Anatomy or an Ottamy? Bodies on show in Georgian London

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“anatomy or an ottamy” sounds like the start of a tongue twister. The first is, of course, a familiar word: it is the one used to describe the study of the structure of the body, a practice that in the Western medical tradition was (and is) based on the dissection of the corpse. Indeed, the origin of the word lies in the Greek ἀνατομία, to

“cut up.”But what (or who) is an “ottamy”? The simple answer is that

“ottamy” (like anothomy, anothamie, anathomy, anatomie, anotomie, anotomy, notomy and atomy) is one of many variant spellings that were used in scholarly texts until the early eighteenth century and in common speech for at least another century and a half after that. For example, The Questyonary of Cyrurgyens, a translation of the work of the French surgeon Guy de Chauliac published in 1542, refers to the

“science of nathomy.” In 1561 the diarist Henry Machyn described seeing eighteen men and two women hanged in London (or rather, just outside London, in the village of Tyburn), one of which was

“had” by the “barbur-surgens” to be “a notheme at ther Hall.”1 But Machyn’s account hints at a further use of the word to describe not just the process of dissecting a body, but also the anatomized corpse itself. By the early eighteenth century, to be “ottamised” was not

ANATOMY OR AN OTTAMY?

Bodies on Show in Georgian London

S I M O N C H A P L I N

William Hogarth, The Reward of Cruelty, 1751 (National Library of Medicine). Published as Plate 4 of The Four Stages of Cruelty. The setting is a fictional composite,

loosely based on the theater of the College of Physicians in London.

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merely to be dissected, but to be preserved, most commonly as a skeleton, for further study and show. In John Gay’s Beggars Opera—first performed at the Lincoln’s Inn Theatre in January 1728, ironically on the site of what was to become the Royal College of Surgeons—this is what happens to “poor Tom,” one of the robber-baron Macheath’s gang. His erstwhile companion-in-crime “Matt of the Mint” recounts Tom’s fate:

Poor brother Tom had an accident this time twelve month [ago], and so clever a made fellow he was, that I could not save him from those flaying rascals the surgeons, and now, poor man, he is among the otamys at Surgeons’ Hall.2

In Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, first published in 1785, to be ‘ottomised’ was translated as ‘to be dissected’: the phrase “You’ll be scragged, ottomised and grin in a glass case” meant to be hanged, dissected and to have one’s remains put on display.

The added fear attached to ending up as an ottamy was understandable. While dissection was itself a cruel and arbi-trary fate for the condemned in the early eighteenth century, at least those bodies taken were—eventually—subjected to a Christian burial at the Barber-Surgeons’ Company’s expense. No such comfort was granted to those whose skeletons were preserved for display. Nor did the remains stay hidden from view, for as with the famous lecture theater in Leiden, London’s Barber-Surgeons admitted visitors to see their collection. A tourist guide to London from 1708 describes at least five

“ottamies,” including the skeletons of Thomas Sherwood and Elizabeth Evans—“Country Tom and Canberry Bess,” hanged for murder in 1635—as well as two flayed skins preserved “in imitation of Adam and Eve” (through presumably a fairly two-dimensional representation).3

Image right: The Body of a Murderer Exposed in the Theatre of the Surgeons Hall, Old Bailey, ca. 1779 (Courtesy of The Royal College of Surgeons of England)

1 Guy de Chauliac, The Questyonary of Cyrurgyens, with the Formulary of Lytell Guydo in Cyrurgie (London: Printed by Robert Wyer for H. Dabbe & R. Banckes, 1542), 252.

2 John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (London: Printed for John Watts, 1728), 24.

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It was the fear of “ottamisation,” of punitive dissection and the subsequent display of ones’ remains as moral lessons to others, that helped to condition antipathy towards dissection among the London poor in the eighteenth century. Such opposition was not voiced quietly. As Peter Linebaugh has shown, at Tyburn in the 1730s and early 1740s the officers of the Barber-Surgeons’ Company were sometimes fought to a stand-still by the crowd, and thus thwarted in their attempts to secure bodies. When Richard Tobin was hanged for theft in 1739, the Company was forced to pay for a posse of sheriff ’s men to fight off those who sought to rescue his body, although their ef- forts were in vain. Six years later, in 1745, at the execution of charmingly named Mary “Cut and Come Again” White, the Surgeons’ officers were again beaten off by the friends of the condemned. Time and again the audit book of the Barber-Surgeons’ Company reveals extra payments for men to stand guard both at the gallows and at the Hall.

