The Italian Boy (26 page)

Thomas had got much of his information from Bethnal Green pub goers. They told him that on the night of the eighth, Fanny had been seen drinking porter with two men in a public house called the London Apprentice, in Old Street, near Nova Scotia Gardens. Concerned, they decided to keep an eye on Fanny—the conversation they had overheard between the trio had seemed rather odd to them. When Bishop, Williams, and Fanny left the London Apprentice, the concerned drinkers followed them and watched as Bishop and Williams persuaded Fanny to come to another public house, the Feathers, just behind Shoreditch Church. There, they bought her some mixed spirits and beer called “hot,” after which Fanny seemed to be incapacitated and was last seen with her arms linked in those of Bishop and Williams, staggering in the direction of Nova Scotia Gardens.

Furthermore—quite a coup this—Thomas announced that he now had reason to believe that Fanny had died by drowning: he had found her shawl at the bottom of the well in Bishop’s garden; this well consisted of a wooden barrel sunk into a hole in the ground, and he wondered whether the victims were told to bend down and drink from the well and were then pushed in headfirst. He had learned that the vessels of Fanny Pigburn’s heart had been engorged, which, as he understood it, was generally the result of drowning—the medical gentlemen present would correct him if he was wrong.

TEN

A Horrid System

The medical men had been keeping a low profile since their original announcement that the King’s College corpse had been a victim of murder; but no group was watching the unfolding events with more interest. Herbert Mayo, professor of anatomy at King’s College, and his junior colleague Richard Partridge, “demonstrator,” or lecturer, in anatomy, both had reason to take particular notice of the Italian Boy case. At thirty-six, Mayo had established a formidable reputation as an anatomist, having been made house surgeon at Middlesex Hospital at the age of twenty-two, in the same year that he published his
Anatomical and Physiological Commentaries,
in which he revealed his discovery of the functions of individual facial nerves. A bitter quarrel followed publication, with Mayo’s former teacher, Sir Charles Bell, claiming it was his own unattributed groundwork that had made Mayo’s discoveries possible. Mayo replied that the opposite was true, that Bell’s work had been based on research by Mayo. The dispute became one of the most famous medical wrangles of the day, and those who mulled it over later in the century tended to concur that most of the glory should have been Mayo’s. (Had the junior man won his argument, a temporary paralysis of the face might today be referred to as Mayo’s palsy.)

Mayo had been chosen as King’s College’s first professor of anatomy—properly, professor of morbid anatomy and physiology—just as his own private school and anatomical theater in Great Windmill Street, Soho, was going into decline.
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But, like most of his peers, Mayo was not quite so acute in the new field of forensic medicine. King’s College (which had officially opened in October 1831, just one month before Bishop, Williams, May, and Shields made their troubling delivery to its dissecting rooms) had been founded as a response to the new University College—“the godless institution of Gower Street,” as its critics called it. University College had been refused a royal charter since no religious instruction was given there and Catholics, Jews, and Dissenters were allowed to take courses. King’s, by contrast, was built on Crown land and reeked of Anglican religiosity; its founder (Rev. George D’Oyly) was a future chaplain to the archbishop of Canterbury; its first principal (Rev. William Otter) would soon be made bishop of Chichester. Present at the inaugural meeting of the council of King’s College in June 1828 were George IV (patron), the duke of Wellington (governor), and three archbishops and seven bishops, while the governors of the medical school included two baronets. The bishop of London’s address at King’s opening ceremony was entitled “The Duty of Combining Religious Instruction with Intellectual Culture.” The lower orders were not overlooked: a (never observed) rule in King’s constitution stated that “post-mortems must not be performed at such times as would interfere with the presence of the hospital porters at divine service in the chapel.”
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The college, according to its charter, would attract those whose ambition for their sons was “to fix in their minds the true principles of morality.” Perhaps it was this kind of earnestness that urged Partridge and his students to look further into the matter of the too fresh corpse that Bishop, Williams, May, and Shields had delivered and so make King’s stand apart from other, conniving medical schools. Or perhaps the new school was receiving so steady a supply of bodies from St. Clement Danes workhouse just across the Strand in Portugal Street that it felt secure enough to raise the alarm when a suspect Subject turned up; though King’s was attached to no hospital, the workhouse provided plenty of useful case studies.

The medical journal the
Lancet
missed no chance to pillory King’s for its ultraconservatism. Refusing to defer to King’s royal links, the journal nicknamed it Strand Lane College, and the Church and Tory College in the Strand, while the cap and gown that King’s students were required to wear were, it said, “disgusting mummeries.” Herbert Mayo was regularly mocked in the
Lancet
. Dubbed the Owl because he lectured with his eyes half closed, he was castigated for his “Cockney” accent, in a strangely snobbish attack (for a Radical publication) on his nongentry background, and a contributor pondered how very un–King’s College it was that Mayo had taken out advertisements in the newspapers to publicize his book
Observations on Injuries and Diseases of the Rectum
.
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Mayo was further criticized for the fact that upon joining King’s he had asked for (and received) the enormous sum of nine hundred pounds for his jars and bottles of interesting specimens (human parts showing rare pathological conditions, unusual animals, “monster” stillborn babies) that had been stored in the anatomical museum of the Great Windmill Street School.
⁴
The nine hundred pounds included a payment of three hundred pounds for “assistance,” which may or may not have been money to pay resurrectionists. Mayo was also taken to task for being a poor lecturer, with bad diction; a student complained to the
Lancet
about the Owl who “does not whoop with a clear voice.”
⁵

That Mayo’s lectures were hard to follow would have been of significance to Thomas Wakely, surgeon, founder of the
Lancet,
and, later, member of Parliament. The
Lancet
had been set up, in October 1823, to prod the medical establishment (mainly, but not solely, those men who ran the hospital-linked anatomy schools) into reforming itself. Wakely perceived the men in charge of the profession as mediocre, highly resistant to change, and, in certain cases, driven less by interest in science than by petty rivalries, indulging in rancorous feuds that could last for years. His name for them was “bats”—creatures that thrived in the dark, in the gloom of an aristocratic system of patronage that exhibited all the perceived corruption and skulduggery of the Hanoverian age. And now, many influential people believed, it was time for this age to end.

