Addresses and other papers / by William Williams Keen.

  • William Williams Keen
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Addresses and other papers / by William Williams Keen. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tached, was added to the noblest anatomical collection in Britain.* The bodies were generally left in the night in bags, and this gave them occasionally a chance too good to be lost. They bagged drunken men on the street and delivered them as subjects, sometimes to their great astonishment, at others with their connivance. Mr. Clift, the curator of the Hun¬ terian Museum, was once thus waked up while a student with John Hunter, and two bags delivered and paid for on the spot. The men had gone but a few steps when Mr. Clift perceived the swindle, and, though in his night-clothes, he ran after them, collared the principal, and said to him, “ You’ve left me a live man.” “I know it,” said the man, shaking off his hold and escaping with the money; “ you can kill him when you want him.”f But such a degrading occupation necessarily debased the men to the level of committing any crime. The increasing number of students leading to a growing demand for subjects, and the increased vigilance of the police adding to the difficulty of procuring them, the fears of medical men that murder would be resorted to were soon realized. In 1827 the University of Edinburgh, with nine hundred students in its class, for the first time made dissection compulsory, and thus greatly stimu¬ lated the demand. London, Liverpool, and Dublin all in turn supplied the want, but the prices obtained soon gave rise to the horrible crimes of Bishop,J in London, and William * These details, and many others equally interesting and amusing, may be found in the account of the Resurrectionists, in the Life of Sir Astley Cooper, vol. i, pp. 334-448, and in Lonsdale’s Life of Robert Knox, the Anatomist, pp. 47-116. The comic side of the subject may be seen in Hood’s Jack Hall (Jackal), in his Whims and Oddities. t The late Prof. S. H. Dickson informed me that he had this not un¬ common “Joe Miller ” of the present day from Mr. Clift personally. t I found this man’s crimes alluded to several times in the Lancet, 1832-33, vol. i, pp. 244, 341, 568, when first preparing this lecture; but, notwithstanding the most thorough search, I was unable to obtain any of