The Edinburgh Dead

Glasgow, 1818

The corpse sat in a simple, high-backed chair. A band had been tied around its stomach to keep it upright. The man—young, perhaps no more than twenty-five—had as peaceable a look to him as death might permit. A relaxed face, hands resting quite naturally, in lifelike manner, upon his knees. He was naked, but a pure white sheet had been laid across his legs and groin, for the preservation of modesty.

A few paces behind the dead man’s chair, a fire burned with vigour in a metal brazier. It gave out prodigious amounts of light and heat, the latter of which in particular was hardly needed. Though the streets of Glasgow outside were awash with freezing rain and stinging winds, the air within was already close and warm and a touch stale, by virtue of the enormous audience the corpse had attracted.

They were packed in to the raked galleries of benches that occupied some three-quarters of the room’s circumference. This great wooden amphitheatre had never seen quite so many beneath its domed roof. They were standing in the aisles, sitting on the steps between the blocks of benches, crowding the very highest and furthest of the doorways, craning their necks to get a view of proceedings. For all their numbers, though, and all their slightly febrile anticipation, a remarkable quiet prevailed. There was the occasional shuffling of a foot, a cough, now and again a faintly nervous laugh. But all in all the fragile, expectant silence held.

The corpse was not alone, down on the floor of the amphitheatre. Figures in long white robes moved about him, like a flock of bishops preparing a sacramental rite. The instruments of their devotion were not, however, chalice or cross or censer. Rather, a stack of metal discs, threaded on to a tall central pillar, stood on a wheeled trolley. Flat strips of copper ran from the top and bottom discs to long rods that stood upright in a glass jar. Beside this odd machinery, a man was laying out knives on a cloth. Dozens of them. And saws, and shears.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said one of the robed men, and at the first, startling sound of his voice a collective shiver of excitement thrilled its way around the whole assembly.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said again once that tremor had passed, “you will this evening be witness to a display of true medical Prometheanism. This,” he gestured towards the corpse strapped to the chair, “is Mathew Clydesdale, murderer. Executed this very day, in accordance with the sentence passed upon him by the court. And his presence here, the service he is about to perform, is also in accordance with that sentence.

“I am Professor Andrew Ure, and it is my privilege to be your guide in the first part of our explorations this evening: a demonstration of galvanic effects.”

He turned and nodded to the younger men, the assistants, who had been waiting beside the gleaming and ordered array of knives. At his sign, they took up their blades. This was greeted by a swelling murmur of conversation around the theatre, and waves of shuffling and shifting as the assembled host sought a clear line of sight. But all sound, all distraction and interruption, dwindled away as the knives went to work.

A lengthwise cut was made along the inner face of the forearm, followed by two transverse incisions across the wrist and the elbow. The skin was peeled open, the two flaps of it pinned to ensure it did not slip back into place. Thus invited, the people of Glasgow looked into the meat of Mathew Clydesdale’s arm, and as they did so they whispered to one another, and trembled in fascination, or horror, or wonder.

The muscles were raw, a brownish red; the bone, overlaid by them and by the straps of pale tendon, yellowish. There was little blood, for his heart had been stilled some time ago.

“Expose the cervical vertebrae, if you would,” Ure murmured to his assistants, and while they tipped Clydesdale’s head forward and went to work on the back of his neck, Ure bent over the exposed machinery of the arm. He probed with a short rod, and used it to elevate slightly from amongst the meat and the gristle a set of cord-like structures, somewhat grey beneath the scraps of tissue and congealed blood that adhered to them.

“Here are the nerves,” he proclaimed to his rapt audience. He shifted his hand a little, letting all but one of the nerves fall back into their corporeal bed. “And this is the ulnar, the first to which we shall direct our attentions.”

At Ure’s instruction, the trolley that carried the tall pile of metal plates was wheeled into position beside the corpse. Ure took up one of the long metal rods attached to the apparatus and inserted it through the new opening in the back of Clydesdale’s neck. Once satisfied of its position, he held it there, and raised the second rod. He looked up to the crowded benches with a grave expression.

“Now, ladies and gentlemen. Observe.”

He slipped the second rod into Clydesdale’s gaping arm; adjusted it, eased it into contact with the ulnar nerve.

And Clydesdale’s arm spasmed. The dead hand that rested palm up on his knee twitched, the fingers clenched. There were gasps, and screams, and a shuddering of alarm. A few cheers. A few hands clapped. Ure withdrew the rod, then reinserted it. Again the fingers trembled and closed, as if trying to grasp at the life so recently extinct.

A woman near the end of one of the rows, midway up the auditorium, fainted away. She was half-carried, half-dragged from her seat and through the crowd to one of the doors, in search of reviving air.

Satisfied, Ure pushed back Clydesdale’s head and turned it to one side. He nodded to his colleagues, and they set to work, cutting open the skin of the lower neck, pulling it away from the underlying structure of veins and muscles. Once they stood back, Ure delicately set the tip of a rod against a deep-buried fibrous thread.

“The phrenic nerve,” he announced.

