Anatomy laws versus body-snatching.

  • Thomas Dwight
Date:
[1896]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Anatomy laws versus body-snatching. 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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    years, not a single body has been received by tbe anatomical depart- ment for which. I am not ready to give an account. By such a course, all reasonable opposition is obviated. There is no wrong to the living, no insult to the dead, and the needs of science are met. It is curious to observe that everywhere there seems to have been a greater readiness to have dissection practised surreptitiously than to put it on a solid legal basis. Other countries have passed beyond this stage : we are still struggling with it. While our legislatures will not do what is imperative for anatomy, they wink at the disgusting trade in the dead, at the fact of corpses being sent about the country in boxes and barrels, to be finally thrown away as refuse. Our system is faulty, as regards humanity on the one hand, and education on the other. While I consider it a debasing superstition to hold that dissection is an injury to the dead, I do not consider it one to say that the body should be decently treated, and that the grave should be rendered inviolable. Humanity demands that the feelings of near relatives, poor or rich, should be respected. Enlightenment demands that not a single unclaimed body that is needed for education should be lost. These demands are not antagonistic: on the contrary, the most perfect solution of the problem secures both. This solution requires that the law be imperative; leaving officials no discretion, but directing them to give to the schools, under penalty, all the bodies that properly belong to them. In freeing officials from responsibility, it protects them from attack. Wise and strict regulations should prevent the suiTcnder of any corpse without due inquiry. The law should likewise demand bonds from the schools for the due observance of the above-mentioned rules for care and burial. Finally, all trading in bodies should be punished with the greatest severity, the penalty being imprisonment without the alternative of a fine. Till the law does all that it should for medicine, in many places the grave will be unsafe; some new horror will disgrace both science and our law-givers. The demands of medical education are both so just and so imperative that they must not longer be neglected. The cry of humanity, that no wrong be done, is equally urgent. We cannot hope that .superstition and prejudice will readily die out; but the intelligent community must rise above them. Till this question has been fairly met, we cannot boast that our civilization equals that of Europe. Thomas Dwight.
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