The public tensions surrounding the Barber-Surgeons’ Company were echoed by disputes within the corporation. In the same year that Mary White was hanged, the joint company split and a new Company of Surgeons was formed. For the next seven years no public dissections were held, and the public tension surrounding ottamisation abated somewhat. They were to re-emerge, however, in a different form in 1752. Prompted by a perceived rise in crime, and particularly by a spate of murders, a bill was raised in Parliament in 1751 to impose additional penalties on those guilty of that “most heinous crime.” The Murder Act—or to give it its full title, An Act for Better Preventing the Horrid Crime of Murder—was passed the following year. It superseded the previous charters granted to the Company and the College of Physicians by making public dissection part of the judicial process. Henceforth

3 Edward Hatton, A new view of London; or, an ample account of that city, in

two volumes, or eight sections.

(London: printed for John Nicholson, and

Robert Knaplock, 1708), 2:596-7.

murderers would, by default, be dissected by the surgeons, and their remains denied burial. For various reasons, not all of those convicted under the Act in either the London or the county of Middlesex between 1752 and 1832 were dissected, but a significant number did find their way to the new Surgeons’ Hall at the Old Bailey (conveniently close to Newgate Prison). Between 1752 and the mid-1790s the bodies of at least eighty murderers were delivered to the surgeons to be dissected.4 Sometimes lectures were given: these were aimed at apprentice surgeons, but many were also open to the public. Even when they were not, or when no lectures were given, the dissected bodies were ritually exposed to public spectators, in order to satisfy the terms of the Act.

The decision to make dissection a specific punishment was not without its critics. The satirical Drury Lane Journal contained a scathing attack on Henry Fielding who was—with his brother and fellow magistrate John—perceived as one of the prime movers behind the Murder Act. Not content with merely dissecting murderers, the Journal proposed instead that:

First, that one or more surgeons be appointed for every jail, to make ottomies of all the condemned bodies ...

Two, that all malefactors, within two days after sentence of death is passed, be cut up alive in the prison yard ...

Three, that while they are thus ottomising, they be tyed hand and foot... and their mouths gagged, to hinder their terrible shriekings and groans ...

Four, that their flesh be roasted, boiled, broiled, fried, baked, stewed, hashed, scolloped, fricasseed, ragou’d, carbonado’d etc and at stated meals distributed to the prisoners ...

Five, that their blood be made into black pudding ...5

4 Simon Chaplin, John Hunter and ‘Museum Oeconomy’, 1750-1800 (PhD Thesis, University of London, 2009), 343.

5 Have At You All: Or, The Drury Lane Journal. London, 1752, 123.

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... and so on. Such penalties were, of course, to be applied only in the case of a first offense.

In fact—and in his defense—Henry Fielding appears to have been rather dismayed at the provision made in the Murder Act. Shortly after the act was passed he made his feelings known through the more mainstream Covent Garden Journal, bemoaning the fact that public execution and public dis-section were

“horrid Farces”: far better, he said, that such awful punishment be enacted in private, before the Court—something which he said “lily-livered” judges were keen to avoid, due to the “dis-agreeable nature” of such proceedings.6

William Hogarth’s famous prints showing the Four Stages of Cruelty, published the year before the Act was passed, prefigured Fielding’s complaint. The final plate depicts the dissection of Tom Nero in a gruesome setting that served as an indictment of the heartless barbarity of public dissection as much as the consequences of Nero’s criminality. Notably, Hogarth incorporated two ottamies or skeletons, topically named as those of highwayman James Maclaine and the boxer James Field, executed in 1750 and 1751 respectively.

Hogarth’s fictional ottamies were soon replicated in fact. The first victim of the Murder Act, Thomas Wilford, was hanged on June 22, 1752. As well as paying for men to bring his body back to the Hall, and for mops and buckets for clearing up afterwards, the Company’s account books include payments of one pound and five shillings for “stripping his bones,” and a further two pounds and seven shillings to have the skeleton mounted for display in the Hall. Later the same year similar provision was made for the skeletons of William Descent and Randolph Branch, executed on September 22, and Abraham Ward, who was hanged and dissected in early December.

The Company of Surgeons continued to make “ottamies” of

6 Martin Battestin, (Henry

Fielding: A Life. London:

Routledge, 1989), 548.

particularly notorious criminals, and these became a significant public attraction at the Hall. Among them were the skeleton of Elizabeth Brownrigg who was hanged in 1767 after her con-viction for the torture and murder of a serving girl (a trial that attracted widespread and lurid coverage in the press). Following her dissection the Public Advertiser reported that:

...the skeleton of Mrs Brownrigg will be fixed in the nitch opposite the front door in the Surgeons Theatre, and her name will be wrote under it, in order to perpetuate the heinousness of her cruelty in the minds of spectators.7

