Reading George Orwell’s essay ‘How The Poor Die’ for my SSC this week reminded me of the gruesome and horrid nature of the beginning of anatomical dissections.
As those in the scientific realm, we often forget the cruel beginnings of our understanding of modern medicine and take for granted the ease of access to resources, the most sacred of all being the human body given to us for our education and progression as student doctors.
The term bodysnatching is synonymous with ‘grave robbing’ and refers to the act, or trade, of stealing bodies from graves for the sole purpose of delivering them to doctors/surgeons to dissect. Prior to this in the 1700s, criminals due to be hung were ‘reserved’ to be donated for this purpose, but the need for bodies to dissect grew larger and bodysnatching became a growing trend.
How despicable it was that grave robbers would burrow into the head end of the grave and drag the corpse out with a rope around the deceased neck, or dig a hole a few metres from the grave to tunnel out the body so as to give the impression the grave was untouched.
Many surgeons during this time viewed this practice as a necessary evil, and in the early 1700s the knowledge gained from these cadavers helped significantly improve the operation of bladder stone removal – the duration changed from “hours to less than a minute, reducing blood loss, distress and the likelihood of infection”.
But what’s worse is that this trend did not halt and actually, became even more ominous. In the early 1800s, in Edinburgh and London, stealing dead bodies changed to murdering people, smothering them whilst compressing the chest to hasten their death. Although the practice of grave robbing before this was illegal but still seen as a necessary evil, doctors and the public were horrified to learn of the source of these corpses. Riots ensued, and the criminals observing this practice were hung/jailed, observed by hundreds of onlookers.
Shortly after this in 1832 the Anatomy Act was created, but even then the bodies of unclaimed poor people (paupers) could be taken by the government to give to licensed anatomists to dissect. Although this may still be deemed wrong, could this be called a significant improvement from bodysnatching?
As we know now, the Anatomy Act 1984 has detailed extensively the rules and regulations regarding donations of human bodies for the purpose of dissection, as well as who can receive these. But we mustn’t forget how we started out, and those who were taken from their graves, and others later even murdered to provide us with ‘valuable’ information in the 1700s and 1800s.
It is so easy to detach ourselves now in the dissecting rooms, the donated bodies’ faces covered so we can so effortlessly forget they were once real; living and breathing humans like us. Even away from the dissecting room, seeing patients during clinical placement, medical students are all too excited to examine patients, to learn more about their disease and body, quickly forgetting that these really are patients, and could be any one of us. I think a paragraph in Orwell’s essay can explain this much better than I:
“I myself with an exceptionally fine specimen of a bronchial rattle, sometimes had as many as a dozen students queuing up to listen to my chest. It was a very queer feeling – queer, I mean, because of their intense interest in learning their job, together with a seeming lack of any perception that the patients were human beings. […] some young student stepped forward to take his turn at manipulating you he would be actually tremulous with excitement, like a boy who has at last got his hands on some expensive piece of machinery.”
We need to continually think about and embed the key principles we so often put to the back-burner, the ethical principles of autonomy and dignity we can describe so well but fail to embody in the rush to move forward within our learning.
References
1. https://www.history.co.uk/history-of-death/the-rise-of-the-body-snatchers
2. To read Orwell’s Essay: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/how-the-poor-die/
Photo by Arthur Lambillotte on Unsplash