¹ Editorial, ‘Alleged traffic in pauper corpses—How the medical schools are supplied—The shadow of a scandal’, Yarmouth Advertiser and Gazette, 11 May 1901, p. 7.

² Cambridge Record Office (hereafter CRO), P25/1/22, St Benedict's parish burial register, 1894–1906.

³Councillor and Guardian, June 1901, p. 12. This was a journal of national significance.

⁴ R Richardson, Death, dissection and the destitute, 2nd ed., London, Phoenix Press, 2001 (first published 1988). The second edition contains an afterword on the Alder Hey controversy.

⁵ Ibid., pp. 3–30; Richardson explains that popular culture held that human remains and the fate of the personality of the soul were one. The soul was guaranteed an after-life if the body was interred whole with some form of basic religious rite, usually Christian. The dissection or dismemberment of a corpse for anatomical teaching purposes, therefore, advertised social and religious failure to the wider community. Despite the concerns of the poor to preserve their popular death customs so as to avoid being condemned in this life and the next, the Anatomy Act gave legal precedence to anatomists' work. The statute permitted Poor Law and asylum authorities to recover welfare costs by selling any pauper cadavers “unclaimed” by relatives or friends up to six weeks after death for burial, to anatomical schools to be used for teaching purposes.

⁶ Several renowned cases of grave-robbing for profit that supplied Cambridge came to light at Great Yarmouth in 1809, contributing to pressure for the new anatomical law, see Richardson, op. cit., see note 5 above, pp. 83, 85–9. Since the issue of consent remained controversial in the area vis-à-vis Cambridge after 1832 it makes an ideal case-study for examining the issue of continuity.

⁷ Four trends reflecting this proclivity are discernible in the current literature. First, some medical historians have examined university-based curriculum developments, see, for example, J A Fairfax Fozzard, Professors of anatomy in the University of Cambridge: … 1707–1968, Cambridge University Press, 1983; M R Jackson, ‘The teaching of anatomy in London as seen through the Lancet, 1823–1848’, BSc dissertation, London, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 2000; M W Weatherall, Gentlemen, scientists and doctors: medicine at Cambridge, 1800–1940, Cambridge University Press, 2000. Second, others have explored the growth in laboratory technology: J V Pickstone, Medicine and industrial society: a history of hospital development in Manchester and its regions, 1752–1946, Manchester University Press, 1985; K Waddington, ‘Unsuitable cases: the debate over out-patient admissions: the medical profession and late-Victorian London hospitals’, Med. Hist., 1998, 42: 26–46; idem, Charity and the London hospitals, 1850–1898, London and New York, Boydell Press, 2000; M W Weatherall, Scientific medicine and the medical sciences in Cambridge, 1851–1939, Cambridge University Press, 1994. A third trend is to examine the impact of the Medical Act (1858): A Digby, Making a medical living: doctors and patients in the English market for medicine, 1720–1911, Cambridge University Press, 1994; I S L Loudon, Medical care and the general practitioner, 1750–1850, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986; R and D Porter, In sickness and in health: the English experience, 1650–1850, London, Fourth Estate, 1988; R Porter, Quacks, fakers and charlatans in English medicine, Stroud, Tempus Publishing, 2000. Finally, others have begun to explore the training experience of anatomy students: S V F Butler, ‘A transformation in training: the formation of university medical faculties in Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool’, Med. Hist. 1986, 30: 115–32; C Dyhouse, ‘Women students and the London medical schools, 1914–39: the anatomy of a masculine culture’, Gender and Hist., 1998, 10: 110–32; D Gareth Jones, Speaking for the dead: cadavers in biology and medicine, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000; E Knox, ‘The body politic: body snatching, the Anatomy Act and the poor on Tyneside’, North East Labour History Bulletin, 1990, 24: 19–35; R C Maulitz, Morbid appearances: the anatomy of pathology in the early nineteenth century, Cambridge University Press, 1987; P M H Mazumdar, ‘Anatomical physiology and the reform of medical education: London, 1825–35’, Bull. Hist. Med. 1983, 57: 230–46; A Morgan, ‘“A beautiful, but seductive science” or “strange and revolting work”?: medical student's experiences of dissection between 1830 and 1880’, BSc dissertation, London, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 2001.