In 1777 an ottamy was made of the skeleton of Louis Mercier, also known as Louis Le Butte, and nine years later another from the bones of John Hogan. Not all of the skeletons preserved at the Hall appear to have stayed in situ. In August 1757 the minutes of the Court of Assistants noted, rather peevishly, that “the Clerk do write to Mr Moffatt [the surgeon James Moffat] to send back the bones of Mary Mussen which he took away without the leave of the Master.” An écorché cast of Mussen’s body was later displayed in Banjamin Rackstrow’s anatomical museum and wax-works on Fleet Street. In December 1771 Asher Weil, Levi Weil, Hyam Lazarus and Solomon Porter were all hanged: Asher Weil’s body was given to the Royal Academy, where the anatomist William Hunter used it to lecture to artists. The other three were dissected at Surgeons’ Hall, but the skeleton of one later resurfaced in the museum of Joshua Brookes, a private anatomy teacher and museum proprietor, while the skeleton of William White, dissected in 1773, also found its way into private ownership (it ended up on public display in the museum of the surgeon John Heaviside).

While the dissections at Surgeons’ Hall after 1752 were not entirely immune from the disorder that had attended dissections at the Barber-Surgeons’ Company, for the most part the popular

7 The Times, September 16,

1767.

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reaction to them was one of enthusiastic—if horrified—delight. Just as Londoners flocked to public executions, so too they thronged the Hall when dissected bodies were on display, and visited to see the ottamies when they were not. At Elizabeth Brownrigg’s dissection was Sylas Neville, a young lawyer, who recorded the occasion in his diary:

Wed. Sept. 16. After waiting an hour in the Lobby of Surgeons’ Hall, got in with great difficulty, the crowd being

great, to see the body of Mrs Brownrigg.8

In 1786, the dissection of John Hogan attracted even greater numbers of spectators:

The crowds of the lower rank of people, who have attended for these three days past at Surgeons-hall, to see the body of Hogan, the mulatto, exposed, has made the Old Bailey

almost impassable from eleven o’clock to two... .9

It was the very appetite of the public for such scenes that made them problematic in the eyes of many critics. After Hogan’s dissection the Morning Chronicle opined that:

The exposing the bodies of murderers after their execution has not appeared to have the salutary effect expected by the Act of Parliament; but, from being frequently repeated, tends to harden the minds of the vulgar and familiarise them with spectacles of horror.10

Certainly the dissections at Surgeons’ Hall did little to advance the cause of medical education. On October 4, 1759, John Taitt, Master of Anatomy at the Company of Surgeons in London, commenced a series of three public lectures over the body of the murderer Richard Lamb. He was under no illusions as to the nature and intention of his audience:

8 Sylas Neville, The Diary of Sylas Neville

1767-1788, Ed. B. Cozens-Hardy

(London: OUP, 1950), 25.

9 The Times, 20 January 1786.

10 Morning Chronicle, 20 January 1786.

The Skeleton of Eliz[abeth] Brownrigg in Surgeon’s Hall, ca. 1779 Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London

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Curiosity more than improvement has, I am persuaded, drawn the greater part of this audience together; and though such as come from mere curiosity will reap little benefit from the view of the dissected subject, yet that their time here may not wholly be thrown away, I would wish them to consider the crime which has occasioned their presence... . Let therefore the Anatomical Table in the Surgeons’ Theatre be a preacher to all this audience: and should their passions run high, and the voice of reason and religion be forgotten,

may this dread table present itself to their view... .11

The moral lessons of Taitt’s ottamising made them less-than-essential viewing for those wishing to study anatomy for professional purposes.

The American medical student William Shippen Jr. (who was to become co-founder and inaugural professor of anatomy

The Resurrection, or an Internal View of the Museum in W—d M—l Street, on the last Day, published by H. Humphrey, 1782, engraving. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London

11 John Taitt, Introductory Discourse to the Anatomical Lectures at Surgeons’ Hall. [Bound with] The Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts for 1759 [copy at Guildhall Library, London]. London, 1759, 25-26.

at the College of Philadelphia) was one of many who eschewed Taitt’s lectures. Instead, he spent his time at work in the dis-section room of William Hunter, one of London’s leading private teachers of anatomy. Together with his brother John, William Hunter was one of sixty or so teachers of anatomy and surgery who worked in London between 1745 and 1800, and who made the city such a desirable destination for medical students. Unlike the public lectures at Surgeons’ Hall these classes were conducted behind closed doors, with small groups of students participating directly in the dissection under a demon-strator’s guidance—the direct forerunners to the classes still given in most medical schools today.