Herbert Mayo

To Wakely, nothing embodied the establishment more than the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and he labeled it a “selfish oligarchy,” even a “junta.”
⁶
The Royal College had been granted its charter in 1800, changing its name from the Company of Surgeons, the organization formed in 1745 when the surgeons broke from the medieval Barbers and Surgeons Company, thereby throwing off any connection with tonsure, shaving, and teeth pulling. Run by a small, self-selecting council of senior surgeons/anatomists, the Royal College was the only body entitled to grant qualifications in surgery in England; whoever wanted to qualify as a surgeon—and thereby become a member of the college—had to fulfill its requirements. And as of 1823, these requirements underwent a controversial change. Summer courses in anatomy, which were taught only at private schools, were delegitimized, and the sole acceptable lectures in surgery and anatomy were those given at London’s teaching hospitals (St. Thomas’s and Guy’s, known until 1826 as the United Hospitals; St. Bartholomew’s; and the London Hospital, in Whitechapel) or, later, at a university-linked institution such as King’s College’s medical school and, even later, the one at University College London. Before undergoing examination at the Royal College, a candidate had to produce certificates of attendance from one of these schools (and then cough up fees for the examiner). So, no matter how good the anatomy teaching at London’s various private schools—and much of it was said to be excellent, with Joshua Brookes, Edward Grainger, Joseph Carpue, and Edward Tuson reputed to have superior learning and technical skill—these courses would no longer count toward qualification.

Teaching standards were of particular concern to Thomas Wakely, since he believed that medical education was the field in which change was most urgently needed. Students paid fees directly to the teaching surgeon/anatomist; the more pupil revenues, the wealthier the institution. But, as Wakely revealed, pupils rarely got their money’s worth at the hospital schools. Teachers who did not turn up for lectures, who were too busy or too lazy to field questions, who refused even to acknowledge complaints, whose information was out of date or simply wrong, who would peremptorily shun or exclude any student—these were the men Wakely was out to shame.

Wakely’s views were not unusual within medical circles. Comparatively few autobiographies and reminiscences from these years are free from at least implicit criticism of senior surgeons and how they ran the medical profession. Joseph Carpue—founder of the Dean Street School of Anatomy, where John Bishop had tried to sell the fresh boy on 4 November—told the Parliamentary Select Committee on Medical Education that he was “disgusted” by the council of the Royal College of Surgeons: “I considered the council a select vestry, which did not like to let in any but the friends, allies and connections of their own body.”
⁷
Its exclusivity expressed itself in the college building: the council entered through the main entrance fronting Lincoln’s Inn Fields; mere members came and went by the back door, which opened onto filthy, tumbledown Portugal Street—the haunt of James May and site of the noxious, much-pillaged St. Clement Danes graveyard.

Quite apart from alleged poor teaching and social and familial exclusivity, hospital schools had two major drawbacks for the medical student: their courses were expensive and instruction stopped in April for five months. A pupil who wanted to study under England’s most famous surgeon, Sir Astley Cooper at Guy’s, would pay the baronet ten pounds and ten shillings for his course of lectures and a further ten pounds and ten shillings for his dissection course.
⁸
But for ten guineas total a pupil could, for instance, attend lectures and perform dissections at Joshua Brookes’s school in Blenheim Steps, in the West End.
⁹
Brookes was an outstanding anatomist and had founded his school in 1787, closing it down in 1826 because of ill health—he was by then sixty-seven and had worked for nearly forty years in typically appalling conditions: his school stank of rank meat because of his unique method of preserving Subjects by injecting them with potassium nitrate (which was more usually the method of extending the shelf life of ham and sausages) and filth was present on every floor of the school. (Such an environment was the norm in these pre–Florence Nightingale, pre–Joseph Lister days. Joseph Carpue was remembered as having dirt-encrusted hands and nostrils exuding snuff, no doubt placed there to keep out the stench; Edward Tuson’s Little Windmill Street School was said to be rat-ridden.)
¹⁰
The Brookesian Comparative Osteological Museum filled the two upper stories of the tall, narrow house in Blenheim Steps, and, with around six thousand specimens—including three elephants and a number of whales—it was said to rank second only to the famous collection amassed by celebrated eighteenth-century anatomist John Hunter; many of Brookes’s exhibits had been donated by his brother, who kept a small indoor zoo in a crumbling house in Exeter ’Change in the Strand.
¹¹
While it was debatable whether much of use could be learned from pickled oddities in jars, the Royal College used as one of its weapons against private schools the argument that since private schools did not have access to museums, their teaching was likely to be defective. In fact, the existence of the Brookesian collection and those of Sir Charles Bell and Herbert Mayo proved that private anatomists often had very good museums in the 1820s; but the Royal College and the hospital schools bought up the private museums (starting with the Hunterian collection as soon as the Royal College was formed), thereby making its original accusation become true in time.
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