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.

    48/486 (page 22)
    The Warburton anatomy bill accordingly was enacted Au¬ gust 1, 1832, giving all unclaimed bodies, under proper regu¬ lations, to the various schools. This has been the model for all subsequent acts, our own passed but six years ago among them. For several years there were loud complaints as to its operation, but experience gradually removed its difficul¬ ties, and now it supplies all the schools well, and at moderate prices. The price in Edinburgh at present is $3 per part.* Our own act is suffering the same trial. Obstinacy and kna¬ very are combined to defeat it, but I do not doubt that in the end it will gain the victory, and afford us an ample supply worthy of a great medical centre.f Not only, however, do we have an immense advantage in these days over the so-called good old times in the facility of obtaining material, but also our means of pursuing prac¬ tical anatomy are vastly more perfect and more prolific. In the Museum of the Royal College of Physicians the cu¬ rious observer will notice “six tablets or boards upon which are spread the different nerves and blood-vessels, carefully dissected,” removed from the body and dried. “In one of them the semilunar valves of the aorta are distinctly to be seen.”J Such are the, to us, wretched preparations with which Harvey illustrated his lectures on the circulation, and they were probably used before his royal patron when he demonstrated his wonderful discovery to Charles I. He * Really the price of a “part” in Edinburgh is but 6.s. ($1.50), but the body is divided into ten parts—two each to the head, the thorax, and the abdomen, and one to each of the four extremities. The body lies on its back for three days to give time to have the thorax and abdomen opened and examined, and the perineum dissected; then on its belly, for dissec¬ tion of the muscles of the back and then of the spinal cord. Each man next removes his own extremity, and dissects it separately. f See foot note page 14. J Harlan’s Gannal’s Hist, of Embalming, p. 258, and the Gold-headed Cane, pp. 127, 128. Similiar preparations are in the College of Surgeons, purchased in Padua, by John Evelyn, made by Fabritius Bartoletus, then Veslengius’s assistant, and afterwards physician to the King of Poland.