An account of the circumstances attending the imprisonment and death of the late William Millard, formerly superintendent of the Theatre of Anatomy of St. Thomas's Hospital, Southwark.

Date:
1825
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An account of the circumstances attending the imprisonment and death of the late William Millard, formerly superintendent of the Theatre of Anatomy of St. Thomas's Hospital, Southwark. 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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    but the skill and enterprise of the latter could have rescued his respectable colleague from the embarassment in which he found himself placed. After the bargain and sale above mentioned of poor Jack's body;, it was discovered that a certain sum of prize money was due to him, or his legal representatives, which, woeful to relate, could not be obtained without producing a certificate of his burial. Here was a dilemma! What was to be done? Jack's remains had not been put under hatches in the customary way. His bui'ial place was no other than the cauldrons of the anatomical theatre, where his too solid flesh melted, thawed, and resolved itself into dew. In this pressing emergency the enterprising Mister Paterson again took the field in order to serve his friend, and in some ivay or other contrived to get a blank certificate of burial from the oflice of the steward of St. Thomas's Hospital. This was duly filled up by the united ingenuity of the party, was presented and accepted at the government offices, the money was paid, and the difficulty thus surmounted by the bold- ness and dexterity of the incomi^arable Mister Paterson. Taking leave of Mister Paterson for the present it is time for us to proceed in the sketch we were engaged in giving of St. Thomas's Hospital considered as a school of medicine. The reader has already formed an idea of the extensive arrangements made for this purpose from the statement that the theatre of anatomy is built to contain with ease four hundred persons. The routine of a medical student's education chiefly consists, so far as we can learn, in attending lectures which are given at the different hospitals by professors on anatomy, surgery, materia medica, chemistry, botany, &c. &c. In walking the hospitals, that is to say, in attending at all the important operations performed there, and lastly, in dissecting subjects, as they are called, (an elliptical expression we presume for His Majesty's Subjects). In St. Thomas's Hospital the deaths are between two and three hundred annually, (see the Report presented to the Lord Mayor in 1819). The greater portion of these, we believe, are removed for interment by their friends : the remainder for the most part find their way into the anatomical theatre or the dissecting room : but as these are insufficient for the consumption of the students, they are compelled to resort to the assistance of the resurrection men, wiio, when they are satisfied with the terms offered them, put the burial grounds of the metropolis C 2