⁸ This phase of radical Poor Law administration is very neglected in current historiography. The most recent text to be published in this field is still K Williams, From pauperism to poverty, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. Recent revisionism indicates just how radical anti-welfare measures were and highlights the sale of cadavers for anatomical purposes, see E T Hurren, ‘The bury-al board: poverty, politics and poor relief in the Brixworth Union, Northamptonshire, 1870–1900’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leicester, 2000.

⁹ M Sappol, A traffic of dead bodies: anatomy and embodied social identity in nineteenth-century America, Princeton University Press, 2002; see also S Baatz, “A very diffused disposition”: dissecting schools in Philadelphia, 1823–25, Pennsylvania, The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1984; R L Blakely and J M Harrington (eds), Bones in the basement: postmortem racism in nineteenth-century medical education, Washington and London, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997.

¹⁰ A Commonwealth and European perspective is also lacking in current historiography. Current work often takes a medical élite perspective and undervalues the Poor Law context, see, for instance, J Fleetwood, The Irish body snatchers: a history of body snatching in Ireland, Dublin, Tomar, 1988; M Colligan, ‘Anatomical wax museums in Melbourne: 1861–1887’, Aust. cult. Hist., 1994, 13: 52–64.

¹¹ Sappol, op. cit., note 9 above, p. 118.

¹² This tends to be explored from the perspective of working-class periodicals, see, for instance, L Hollen Lees, The solidarities of strangers: the English Poor Laws and the people, 1700–1948, Cambridge University Press, 1998, uses one source, the Poor Man's Guardian. This lack of regional research means that late-Victorian Poor Law records filled with accounts and complaints written by the poor objecting to pauper funeral treatment are neglected. See E T Hurren and Steven King, ‘Begging for burial: pauper funeral provision in England, 1750–1900’, forthcoming.

¹³ E Garrett, A Reid, K Schurer and S Szreter, Changing family size in England and Wales: place, class and demography, 1891–1911, Cambridge University Press, 2001, the broad north/south demographic mortality trends are discussed on p. 355.

¹⁴ See, for instance, Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), MH74/36, returns of pupils dissecting in schools of anatomy, winter 1877–78.

¹⁵ Many anatomical registers compiled by medical schools have not survived, which hampers research, and in addition, in the mid-Victorian period, Poor Law and asylum records of cadaver sales are fragmentary. Yet, these primary source problems can be overcome. Under successive Burial Acts (1866, 1888 and so on) anatomical schools were legally required to appoint an officiating clergyman who was responsible for keeping accurate interment records and conducting a basic Christian service on their behalf each time a batch of cadavers was released after dissection and dismemberment. Contrary to rumours amongst the poor, most anatomical teaching material was buried with Christian rites. Generally, medical schools used a regular burial plot located near their teaching facility. These surviving burial registers, with the caveat that they are not always accurate, can be utilized to compile a demographic survey of cadaver procurement.

¹⁶ See, for example, C W M Pratt, The history of anatomy at Cambridge, University of Cambridge, School of Anatomy, 1981; Weatherall, Gentlemen, scientists and doctors, op. cit., note 7 above; R Macleod, The “creed of science” in Victorian England, Aldershot, Variorum, 2000; P Harman and S Mitton (eds), Cambridge scientific minds, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

¹⁷ Pratt, op. cit., note 16 above, p. 11.

¹⁸ A Macalister, The history of the study of anatomy in Cambridge, Cambridge, The University Press, 1891.

¹⁹ His internationally renowned publications included: An introduction to animal morphology and systematic zoology part I: invertebrata, Dublin, Hodges, Figgis, 1876; A text-book of human anatomy: systematic and typographical, London, Charles Griffin, 1889.

²⁰ S French, The history of Downing College, Cambridge: volume two, 1888–1914, Cambridge University Press, 1978.

²¹ Ibid., p. 70.

²²Lancet, 1899, ii: 1181.

