lege of Surgeons, and members of the Court desirous of being
present, with Messrs. Clift (senior and junior), Belfour, and myself. On
extraordinary occasions visitors were admitted by special favour. The
bodies would then be stripped, and the clothes removed by Calcraft as his
valuable perquisites, which, with the fatal rope, were afterwards
exhibited to the morbidly curious, at so much per head, at some favoured
public-house. It was the duty of the City Marshal to be present to see the
body 'anatomised,' as the Act of Parliament had it. A crucial incision in
the chest was enough to satisfy the important City functionary above
referred to, and he would soon beat a hasty retreat, on his gaily-decked
charger, to report the due execution of his duty. These experiments
concluded, the body would be stitched up, and Pearson, an old museum
attendant, would remove it in a light cart to the hospital, to which it
was intended to present it for dissection."

* * * * *

These bodies of murderers were the only ones which could be legally used
for dissection; it is therefore obvious that the number was quite
insufficient for the wants of the Metropolitan Schools, and the teachers
were thus forced to obtain a supply from other sources.

It was strongly urged, but urged in vain, that the whole difficulty would
disappear if a short Act were passed, doing away with the dissection of
murderers, and enacting that the bodies of all unknown persons who died in
workhouses or hospitals, without friends, should be handed over, under
proper control, to the different teachers of anatomy. That these would be
sufficient was afterwards made clear by the Committee on Anatomy.[9] In
their Report it is stated that the returns obtained from 127 of the
parishes situate in London, Westminster, and Southwark, or their immediate
vicinity, showed that out of 3744 persons who died in the workhouses of
these parishes in the year 1827, 3103 were buried at the parish expense,
and that of these about 1108 were not attended to their graves by any
relations. The number of bodies obtained from this source would have
exceeded those supplied by the resurrection-men, and would have been
adequate for the wants of the London Schools.

The newspapers of the day contain many proposed solutions of the
difficulty. One correspondent gravely suggested that as prostitutes had,
by their bodies during life, been engaged in corrupting mankind, it w