An address to the British public, on the late horrible system of burking : containing an account of the methods hitherto adopted for supplying the anatomical schools with subjects : and suggestions for remedying the evil, &c. &c. &c. / by a practical anatomist.

Date:
1831
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An address to the British public, on the late horrible system of burking : containing an account of the methods hitherto adopted for supplying the anatomical schools with subjects : and suggestions for remedying the evil, &c. &c. &c. / by a practical anatomist. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    sider tlie circumstance of murderers being dissected gives the public any additional feelings of dislike to it, but because we consider it an absurdity which ought not to be allowed to exist in the nineteenth century. It in fact is ridiculous to suppose that a sentence of dissection after death, can be any mental punishment to a man whose faculties are so depraved, that, in defiance of every law, human and divine, he has deprived a fellow creature of life with deliberate and intentional violence. At the same time that we are anxious to have this law abolished as a punish- ment, we must confess we see no reason why the bodies of all persons who are executed, and of those convicted felons who die in prison, or on board the hulks, should not be forfeited to the crown, in just the same way as the rest of their. property, and so disposed of to the anatomist. If there is any class of society whose feelings are to be consulted less than others, surely these are the persons. They have outraged society by their crimes, let them therefore be made of as much use to the public as possible, by way of reparation. It may be objected, that we should be doing a violence to the feelings of their friends; we grant it: but the friends of criminals have no right to expect, in such a case, that their feelings should be allowed to stand in the way of the pubhc good. A large number of bodies would be thus obtained, but. yet the supply woYild be very far from sufficient. We would therefore propose, in the next place, that the bodies of all suicides upon which the coroner's jury have returned a verdict of felo de se^' should also become the property of the public, and be sold for the purpose of dissection. To this we think no one will dissent, when it is considered, that until very lately the bodies of these unfortunate people were buried with every mark of contempt and abhorrence in the public high-road, and are even to this day denied christian burial. By this a few more subjects B
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