²³ An undergraduate student at Downing College first used this material in 1994. Her dissertation is titled, ‘A corporeal correspondence: Professor Macalister's searches for stiffs’. The author was identified on the cover only as “Danielle”; I would be happy to give her a proper citation. The dissertation used the material to give a brief overview of Macalister's work. Extracts from her work also appear in Weatherall, Gentlemen, scientists and doctors, op. cit., note 7 above. I would like to reiterate here how grateful I am to the present provector of anatomy at Downing College, Barry Logan, for alerting me to this material and sharing his enthusiasm in such an encouraging way. I thoroughly enjoyed our body hunts around Cambridge.

²⁴ This collection was recently broken up when the anatomy library at Downing was dismantled and redistributed to the main central university library collection. Regrettably a lot of material was consigned to a bonfire. Barry Logan, who thankfully recognized the importance of the primary sources, rescued the Macalister Papers.

²⁵ Macalister Papers (hereafter MP), Downing College, Cambridge, teaching notes on taking up appointment.

²⁶ H Ellis, ‘History of anatomy in the university of Cambridge’, Clin. Anat., 1993, 6: 188–91.

²⁷ A Macalister, Some morphological lessons taught by human variations and so on: the Robert Boyle lecture No. 3 1892, London, Henry Frowde, 1894.

²⁸ PRO, MH74/36, Memo marked ‘Private—To Poor Law Guardians’, Cambridge, 1 March 1884, signed G E Paget MD (Regius professor of physic, Cambridge), G M Humphry MD (professor of surgery, Cambridge) and A Macalister MD (professor of anatomy, Cambridge).

²⁹ Porter, Quacks, fakers and charlatans, op. cit., note 7 above, pp. 29–30.

³⁰ MP, A Macalister, memo to boards of guardians, 9 Oct. 1884.

³¹ PRO, MH74/36, copy of memo by G H Humphry to Midlands Poor Law unions, 9 Oct. 1884.

³² MP, A Macalister, memo to boards of guardians, 9 Oct. 1884.

³³ Richardson, op. cit., note 4 above, p. xv.

³⁴ Poor Law and cemetery provision is discussed in C H Cooper, Memorials of Cambridge, Cambridge, 1866, vol. 3, p. 147; J P C Roach, A history of the county of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely, vol. 3, The city and university of Cambridge, London, Oxford University Press for the Institute of Historical Research, 1959, p. 274.

³⁵ I am grateful to Mr David Thomas, director of Cambridge crematorium, who gave me access to Histon Road cemetery records and outlined burial provision in the city comprehensively during a visit in July 2001.

³⁶ CRO, P25/1/21–23, St Benedict's burial records.

³⁷ It revised its burial arrangements in 1855 for two further reasons. First, in that year the department persuaded the Cambridge Poor Law union to supply bodies. Second, the department received only meagre supplies from the London Hulks by the mid-1850s. It was essential to sort out covert burial arrangements to protect the new asylum and Poor Law suppliers from public scrutiny, see Weatherall, Gentlemen, scientists and doctors, op. cit., note 7 above, p. 99.

³⁸ The accuracy of these figures has been checked in three ways. Church officials annotated burial registers on a regular basis with a “p”, to indicate a pauper interment on behalf of the anatomical school. These were then sampled and checked against case-study material in Macalister's archive to test their reliability. Second, a database was complied that includes a record of officiating burial administrators. Generally, this involved a clergyman and a representative from the anatomy school. Where the burial register did not record an anatomy official present, the case was not included in the sample. Figures are, therefore, probably under-estimated. Third, the present provector of anatomy at Downing College agreed to release some early-twentieth-century anatomical details, provided these would be used only to check the accuracy of St Benedict's dissection interments. The anatomy registers duplicated the St Benedict's burial records.

³⁹ Richardson, op. cit., note 4 above, p. 247.

⁴⁰ Pratt, op. cit., note 16 above, p. 13.

⁴¹ M Rose, ‘The crisis of poor relief in England, 1860–1890’, in W Mommsen and W Mock (eds), The emergence of the welfare state in Britain and Germany, 1850–1950, London, Croom Helm on behalf of the German Historical Institute, 1981, pp. 50–70.

