gaimster, ‘Sex and sensibility at the British Museum’, History Today, 2000, 50 (9): 10–15.

89 The Doctor, a Medical Penny Magazine, 1835, 3: 126; ‘The Old Medical Student’, Hints to men about town: part I, Liverpool, George Davis and Co., 1840, pp. 61–71.

90 Perry and Co., op. cit., note 71 above, p. 168.

91 When asked during the Bradlaugh case of 1877 whether The fruits of philosophy was “calculated to excite sensual or libidinous feelings”, Dr Drysdale of the Royal Free Hospital replied: “on me it had the contrary effect”: St John-Stevas, op. cit., note 86 above, p. 154. On moral restraint as an objective in opening museums to working-class visitors, see Bennett, op. cit., note 17 above, pp. 20–21.

92 The most notable was the publisher William Dugdale: Geraldine Beare, ‘Dugdale, William (1799/1800–1868)’, in H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol. 17, pp. 157–8.

93 The Times, 26 May 1865, p. 11.

94 ‘Anatomy of quackery: quack medicines, their history, composition, and qualities; no. xxxvii; provincial Calcrafts’, Med. Circ., 1854, 4: 8–9.

95 Med. Press, 1866, 1: 289–90. Jordan qualified in 1859; his name was erased from the Medical Register on 4 May 1864 for publishing an “indecent” work: Min. med. Coun., Lond., 1864, 3: 66.

96 Med. Press, 1867, 3: 107, 171, 252–3; Br. med. J., 1869, i: 78.

97 Reynolds's Newspaper, 8 Dec. 1872, p. 4; Med. Press, 1872, 14: 532.

98 Med. Press, 1872, 14: 468–9; 1873, 15: 37.

99 In 1877, the Solicitor General gave an opinion that the general publication of medical works was obscene, though publishing them for “doctors” was not: St John-Stevas, op. cit., note 86 above, pp. 70–2, quote on p. 129.

100 Br. med. J., 1873, i: 295, 413; The Times, 1 Dec. 1873, p. 11; 19 Dec. 1873, p. 11. Quacks continued to practise under the name of Kahn until 1876: The Times, 14 Oct. 1876, p. 11; Lancet, 1876, ii: 593, 701.

101 Descriptive catalogue of the Liverpool Museum of Anatomy, 29, Paradise Street, Liverpool, Matthews Brothers, n.d., p. 65.

102 Lancet, 1874, i: 915–16.

103 Altick, op. cit., note 5 above, p. 339; Porter and Hall, op. cit., note 5 above, p. 138.

104 Ludmilla J Jordanova, Sexual visions: images of gender and science in medicine between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, New York, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, pp. 43–50; also Pilbeam, op. cit., note 41 above, pp. 4, 133–4, and Sheila Shaw, ‘Spontaneous combustion and the sectioning of female bodies’, Lit. Med., 1995, 14: 1–22, p. 5.

105 A W Bates, ‘Anatomical Venuses: the aesthetics of anatomical modelling in 18th- and 19th-century Europe’, in János Pusztai (ed.), 40th international congress on the history of medicine: proceedings, 2 vols, Budapest, Societas Internationalis Historiae Medicinae, 2006, vol. 1, pp. 183–6. On anatomy and classical proportions, see Deanna Petherbridge, ‘Art and anatomy: the meeting of text and image’, in Deanna Petherbridge and Ludmilla Jordanova (eds), The quick and the dead: artists and anatomy, London, South Bank Centre, 1997, pp. 7–98, and Francesco Paolo de Ceglia, ‘The rotten, the disembowelled woman, the skinned man’, J. Sci. Commun., 2005, 4, 1–7: p. 3 [http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/04/03/A040301/, viewed 15 Aug. 2007].

106 For photographs of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anatomical models see Michel Lemire, Artistes et mortels, Paris, Chabaud, 1990, esp. pp. 27–251; von Düring, Didi-Huberman, and Poggesi, op. cit., note 11 above, pp. 18–115, and The William Bonardo collection of wax anatomical models, London, Christie's, 2001, esp. pp. 23, 49, 52, 56.

107 de Ceglia, op. cit., note 105 above, pp. 2–3.

108 Catalogue, op. cit., note 71 above, p. 45; Knox, op. cit., note 43 above, pp. 19–20; W Mawhinney, Anatomical and physiological description of Signor Sarti's Florentine Venus, together with the causes, symptoms, and treatment of the diseases of the principal organs, Bury, John Heap, 1851, p. 3.

109 Burmeister, op. cit., note 6 above, pp. 29, 47. Desnoües's twenty-four models in London comprised twelve females, seven males and five of undefined sex: six of the females were pregnant and in two malpresentations were shown: A brief description, op. cit., note 14 above, pp. 3–12.

110 Elaine Showalter, Sexual anarchy: gender and culture at the fin de siècle, New York, Viking, 1990, p. 128.

111 Roy Porter, Health for sale: quackery in England 1660–1850, Manchester University Press, 1989, p. 151.

112 The Times, 27 Dec. 1854, p. 10.

113 ‘Exhibitions’, op. cit., note 40 above, p. 64. On the monstrous defined by transgression of social and moral laws, see Michel Foucault, Abnormal: lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, transl. Graham Burchell, London, Verso, 2003, pp. 49–94.

