This important new exploration of the Victorian anatomy trade likens the history of anatomy to a dry stone wall whose crevices are packed with documents relating to the dispossessed poor. Elizabeth Hurren excavates these cracks and submits their contents to forensic historical scrutiny. The book is divided into seven chapters detailing the anatomy trade in St Bartholomew's Hospital, Cambridge, Oxford and Manchester. Chapter one revisits the Anatomy Act of 1832, whose impact is perceived as penalising the vulnerable in death for the crime of poverty. The Act was passed to stop the crime of bodysnatching and its intentions and impact are explored, enriched by an account of the trial of workhouse master Albert Feist who contravened the Act by trading corpses for profit. Chapter two explores Victorian death and dying. Hurren reviews historical literature on ‘pauper funerals’, compares these with ‘anatomy burials’ after dissection, and shows how the Poor Law and Anatomy Act worked in conjunction. She sheds light on how a death could throw a pauper family into financial crisis. Chapter three puts this legislation into context by taking the reader into the dissection room itself, and provides an overview of medical education in general and anatomical training in particular in the nineteenth century. The aim of the body trade was to match supply to medical student numbers, but this unpalatable if lucrative business was buffeted by local and national politics.

Chapter four looks at the trade at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London. Many of the destitute and numerous former prostitutes died near the hospital. The street geography of body transactions is analysed, and the supply chains across London and the provinces are detailed. Trends in this shady business followed policy developments, and these are traced over time. Professor Macalister at Cambridge, described in chapter five, devoted his working life to medical education and much of his effort was devoted to a round of negotiating anatomy supply deals. This chapter explores the trade at Cambridge as Macalister came under pressure to supply cadavers and increase student numbers in the face of plummeting rents to University colleges in a period of agricultural recession. Corpses were brought in by the railway from rural districts and the poorest parts of the city. Chapter six looks into the anatomy business at Oxford University, where the economy of supply was small scale. An acrimonious dispute with the local coroner contributed to the failure of the trade in the city. The final case study of the book is that of Manchester, which explores lost pauper lives harvested from one main local workhouse source of supply. The book concludes with a review of its insights from this new research into pauper archives, and a look to the future of the body trade.

This book is written for the forensic historian, if such an animal exists, and as such it succeeds admirably. The forensic descriptions of anatomical dissection may owe more to a historian's lurid imagination than to mortuary reality, but nonetheless they add flavour. The sympathies expressed by Hurren are by her own admission very much with the paupers being dissected, and little attention is paid to any laudable aims of the medical profession. Consent for post mortem dissection is always under public scrutiny. This thoughtful and thought-provoking book shows us how the Victorian poor laid some foundation stones along the path of progress, however desperately and unwillingly.