The Italian Boy (29 page)

Secrecy such as Sir Astley’s tended to provoke suspicion rather than deflect it. Mysterious attics, rooms with opaque windows, creatures pickled in bottles, body parts in cooking pots, disappearances, strange goings-on after dark: it was the stuff of gothic fiction and fairy tales. A physician, Dr. James Johnson, used another gothic trope when he wrote that in comparison with London hospitals “the cells of the Spanish Inquisition were not sealed up from public observation with a much stricter secresy.”
³⁴
But surgeon George Guthrie was having none of this, and in an open letter to the home secretary he claimed that dissection and the teaching of anatomy involved no secrecy or need for circumspection whatsoever: “The doors of every dissecting-room in London are always open, there is nobody to watch them, they swing backwards and forwards on a pulley weight, they may shut of themselves, in case anybody leaves them open; every man may walk in and walk out wherever he pleases; many persons do, but no one gives himself any concern about what is going on. The neighbors care nothing about it, and unless, from some accident, the place becomes offensive, no one interferes; although the resurrection men, for their own purposes, sometimes endeavor to excite a little commotion.… In London … no one knows or cares what is going on, unless he is interested in it.”
³⁵

Guthrie’s diagnosis of metropolitan apathy was in keeping with the growing view that Londoners were self-absorbed and unobservant, though it clashed with the simultaneously increasing wariness of the Mob, which dictated a great deal of establishment behavior. But London street protest in these years is notable for the fact that it never truly evolved into systematic revolt. Insulting or striking a constable who was arresting a beggar was a familiar enough rumpus; setting up a hue and cry when a graveyard was discovered to have been plundered by resurrectionists was not unusual. But public outcry at the defeat of the Reform Bill—what had that amounted to in London? One abandoned mass meeting at the bill’s second failure to pass; early closing for the shops of the West End; a few Tory windows put out; smaller meetings and marches here and there. Five hundred Metropolitan Police officers lined Whitehall and Old Palace Yard when Parliament reconvened after the bill had been rejected by the Lords in October 1831: a huge crowd jeered the carriages of the anti-Reform members and cheered the supporters of the bill. The Mob laughed when they realized they should have been jeering, not cheering, Lord Ellenborough. A piece of orange was thrown at the anti-Reform duke of Wellington.
³⁶
No soldiers were needed, no firearms. Six months earlier, demonstrators had marched through town and smashed windows where no light was showing on the night of the General Illumination; when they reached Apsley House—Wellington’s London home, at the southern end of Park Lane—and had commenced stoning, they were informed that the duchess of Wellington had died and was lying in state within. The Mob withdrew immediately as a mark of respect.
³⁷
There was nothing here to compare to London’s last mass civil action, the Gordon Riots of 1780; only No-Popery seemed to galvanize Londoners, who had shown atypical vigor in the Puritan/Parliamentarian cause during the English Civil War. In the Reform era, the capital’s citizens failed to match the organized, planned mass protests in other British cities and the countryside.

“No one knows or cares what is going on,” said Guthrie, who in his letter went on to state his belief that there was far less popular opposition to becoming a Subject than was generally supposed. “Few individuals really care much what becomes of their bodies after they are dead,” he claimed, adding that he had heard the poor in hospital wards laughing and joking about the idea of their bodies being lectured over or being preserved in bottles. But his assertion that there was nothing secretive about hospital dissecting rooms is hard to fathom. That the doors were not closed is not proof that anyone other than medical men ever passed through them. And against Guthrie must be set the rest of London’s teachers, who certainly acted as though there was very good reason to be cautious. The more secret, the better; the less the public knew, the quicker science could advance.

*   *   *

The Italian Boy hearings
were shining an uncomfortably bright light on the mysteries of the dissecting room. If, as Guthrie claimed, anyone could easily penetrate London’s anatomical theaters, it was quite clear that George Rowland Minshull and other justices had never taken advantage of that freedom. A number of procedural niceties from London’s dissecting rooms were revealed as the evidence against Bishop, Williams, and May piled up: the hampers left by hospital railings for resurrectionists to use; the convivial relationships between the porters and Bishop, May, and Shields; the small-change tips given to porters by resurrectionists; the fact that there was, in October and November 1831, a body glut in London; the preference of anatomists for adult male corpses rather than female; and the acceptability of children in the absence of either.

Such revelations were not likely to inspire confidence in the medical profession. A tailor named West said he had seen strange goings-on in his neighborhood. West lived close by an anatomical theater “near to Golden Square.” (It was not named and could have been one of several in the Soho area.)
³⁸
He claimed that three or four days before the arrests at King’s College, he had seen Bishop and Williams bring to the theater the body of a boy “supposed to be about ten.” It seems curious that Bishop and Williams would allow themselves to be spotted carrying about a corpse so badly wrapped that an onlooker could describe its gender and age. The next day, Superintendent Thomas called on the theater in question and was told that Bishop had indeed sold to the surgeon there a child—though a three-year-old, not a ten-year-old—along with the corpse of a fifty-year-old woman.

The official connivance in the trafficking of corpses could not withstand such direct evidence of doctors’ participation. The testimony of King’s College porter William Hill with regard to the events of Saturday, 5 November, was similarly disturbing.

Hill
: “The prisoners then asked me for the money.”

Minshull:
“Do you mean the price of the body?”

Hill:
“Yes.”

Minshull:
“Did you not inquire of the men how they got possession of a body so fresh as they described?”

