Resurrectionist

HISTORICAL NOTE

By any definition, body snatching is and was a foul trade, and yet there is no doubt that during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, prior to the Anatomy Act of 1832, which allowed corpses other than those of condemned murderers to be used in anatomy studies, it played a crucial role in the advancement of medical knowledge. There were very few surgeons who did not rely on the resurrection men to provide fresh cadavers for their research.

Hyde’s real-life mentor, John Hunter, certainly made use of them and took delivery of fresh corpses for his anatomy classes at 13 Castle Street, now Charing Cross Road.

Other characters in the story also existed. James McGrigor was Surgeon-General of the Army, Richard Ryder was Home Secretary and both James Norris and James Tilly Matthews were patients at Bethlem Hospital. Mike Jay’s book, The Air Loom Gang, gives a fascinating account of Matthews’ incarceration in Bedlam, as well as great insight into the workings of the mad houses of the time.

Eden Carslow is a fictitious character, though based for the most part on the surgeon Astley Paston Cooper, who was a student of Hunter’s and who later became lecturer in anatomy at St Thomas’s and senior surgeon to Guy’s Hospital. There is no suggestion that Cooper was involved in aiding and abetting murder, though he was in league with the sack-’em-up men, using Thomas Butler, a porter at St Thomas’s dissecting room, as a go-between. Cooper often boasted that he could obtain any body that he wished and he paid the resurrection men handsomely for their services, despite referring to them as ‘the lowest dregs of degradation’.

In that, Cooper was not wrong, as I discovered during my reading of Ruth Richardson’s excellent Death, Dissection and the Destitute. The scene in which Hawkwood discovers that human flesh had been converted into soap and candles in the cellar of the Black Dog is not the product solely of my imagination. If anything, I have held back in describing some of the more bizarre uses to which human corpses were subjected. For example, John Sheldon, another of Hunter’s former pupils, lived with the preserved body of a beautiful woman in a glass case in his bedroom for ten years, while another, dentist Martin van Butchell, had his wife embalmed by Hunter and kept her in his living room where visitors could view her by appointment. I confess I did try to work a similar scenario into the story but decided to abandon the idea, for fear it would be considered too fanciful.

Equally, while some of the medical procedures I have attributed to Hyde during his service in Spain may seem unlikely, they too are based on fact. Crude blood transfusions had been attempted, including one from a sheep to a man by seventeenth-century physicians Richard Lower and Jean Baptiste Denys. John Hunter also conducted transplantation experiments involving both human and animal subjects.

Lest any readers think it a tad convenient that Hyde should have found himself a bolt-hole equipped with both an operating room and an escape route through an adjoining building that just happened to back on to his hideaway, I can assure them this was not poetic licence. Hunter did indeed own the lease to 28 Leicester Square, the house directly behind the Castle Street property. He had the gap between the houses bridged with an operating room specially constructed to aid his anatomy lectures. Above it he built a museum, in which were displayed thousands of his preparations. Following Hunter’s death in 1793, the Leicester Square property was rented out, while the museum remained in place, tended by Hunter’s former assistant, William Clift. The museum’s contents were later purchased by the Royal College of Surgeons. They are now displayed to splendid effect in the galleries in the Hunterian Museum at the RCS’s headquarters in Lincoln’s Inn. Sadly, unlike Hunter’s specimens, neither his home nor the school building has been preserved, though the plaque placed above his grave in Westminster Abbey can be seen, commemorating him as the ‘Founder of Scientific Surgery’. While researching the novel, I referred constantly to Wendy Moore’s immensely readable biography of John Hunter, The Knife Man. I cannot recommend it too highly. I am also indebted to Mick Crumplin, Archivist to the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland, whose knowledge of general surgical history, in particular that of the Napoleonic Wars, is truly encyclopaedic. He responded to my questioning with great patience and good humour. Any mistakes in the story are mine, not his.

The science of electricity was in its infancy during this period, and yet scientists and physicians were already attempting to harness electrical power as a means to dominate nature. Several experiments were conducted to inject life into human cadavers. The attempt to reanimate the corpse of the murderer George Forster did take place as described, as did John Hunter’s efforts to resuscitate the forger William Dodd.

Regarding the latter experiment, there is an intriguing footnote in Wendy Moore’s biography. Despite there being a memorial stone bearing his name in St Laurence’s churchyard in Cowley, West London, there is no mention of Reverend Dodd’s interment in the parish register.