Unlike the Surgeons’ Company, the private teachers could not claim the bodies of murderers. Instead they procured cadavers from other means, through collusion with grave-robbers or from hospital porters, workhouse attendants and others whose work gave access to the unclaimed corpses of paupers. Such a supply was not without problems: In 1788, Edward Howe, a messenger from the Westminster Dispensary, was arrested for trying to sell to John Hunter the body of Jedediah Thomas, who had died in an apothecary’s shop in Grafton Street.12 But while their approach to teaching anatomy differed from the Company, the private anatomists shared (and often exceeded) the Company’s zeal for preserving and displaying the remains of those who had been dissected. Allied to the rise of the private anatomy schools of Georgian London was an unprecedented interest in the collecting and exhibition of preserved body parts.

While the museums of William and John Hunter are the best known (they survive, in part, at the University of Glasgow and the Royal College of Surgeons in London respectively), similarly extensive collections were amassed by surgeons such as John Sheldon, Henry Watson, Joshua Brookes and John

12 The Times, 14

November 1788.

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Heaviside. With their ranks of jars holding preserved specimens, or skeletons and mummified bodies in glazed cases, these museums were undoubtedly important resources for teaching and research. They were also powerful tools for the public display of anatomical expertise in Georgian London. Many of them—including the museums of John Hunter, Joshua Brookes and John Heaviside—are known to have been open to the public as well as to medical guests. Joshua Brookes even provided a vivarium (an outdoor rock garden decorated with ex- otic animals) as an attraction to visitors, while Heaviside tempted spectators with offers of free tea and cakes. Nor was the use of preserved bodies to advertise anatomical expertise lim- ited to those giving classes in dissection. The apothecary William Partridge was one of many who had ottamies on show in his shop. His possessions, revealed in the sale by auction of his property after his death, included “an adult skeleton, mounted, in a case” as well as the body of a child with the blood vessels injected.

While the function of such collections was to serve as ex-emplary medical indicators, they also excited the attention of spectators in ways similar to the skeletons at Surgeons’ Hall. But if the “Dread Table” and its attendant ottamies were calculated to provide a moral warning to spectators, the remains on show in the museums of anatomy teachers, or the shops of apothecaries, appear not to have been so fearsome in their aspect. A cartoon of William Hunter in his museum, confronted on the day of resurrection by those whose remains he had placed on show, pokes fun at the idea that the retention of body parts for posthumous display was a threat to spiritual well being. One reason for this was that the preserved bodies in the private museums were not simply those of notorious criminals. In John Hunter’s museum, for example, visitors could examine the preserved organs of bishops and aristocrats,

politicians and actors, as well as the remains of executed felons and anonymous paupers. These virtuous ottamies were the pro- ducts not only of dissections carried out for teaching, but of postmortems carried out to determine the cause of death, and conducted at the behest of (and sometimes in the presence of) the deceased’s family or friends. This is not to suggest that the kind of ottamising being conducted by private teachers was beyond reproach, or universally approved of: There is of course plenty of evidence of surgeons conniving or deceiving or simply forcing next of kin to allow them to dissect their patients, and nor did the rise of consensual postmortems in any way diminish the continuing—and growing—reliance of London’s anatomy teachers on the illicit supply of cadavers from burial grounds or institutions. But by displaying preserved bodies in a more overtly medical context, and by showing that dissection was not just an act of punishment, these museums helped to the stigma of “ottamisation,” and to create a common purpose to anatomical study.

By the late 1830s, the awful specter of the ottamy was starting to slip away into history. The journalist Pierce Egan, a connoisseur of London popular culture featured in “The Pilgrims of the Thames” (1838), included as a historical oddity a supposed letter from a condemned highwayman to his lover, Peg. In it, the luckless robber wrote:

But you know the traps [officers] first nippered me, the beaks [Magistrates] then lumbered [imprisoned] poor Bob, the Big-Wigs [Judges] knocked him down [sentenced him to death], which rendered your fancy man of no use to you, Peggy, or any body else, and the nubbing chit [executioner] will finish the innings by changing poor Bob into a stiff ‘un! But let me be put to bed decently, for you know, Peg, I never was a shabby or a mean fellow in my life; and, therefore, I

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should like the tie-up of Poor Bob to be nothing else but good. I am sure some of my old pals will watch in turns, throughout the darky [night], to prevent the body-snatchers

from selling me for an Ottamy.13

In truth, judicial dissection and bodysnatching were no longer the pressing concerns they had been a hundred years before. The age of the ottamy was over: anatomy ruled supreme.

John Howship, Interior of John Heaviside’s Museum, 1814. Courtesy of Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons.

13 Pierce Egan, The Pilgrims

of the Thames, in Search of the National

(London: W. Strange, 1838),

123.

Anatomy or an Ottamy? Bodies on show in Georgian London

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