Hill:
“No. We never ask that question. We are not in the habit of doing so.”

Hill had given a similar answer to the Covent Garden coroner: “I did not ask them how they got the body because I never ask such a question. It is not likely they would have answered me truly if I did.”

So far, so good: only the porters had besmirched themselves, and the only anatomist placed in an awkward position had been the unnamed Golden Square private tutor. But an error in the proceedings now forced a hospital surgeon to come forward. John Hilton (nicknamed “Anatomical John” since he was rarely out of the dissecting room and would always do “an inch or so” of dissecting before starting work in the morning) was demonstrator of anatomy at Guy’s.
³⁹
He wrote to the
Times
on 30 November: “Through the medium of your journal and some others, a most unfounded report prevails respecting the teachers of anatomy of Guy’s Hospital having sanctioned an easy disposal of any subject which might have been offered to them for dissection by the prisoner Bishop. It was stated at Bow Street that a female had been recently purchased by us from him. As you have participated in this mistake by giving circulation to it, I trust, in justice to the school, you will insert the following remarks in reply not only to this point, but as a general refutation to several most unmerited errors, at any rate as regards the dissecting-room to which I am attached. Allow me to assure you not one subject of any kind has been purchased of Bishop since October 19th 1829. The last boy dissected was in March 1831, and no bodies were obtained during the past summer of any person, from April 15 to October. Lastly,… detached portions of the body have never been purchased for our dissecting-rooms, although it may be the practice at other schools.”

Hilton’s protestations were disingenuous. Guy’s dissecting-room porter, James Davis, had already admitted at Bow Street that he had bought two corpses from James May on the second or third of November, and at the Old Bailey he would repeat this evidence. So while no Subject had been bought between April and October—which was, in any case, the summer recess—purchasing had resumed by early November. Even more compromising was the reported exchange between Davis and May when the body snatcher turned up on the evening of Friday, 4 November, with Bishop and Williams—a friendly, chatty conversation that made it clear how cordial such relationships could be.

But Anatomical John was correct about the error. The source of the mistake was Superintendent Thomas, who had told Minshull in open court that he had ascertained that the bodies of two women had been sold to Guy’s Hospital. What Thomas had meant to say was “Grainger’s,” not “Guy’s.” Nevertheless, Guy’s and missing women were now linked in the minds of newspaper readers, and Hilton’s efforts to disengage them looked like trying just a little too hard.

Richard Grainger of the Webb Street School was also tying himself in knots. With a citywide panic aroused, the condition of Subjects being brought into dissecting rooms by resurrectionists was under scrutiny, and one of Grainger’s own pupils had gone to the magistrates when the corpse of a forty-year-old man with a head injury turned up at Webb Street. Grainger came forward to explain that this was a disinterred convict who had died on the Woolwich Marshes. The body had been caked in mud and the injury had, Grainger believed, occurred when the body was pulled from the grave. The
Morning Advertiser
reported

that in consequence of the misstatements which had appeared in some of the public journals, respecting the connection of the Webb Street School with Bishop and his gang, he was extremely anxious to remove an unfavourable impression which had been in the minds of many on the subject. In the first place, the body of the unfortunate Italian boy was not brought to Webb Street, nor was it ever seen by Appleton, the porter. Bishop merely called to inquire if a Subject would be purchased, and was answered that none was wanted. Secondly, that with the exception of one body, bought in October, no Subjects had been received from Bishop and Williams in two years. Thirdly, that on its being known that Bishop and his vile associates were apprehended on the charge of having murdered the Italian boy, information was given by Mr Pilcher, one of the lecturers, to Mr Thomas, the superintendent of police, of the fact that those men had brought the body of a female to Webb Street early in October. The circumstance of Mr Thomas having omitted to mention this fact, when he communicated Shields’s confession, although he acknowledged it at Bow Street on Thursday last, has led the public to suppose that the lecturers in Webb Street had concealed this important circumstance, when, in point of fact, they had done everything in their power to assist the cause of justice.… The circumstance of bodies being occasionally stolen from dead houses before interment, and disposed of for dissection, no suspicion was excited in Appleton’s mind by the state of the body brought early in October.
⁴⁰

This denial only served to underline Webb Street’s involvement in flesh trading and suggests that the public had in some way been making known its disapproval of the school’s anatomists.

*   *   *

One surgeon was covering himself
with glory in this affair. Richard Partridge would distinguish himself in little else during the rest of his career (one epitaph would claim “he was best operating on a body that was already a corpse”), but he would be credited with uncovering the Case of the London Burkers.
⁴¹
He had arrived in London from Birmingham four years earlier and had studied under John Abernethy at St. Bartholomew’s. He was just twenty-seven when he was appointed King’s first demonstrator of anatomy. He dressed in dandyish fashion—highly polished boots, beautifully tailored trousers—and drove a very smart coach and horses. He was no Bat, but—like so many other self-made men of the nineteenth century—he quickly adopted the condescension and waggishness of the gentleman born. He told his class one morning that his carriage had just run over “a little street urchin” but that the child had jumped straight up and made a rude gesture to him. “Really, you cannot break the bones of these street arabs—they’re so elastic!” he joked.
⁴²
Confidential details about colleagues and off-color jokes about the corpses in front of him punctuated his lectures. (Partridge was not alone in this facetiousness: Joseph Carpue claimed in classes to have known some of the Subjects that ended up on his dissecting table. “That skeleton is one of the prettiest girls I ever saw,” he once told his students.)