114 Courtenay, op. cit., note 63 above, p. 46.

115 Siena, op. cit., note 72 above, p. 40.

116 Pilbeam, op. cit., note 41 above, pp. 97–130.

117 Catalogue, op. cit., note 56 above, p. 3; Daily News, 28 Apr. 1851, p. 1.

118 Joseph Kahn, Atlas of the formation of the human body, in the earliest stages of its development, compiled from the researches of the late Dr M. P. Erdl, London, John Churchill, 1852, p. v.

119 Frederick Tyrrell, An introductory lecture on anatomy; delivered at the new Medical School, Aldersgate Street. October 2nd, 1826, London, Longman, 1826, p. 8; E A Barton, A doctor remembers, London, Seeley, Service, 1941, p. 22.

120 Medical calendar, op. cit., note 23 above, p. 83; General Medical Council, Report of the Committee on Professional Education (1869), with three appendices, London, General Medical Council, 1869, p. 64.

121 An anatomy tutor writing to The Times, 26 Nov. 1866, p. 8; he did not name the London schools involved. In Edinburgh, Robert Knox was accused of signing certificates for students who had not attended classes: Lancet, 1847, i: 567–71. Until the mid-nineteenth century the examination was a viva voce only: Newman, op. cit., note 23 above, pp. 20, 245.

122 Med. Circ., 1854, 5: 187.

123 Min. med. Coun., Lond., 1868, 5: 238.

124 Dr G M Humphry, FRS, quoted in General Medical Council, op. cit., note 120 above, p. 69.

125 W Mitchell Banks, ‘The teaching of anatomy’, Br. med. J., 1874, i: 466–7. Newman, op. cit., note 23 above, p. 285, dismissed anatomy as: “a mass of facts … of little educational value”.

126 Min. med. Coun., Lond., 1876, 12, p. 54; Br. med. J., 1875, i: 848–57.

127 Barton, op. cit., note 119 above, p. 23. On ritual aspects of anatomy, see Sappol, op. cit., note 5 above, pp. 1–3.

128 ‘A Physician’ [Samuel Dickson], London medical practice: its sins and shortcomings, London, Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 1860, p. 61.

129 Kahn, op. cit., note 30 above, pp. 3–4, quote on p. 4.

130 On possible erotic connotations of dissection and the collection and display of anatomical specimens, see Sappol, op. cit., note 5 above, pp. 4, 22, 85, 87, 233–4, 276.

131 The Times, 4 Dec. 1833, p. 2; 26 Sept. 1842, p. 7; 2 Feb. 1858, p. 11. Reports of “gross indecency” implied disrespectful treatment of cadavers rather than sexual misconduct: The Times, 10 Oct. 1859, p. 6; 22 Nov. 1866, p. 7. Henry Ashbee's pornographic Index librorum prohibitorum included a story of corpse “profanation” by a porter in a Victorian dissecting room (Richardson op. cit., note 36 above, p. 96), but this was not a subject raised in newspapers of the period.

132 Edward Bulwer Lytton, Caxtoniana: a series of essays on life, literature and manners, London, Blackwood, 1863, p. 185.

133 Anatomy museums were included in guides for middle-class visitors to London, for example John Timbs, Curiosities of London, London, David Bogue, 1855, pp. 529–30. Kahn's was listed among Christmas attractions “to amuse the holyday folks” in The Times, 27 Dec. 1854, p. 10, and was treated humorously in Punch, 1856, 31: 108. The closure of Kahn's was reported in the medical press but not the News of the World, Reynolds's Newspaper, or the Illustrated Police Gazette.

134 General Medical Council, op. cit., note 120 above, pp. 69–70.

135 Raymond Tallis, Hippocratic oaths: medicine and its discontents, London, Atlantic Books, 2004, pp. 245–6, argues that the “distasteful” attainment of “objectivity over repulsion” in medicine has been “frequently represented as an enjoyable exercise of power”.

136 General Medical Council, op. cit., note 120 above, p. 238; Br. med. J., 1862, i: 372; J B Atlay, Sir Henry Wentworth Acland, Bart., K.C.B., F.R.S., Regius Professor of Medicine in the University of Oxford: a memoir, London, Smith, Elder, 1903, pp. 82, 91.

137 Thomas Neville Bonner, Becoming a physician: medical education in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, 1750–1945, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000, p. 75.

138 William Dale, The present state of the medical profession in Great Britain and Ireland, London, A W Bennett, 1860, p. 42; Herbert Hutchinson, Jonathan Hutchinson: life and letters, London, Heinemann, 1946, p. 25; John Bland-Sutton, The story of a surgeon, 4th ed., London, Methuen, 1931, p. 39; Macdonald Critchley and Eileen A Critchley, John Hughlings Jackson: father of English neurology, New York, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 27. See also Newman, op. cit., note 23 above, pp. 41–5.

139 S Squire Sprigge, The life and times of Thomas Wakley, London, Longmans, Green, 1897, p. 18; General Medical Council, op. cit., note 120 above, pp. 69–70.

140 Br. med. J., 1860, i: 15.

141 [W H Mallock], The new republic; or, culture, faith, and philosophy in an English country house, 2nd ed., 2 vols, London, Chatto and Windus, 1877, vol. 1, pp. 182–3.

142 When Spitzner's museum, founded in 1856, came to London in 1903, it was immediately indicted for “publishing indecent libels”: Burmeister, op. cit., note 6 above, p. 209–10. In 2002–3, Professor Gunther von Hagens’ “Bodyworlds” provoked criticism from the medical profession and parliament: Bull. R. Coll. Pathol., 2002, 119: 4–5; Independent, 16 Mar. 2002, p. 2; Hansard, 28 June 2004, col. 110.