⁴² R Humphreys, Sin, organized charity and the Poor Law in Victorian England, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1995, pp. 20–1.

⁴³ These are briefly outlined in A Kidd, State, society, and the poor in nineteenth-century England, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1999, pp. 45–64; Hollen Lees, op. cit., note 12 above, discusses Karel Williams' 1981 work on this subject (see note 8 above).

⁴⁴ Williams, op. cit., note 8 above, pp. 96–107.

⁴⁵ D Thomson, ‘Welfare and the historians’, in L Bonfield, R M Smith and K Wrightson (eds), The world we have gained: histories of population and social structure, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986, p. 374.

⁴⁶ See, for example, E T Hurren, ‘Labourers are revolting: penalising the poor and a political reaction in the Brixworth Union, Northamptonshire, 1875–1885’, Rural Hist., 2000, 2: 37–55; Idem, ‘Agricultural trade unionism and a crusade against outdoor relief: Poor Law politics in the Brixworth Union, Northamptonshire, 1870–75’, Agric. Hist. Rev., 2000, 48 (pt 2): 200–23; S A King and J Stewart, ‘The history of the Poor Law in Wales: under-researched, full of potential’, Archives, 2001, 105, issue 26: 134–48.

⁴⁷ A Digby, ‘The labour market and the continuity of social policy after 1834: the case of the eastern counties’, Econ. Hist. Rev., 1975, 2nd series, 28: 69–83; Idem, The Poor Law in nineteenth-century England and Wales, London, Historical Association, 1982.

⁴⁸ T Laqueur, ‘Bodies, death and pauper funerals’, Representations, 1983, 1: 109–31. These conventions are also discussed in R Richardson, ‘A dissection of the Anatomy Acts’, Studies in Lab. Hist., 1976, 1: 8–11; M Wheeler, Death and the future life in Victorian literature and theology, Cambridge University Press, 1990; P Jalland, Death in the Victorian family, Oxford University Press, 1996.

⁴⁹ PRO, MH74/11, A Macalister to J Pickering Pick, memo, 9 Oct. 1896.

⁵⁰ This under-rated legislation is briefly discussed in D Englander, Poverty and Poor Law reform in Britain, 1834–1914: from Chadwick to Booth, London, Longman, 1998, p. 25.

⁵¹ Northamptonshire Record Office (hereafter NRO), PL2/12, Brixworth Poor Law Union register of deaths, 1837–1895. These were checked against interment records held at Brixworth parish church. I am indebted to the present incumbent, Rev. Watson, for his assistance in reconstituting these burial records.

⁵² This facet of the late-Victorian Poor Law is much under studied, see Hurren's articles note 46 above.

⁵³ The election of lady guardians is outlined in P Hollis, Ladies elect: women in English local government, 1865–1914, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987; however, conventional views of female administration are being challenged, see S A King, Born to intellectual freedom out of material security: Mary Haslam and the Bolton Union, 1870–1914, Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2004.

⁵⁴ MP, memo from Claude Douglas, New Walk, Leicester, 7 Oct. 1897, to Downing anatomy school.

⁵⁵ MP, A Keith, the London Hospital medical school, University College London, to Prof. Macalister, 6 May 1903.

⁵⁶ MP, see, for example, 1912 notes on “old and possibly new sources of bodies” by A Macalister.

⁵⁷ Richardson, op. cit., note 4 above, p. 247.

⁵⁸ D Thomson, ‘Workhouse to nursing home: residential care of elderly people in England since 1840’, Ageing and Society, 1983, 3: 43–69.

⁵⁹ Rose, op. cit., note 41 above, pp. 50–70, argues women were less harshly treated on the whole and benefited from the move to boarding out vulnerable paupers post-1870.

⁶⁰ P Bury, The college of Corpus Christi and of the Blessed Virgin Mary: a history from 1822–1952, Cambridge University Press, 1952, pp. 278–89.

⁶¹ I am grateful to the staff at Cambridgeshire Record Office who helped me plot the post-1885 Downing site and its surrounding street network from maps in their collection.

