Art and epigram regarding science and medicine in relation to death : being a reprint of a communication from the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine (Section of the History of Medicine), 1914, Vol. VII, pp. 192-217 : together with an addition on epigram and art in relation to the excessive fear of death / by F. Parkes Weber.

  • Weber, Frederick Parkes, 1863-1962.
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Art and epigram regarding science and medicine in relation to death : being a reprint of a communication from the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine (Section of the History of Medicine), 1914, Vol. VII, pp. 192-217 : together with an addition on epigram and art in relation to the excessive fear of death / by F. Parkes Weber. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    “ Though once beneath the ground this corse was laid, For use of surgeons it was thence conveyed. Vain was the scheme to hide the impious theft— The body taken, shroud and coffin left. Ye wretches, who pursue this barbarous trade. Your carcases in turn may be conveyed Like this to some unfeeling surgeon’s room ; Nor can they justly meet a better doom.” “ Her body dissected by fiendish men. Her bones anatomized, Her soul we trust has risen to God, • A place where few physicians rise.” With these epitaphs referring to the old “ body-snatching ” days of the “resurrectionists” Hogarth’s “Reward of Cruelty” (1751) may be compared, as it well illustrates the popular horror of the idea of post-mortem examinations in England during the eighteenth century. It is the caricature of the dissection of a criminal’s body at Surgeons’ Hall in Old Bailey, London. The rope by which the murderer (“ Tom Nero ”) was hung at Tyburn is still around his neck, his intestines are being placed in a pail below the dissecting table, and a dog has taken possession of his heart. The skeletons of two recently executed criminals, labelled respectively “ Macleane ” (James Maclaine or Maclean, a noted “gentleman highwayman,” hung at Tyburn in 1750), and “James Field” (executed for highway robbery early in 1751) adorn niches in the walls. Clearly, in this caricature the anatomists and surgeons who dissect the criminal’s body were held out to youthful hooligans as bogies to children—namely, as additional instruments of (post-mortem !) punishment for the crimes committed by murderers, highwaymen, &c. This popular dread of being subjected to dissection after death recalls the mediaeval horror of the body being “tortured” after death by being “eaten by worms”—a subject frequently referred to in mediaeval and later poetry and art. An engraving of about 1480 by the “ Meister I. A. M. von Zwolle ” (the “ Meister mit der Weber- schiitze ”) pictures Moses with the tables of the Ten Commandments in an upper compartment, and a skeleton-like corpse being “ eaten by worms ” in a lower compartment. The design was evidently intended to illustrate certain passages in “ Ecclesiasticus ” (x, 11, and xxviii, 6) : “For when a man is dead, he shall inherit creeping things, beasts, and worms ” ; “ Remember corruption and death, and abide in the commandments.” To increase the horror of the subject mediaeval and later art often magnified the worms into serpents. In a short Latin poem by Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury (died 1109), included