Medicine in the Nineteenth Century

Page
3

The outcry over Burke and Hare led in 1832 to the passage by Parliament of the Anatomy Act. This stipulated that the bodies of those maintained by the state – the very poor who lived in workhouses – became the property of the anatomists after death, so long as they were not claimed by a relative within 48 hours. An Inspector of Anatomy, working for the Home Office, was appointed to administer the act. (more on that soon…)

Slide 18

Progress

Strides were being made not only in medical anatomy and physiology but also in pharmacology. Among the drugs isolated, concocted, or discovered between 1800 and 1840 were morphine, quinine, atropine, digitalis, codeine, and iodine. The nineteenth century was also a notable period in the identification, classification, and description of diseases.

Slide 19

Scarlet fever was clinically distinguished from diphtheria, syphilis from gonorrhoea, typhoid from typhus. The work of the great French physiologist Claude Bernard on the digestion established the connection between diabetes and glucose in the blood. The inventor of the stethoscope, R.-T.-H. Laënnec, wrote an important treatise in 1823 that first clearly distinguished such diseases as pleurisy, emphysema, bronchitis, and pneumonia.

Slide 20

The British public followed with a keen interest these developments which seemed to promise a healthy nation. And yet, in looking around them, they could clearly see that the promise was far from being realized. In actual practice all the researchers, family physicians, apothecaries and surgeons -- the whole of the medical profession -- provided scant help in curing those diseases of which Victorians had been made so vividly aware.

Slide 21

Burke and Hare

There were plenty of trainee surgeons, but they had nothing to train on. It was possible to get hold of bodies in the 18th century, but public executions provided the only legitimate source of corpses, and it was not easy for students of anatomy to claim the bodies.

Slide 22

The family of the condemned man would usually try to get the body back as soon as possible, since in some cases it was possible to revive a hanged man. In any case, there remained a strong belief that in order to stand a chance of redemption, a corpse should be left intact. Dissection was equivalent to damnation.

Slide 23

There were simply not enough bodies supplied by the hangman's gallows to meet demand. Elsewhere in Europe, anatomy schools were allowed to take bodies from poor hospitals. In Britain, surgeons had to take more extreme measures.