⁶² Although Richardson (op. cit., note 4 above, pp. 3–30) stresses the reluctance of the poor to sell children's bodies because of moral and religious dilemmas, financial desperation may have forced some families to sell their dead infants. Possibly, a lack of residential property in that area facilitated covert sales. Selling a baby's cadaver outside its neighbourhood decreased the chances of surveillance by the community, and may have been more desirable than approaching a local intermediary to arrange the transaction. Evidence exists in letters from paupers among the Estcourt Papers, Gloucestershire Record Office, that they were anxious to avoid neighbourhood gossip and occasionally acted in this manner. This was not just a British phenomenon, as Frank McCourt's childhood memoir, Angela's Ashes, London, Penguin, 1994, p. 41, reveals. He recounts how his father sold his sister Margaret, after she died just seven weeks old, direct to anatomists for dissection in 1940s America. This prevented her being buried in consecrated ground, a bitter, but necessary, financial transaction for his Irish Roman Catholic mother. Similarly, Sappol, op. cit., note 9 above, pp. 39–43, reveals that it was common in nineteenth-century America to pose for a photoportrait with a deceased infant before it was handed over to anatomists. The visual representation was designed to console the family with a wholesome image, because the child's remains were to be dissected and dismembered with consent. The fact that a baby-farm existed in the Downing area cannot be discounted, but no evidence has come to light. However, since, as Hamrighaus explains, children were seldom abandoned but were sent to baby-farms by middle-class families, it seems unlikely that the data represent sales of the bodies of lost and unwanted children only. R E Hamrighaus, ‘Wolves in women's clothing: baby farming and the British Medical Journal, 1860–72’, J. Fam. Hist., 2001, 26: 350–72.

⁶³ MP, cadaver invoices, 1901–2.

⁶⁴ MP, W H Ekins, superintendent Three Counties Asylum, to Dr Barclay-Smith, Cambridge anatomical teaching school, 2 Oct. 1912.

⁶⁵ B Pippard, ‘Thomson, Rutherford and atomic physics at Cambridge’, in P Harman and S Mitton (eds), Cambridge scientific minds, Cambridge University Press, 2002, ch. 11, pp. 155–72, points out that experiments were being carried out in the Cavendish Laboratory on the conduction of electricity on cadavers. It was here in 1895 that scientists announced the discovery of X-rays and in 1896 radioactivity. Cadavers seem to have been passed on from the anatomy department for these research purposes. Though why they preferred young research material is not clear.

⁶⁶ Weatherall, Gentlemen, scientists and doctors, op. cit., note 7 above, pp. 104–8, discusses the close relationships that developed between science (specifically embryology and physiology) and anatomy at Cambridge. He explains that human anatomy by the mid-1880s found itself competing with new branches of clinical medicine. It responded by developing interdependent ties with its competitors, which facilitated a culture of shared research material.

⁶⁷ Known as the Strangeways Laboratory, details of its tissue culture work can be researched at the Wellcome Library, Archives and Manuscripts, SA/SRL, Strangeway papers, 1900–1990 (contains also papers of and on T S P Strangeways 1886–1926); Wellcome, PP/HBF, Dame Honor Fell papers, 1919–1988.

⁶⁸ Two methodological caveats are worth noting. First, the figures for Cambridge city centre should be viewed alongside those for Addenbrooke's Hospital. Post-1900 the burial register of St Benedict's records that most bodies listed as having died in a Cambridge city street had in fact “died in hospital” and not at home. For example, a pauper named Eliza Johnson aged forty-eight from New Street, Cambridge, was interred by the anatomy school on 13 Jan. 1910. A pencilled entry, “died in hospital” appears in the register beside her place of death. This was probably Addenbrooke's Hospital and she was doubtless a coroner's case. The Macalister archive indicates that such arrangements were common. These “died in hospital” cases have not been reallocated to the Addenbrooke's figures because we have no way of checking their accuracy. It means, however, that the Addenbrooke's figures are likely to be considerably under-estimated. Second, over time cadavers were procured from three sources in each location: workhouses, workhouse infirmaries and, by the 1920s, refurbished former workhouses (listed as Poor Law nursing homes). These have only been expressed as one location in Table 1 because all three categories were under the remit of the late-Victorian Poor Law.

