Dying for Victorian Medicine ― English Anatomy and its Trade in the Dead Poor, c. 1834 - 1929

The 19th century business of anatomy was lucrative. In a Victorian underworld commercial body dealers bought dead paupers from asylums, infirmaries and workhouses. They sold the nameless and friendless on to teaching hospitals and medical students for dissection. Corpses travelled in dead boxes on railway trains to get fresh cadavers quickly to trainee doctors; others were bought in the street where they died. For the first time, all the suppliers paid in petty cash along this human supply chain are rediscovered, and their financial profiteering in bodies and body parts. Heart-rendering human stories lost in the archives are brought back to life. We encounter servants, prostitutes, and the labouring poor, down on their financial luck, who supplied the dissection table. Dying for Victorian Medicine celebrates the contribution of thousands of forgotten human faces who lived and died in abject poverty, and in so doing, created a better medical future for everyone today.

Dr Elizabeth Hurren is Reader in the Medical Humanities at the University of Leicester, UK. She is a leading international expert on the history of anatomy and the body, poverty and welfare.