And the corpse’s chest heaved. Clydesdale’s whole inanimate form shifted as his ribcage rose and fell in a dreadful parody of breathing. More exclamations of amazement, and of horror. Some of those watching averted their eyes, or closed them, their morbid fascination exceeded by repulsion and unease.

“You see,” Ure said calmly and clearly, “that the mechanism of breathing remains intact after death, lacking only the animating force by which it was formerly enlivened.”

Though his voice was steady, his face was flushed with excitement, for he was as captivated as any by the wonders he performed.

And so the demonstration proceeded. The leg was made to straighten, jerking and kicking as if during a fit. A rod inserted into a notch cut above the orbit of Clydesdale’s left eye made his face contort and convulse in a mad dance of lopsided expression. At that, another woman was overcome, and helped from the chamber. Two men departed, one after the other, each pale of visage and with a hand pressed over his mouth. One was already gagging as he made for the door.

At the conclusion of Ure’s work, another white-clad figure, Professor Jeffray, took charge. He had the dead man laid out on a flat trolley, where he dissected out his every inner working, breaking open the ribcage to reveal the organs beneath, carving away until Mathew Clydesdale was rendered down to so many dissociated, exposed parts.

A state of numb shock settled across many of the observers. They shuffled out more slowly than many of them would have wished, constrained by the crowding to essay a patience few felt. Some lingered, though, after the corpse had been covered up with winding sheets, as the medical men busied themselves with tidying away the tools of their trade.

One—a tall, thin-faced and well-dressed man with a dispassionate intelligence alive in his eyes—descended from the steep slope of benches.

“Professor Ure,” the man said, and Ure looked up from his rolling of the knives into their cloth parcel.

“Sir?”

“A remarkable demonstration. Fascinating.”

“I am delighted you found it so. One hopes to inform and educate. Are you a medical man, sir? You have the look.”

One of the attendants was damping down the brazier behind them. It hissed and crackled, spinning a few sparks up into the air.

“No, not strictly a medical man. I have some slight experience in that field, but my researches have followed a rather different course in recent years. Still, the equipment you use is most interesting.”

He extended a languid arm towards the stack of discs, with all their panoply of wires and rods.

“Ah, the Voltaic pile?” Ure smiled.

“I have heard them described, of course, and seen illustrations, but this is my first opportunity to observe the thing itself. Copper and zinc plates, separated by plasterboard soaked in brine. Am I correct?”

“I believe it is charged with acid rather than brine, but in principle you are correct, yes. A quite remarkable contraption. I confess my facility with the construction and care of the things is somewhat limited. Carlyle there, on the other hand: an invaluable man. A natural and subtle talent when it comes to the machinery, whether electrical or mechanical, with which our world is becoming so crowded. He is employed here for that sole purpose, and I dare to think there is none in Scotland to match his expertise.”

“Carlyle, you say?” the other man murmured, staring with acute intensity at the indicated attendant, white-clad as the others, who was examining the Voltaic pile with proprietorial concern.

“Indeed. Edward Carlyle.”

“Tell me, Professor Ure—if the question is not unwelcome, of course—tell me, have you had any success in stimulating the heart?”

“No, no. Not as yet. The heart remains unresponsive. I have to say, I believe it is through stimulation of the phrenic nerve that the greatest successes will be achieved: it is my hope that it might one day even be possible to thereby restore life and its functions to the victims of drowning, suffocation. Even hanging. But we are scientists, you and I, eh? We must have a realistic view of these things. Our ignorance is reduced with every passing day—how could it be otherwise, when so many great minds are applied to the task?—but it remains prodigious.

“I rather fancy, if you will forgive me an aphorism, that we live not in the Age of Reason, as so many proclaim, but in that of Ignorance; for there is nothing reason so readily proclaims to the attentive mind as the extent of our ignorance. It transforms what were once mysteries, for ever inaccessible to human comprehension, into merely phenomena we have not yet explained, and thereby at once increases what we know and what we do not. Do you see?”

“Very astute, I am sure.”

“Yes. Well. If you are interested in natural philosophy, you should consider attending some of my evening lectures. Every Tuesday and Thursday at seven o’clock. All the most recent developments are explained.”

“I am an Edinburgh man. I am seldom in Glasgow, unfortunately; we came today only for your demonstration.”

“Oh, I see. I am flattered. I did not catch your name, sir.”

“No? Well, forgive me, I must have a word with my man Blegg over there. Do excuse me.”

Blegg cut a slight figure in comparison to his master, and at that master’s approach he was already sinking his head in obsequious expectation of instruction.

“Do you see the man beside the pile, Blegg? His name is Edward Carlyle. We require him, and his services, so you get yourself over there and give him my compliments. Convey my admiration of his work, and ask whether he would hear a proposal I have for him. One that could be of the utmost mutual benefit. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Blegg dipped his head once more, his hands clasped as if in submissive prayer.

“And make some enquiries. We will be requiring rooms for the night. It is too late to return to Edinburgh now.”

Blegg hesitated, unsure whether further commands would be forthcoming.

“Be about it, then,” his employer snapped.

“Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”

And Blegg scampered away to deliver the message.