Remarks on the Anatomy Bill now before Parliament : in a letter addressed to the Right Hon. the Lord Althorp, and given to the members of either House on their personal or written application to the publisher / by G.J. Guthrie.

  • Guthrie, G. J. (George James), 1785-1856.
Date:
1832
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Remarks on the Anatomy Bill now before Parliament : in a letter addressed to the Right Hon. the Lord Althorp, and given to the members of either House on their personal or written application to the publisher / by G.J. Guthrie. 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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    or prison, from whatever cause they have been placed there, who have no friends to bury them, and are buried at the expense of the county. 4. All persons found dead, from whatever causes, in highways, canals, or otherwise, and who, having no friends to bury them, are sent to bone-houses for interment, at the expense of the parish or county. 5, and lastly. The poor who die in temporary or floating hospitals, or in workhouses, having no friends to bury them, having expressed no wish on the subject, and having no respectable or decent relatives to express it for them, either before or after death. It is not proposed to interfere by regulations with the bodies of those who die without friends in regularly-established hospitals; it being presumed that the surgeons of those institutions will properly apply them in the instruction of the students committed to their charge. In other words, it is not intended that the public schools of anatomy shall interfere with the private or public instruction delivered by surgeons in their own hospitals. When gentlemen in. their places in the House of Commons say it is the stigma which is attached to the dissection of murderers that prevents other persons either from leaving their own bodies for anatomical purposes, or from permitting those of their friends to be dissected; and that if this stigma were removed, the reverse would take place, and that people would allow themselves and their friends to be dissected, as freely as the anato- mical student can desire; I cannot refrain from enquiring what proof they have of the assertion ? And I do not hesitate to say, with all due submis- sion, that they have no proof whatever ; and if they will not feel offended at the remark, I will add, that they have adopted the opinion on the faith of some one of their medical acquaintance, or of some reviewer, without mak- ing any substantial investigation of the subject for themselves. It is a very fashionable opinion I admit among medical men in the present day, but will any one man in the profession who maintains it, affirm that he is him- self deterred from leaving his body for dissection by the stigma. I do not believe there is a single man who will answer yes. They know better. The late Dr. Gooch first broached to the public, in the Quarterly Review, the insufferable doctrine that the poor and honest man should be dis- sected, because he was poor; and that the murderer, the thief, and the rogue should escape this process, because the doctors, forsooth, declare it to be an unobjectionable one, which all poor men should like, and which rogues and thieves disgrace, and to which they attach a stigma. But did he act up to the opinion he thus edited ? Did he set an example of his belief in it, by leaving his body for dissection ?—He did no such thing: but when he died, which happened shortly afterwards, he took care to have himself buried in the usual manner. I have argued in my former letter, page 6, that there is no more reason for a- medical man’s giving up his body for anatomical purposes than for any other person : this I argued on general principles ;' but if a medical man maintains the opinion that dissection is an unobjec- tionable process which people ought to submit the dead bodies of their friends to for the sake of science and the benefit of the living, I in my turn maintain, that they are bound to set the example. Will they do it, or have they done it ? The late Mr. Abernethy was a student and teacher of anatomy for nearly fifty years—a sufficient length of time, it will be admitted,