⁶⁹ At this research stage it is difficult to ascertain whether the arrangements were between doctors and undertakers, rather than directly with families. The high numbers suggest various agencies may have been involved.

⁷⁰ Garrett, et al., op. cit., note 13 above, p. 355, discusses broad north/south demographic trends.

⁷¹ J M Eyler, ‘Poverty, disease, responsibility: Arthur Newsholme and the public health dilemmas of British Liberalism’, Milbank Q., 1989, 67: 109–26; idem, ‘The sick poor and the state: Arthur Newsholme on poverty, disease and responsibility’, in C Rosenberg and J Golden (eds), Framing disease: studies in cultural history, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1992, pp. 276–96; J M Eyler, Sir Arthur Newsholme and state medicine, 1885–1935, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Newsholme's epidemiological research during his tenure at Brighton as medical officer of health from 1888 (notably on tuberculosis, scarlet fever and diphtheria) demonstrates the complexities of central–local welfare relations in late-Victorian England. New health policies sponsored by the Local Government Board often ran contrary to its own desire to keep poor relief costs low, exemplified by the crusade against outdoor relief. See E T Hurren, ‘Diphtheria debates: the challenge of the crusade against outdoor relief to public health improvements in late-Victorian England, 1870–1900’, forthcoming, copy at University College Northampton. These welfare policy tensions benefited anatomists.

⁷² Demographic trends were overturned by 1911, see Garrett, et al., op. cit., note 13 above, p. 362.

⁷³ MP, D G Thomson, medical superintendent, Norfolk County Asylum, to Dr Barclay-Smith, Cambridge anatomical school, 16 Sept. 1912, and follow up letter, 4 Oct. 1912.

⁷⁴ MP, A Boyle, superintendent Hertfordshire County Asylum, to Dr Barclay-Smith, Cambridge anatomical school, 9 Oct. 1912.

⁷⁵ Although Reading, Southampton and Whitechapel sold only a few cadavers to the Cambridge anatomy school, they were the chief suppliers of the Oxford anatomy school. It was the surplus which was sold to Cambridge. See Oxford City Council Archives, Cemetery Committee Books 1870–1900, Oxford Record Office; E T Hurren, ‘The business of anatomy: Oxford anatomical school and its pauper cadaver trafficking, 1870–1914’, work in progress paper read at University College Northampton.

⁷⁶ This point is made forcibly in the conclusion of S A King, Poverty and welfare in England, 1700–1850: a regional perspective, Manchester University Press, 2000; and Hurren's thesis on the late-nineteenth-century experience, op. cit., note 8 above.

⁷⁷A regional history of the railways of Great Britain, vol. 5: The eastern counties by D I Gordon, Newton Abbott, David and Charles, 1968, chs 5 and 6 outline Cambridge main and branch-line links.

⁷⁸ See, for example, M A Crowther, The workhouse system, 1834–1929, London, Methuen, 1983; Pickstone, op. cit., note 7 above; S Cherry, Medical services and the hospitals in Britain, 1860–1939, Cambridge University Press, 1986; F F S Driver, ‘The English bastille: dimensions of the workhouse system, 1834–1884’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1988; G Bock and P Thane (eds), Maternity and gender politics: women and the rise of the European welfare states, 1880s–1950s, London, Routledge, 1991; H Hendrick, Child welfare: England, 1872–1989, London, Routledge, 1994; F Crompton, Workhouse children, Thrupp, Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 1997.

⁷⁹ Richardson, op. cit., note 4 above, pp. 409–28.

⁸⁰ E T Hurren, ‘Late-Victorian “Alder Heys”: Why have we failed to learn the historical lessons about medical research?’, May 2003, www.historyandpolicy.org new History Policy Internet journal edited by M Daunton and S Szreter, St John's College, Cambridge, launched at the Institute of Historical Research, May 2002, copy available at University College Northampton.