In a lovely sliver of poetic justice, Burke’s corpse was, in keeping with the law of the day, dissected. As the lecture had been about the human brain, it seems unlikely that the body cavity would have been opened and notably rearranged, but perhaps this was thrown in after the fact, as a crowd pleaser. The following day the lab was opened to the public, and some thirty thousand vindicated gawkers filed past. The post-dissection cadaver was, by order of the judge, shipped to the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh to have its bones made into a skeleton, which resides there to this day, along with one of several wallets made from Burke’s skin.[7]
Though Knox was never charged for his role in the murders, public sentiment held him accountable. The freshness of the bodies, the fact that one had its head and feet cut off and others had blood oozing from the nose or ears—all of this should have raised the bristly Knox eyebrows.
The anatomist clearly didn’t care. Knox further sullied his reputation by preserving one of Burke and Hare’s more comely corpses, the prostitute Mary Paterson, in a clear glass vat of alcohol in his lab.
When an inquiry by a lay committee into Knox’s role generated no formal action against the doctor, a mob gathered the following day with an effigy of Knox. (The thing must not have looked a great deal like the man, for they felt the need to label if. “Knox, the associate of the infamous Hare,” explained a large sign on its back.) The stuffed Knox was paraded through the streets to the house of the real Knox, where it was hung by its neck from a tree and then cut down and—fittingly—torn to pieces.
It was around this time that Parliament conceded that the anatomy problem had gotten a tad out of hand and convened a committee to brainstorm solutions. While the debate mainly focused on alternate sources of bodies—most notably, unclaimed corpses from hospitals, prisons, and workhouses— some physicians raised an interesting item of debate: Is human dissection really necessary? Can’t anatomy be learned from models, drawings, preserved prosections?
There have been times and places, in history, when the answer to the question “Is human dissection necessary?” was unequivocally yes. Here are some examples of what can happen when you try to figure out how a human body works without actually opening one up. In ancient China, Confucian doctrine considered dissection a defilement of the human body and forbade its practice. This posed a problem for the Father of Chinese Medicine, Huang Ti, who, around 2600 B.C., set out to write an authoritative medical and anatomical text (Nei Ch’ing, or Canon of Medicine). As is evident from this passage—quoted in Early History of Human Anatomy—there are places where Huang is, through no fault of his own, rather clearly winging it:
The heart is a king, who rules over all organs of the body; the lungs are his executive, who carry out his orders; the liver is his commandant, who keeps up the discipline; the gall bladder, his attorney general… and the spleen, his steward who supervises the five tastes. There are three burning spaces—the thorax, the abdomen and the pelvis—which are together responsible for the sewage system of the body.
To Huang Ti’s credit, though, he managed, without ever disassembling a corpse, to figure out that “the blood of the body is under the control of the heart” and that “the blood current flows in a continuous circle and never stops.” In other words, the man figured out what William Harvey figured out, four thousand years before Harvey and without laying open any family members.
Imperial Rome gives us another nice example of what happens to medicine when the government frowns on human dissection. Galen, one of history’s most revered anatomists, whose texts went unchallenged for centuries, never once dissected a human cadaver. In his post as surgeon to the gladiators, he had a frequent, if piecemeal, window on the human interior in the form of gaping sword wounds and lion claw lacerations.
He also dissected a good sum of animals, preferably apes, which he believed to be anatomically identical to humans, especially, he maintained, if the ape had a round face. The great Renaissance anatomist Vesalius later pointed out that there are two hundred anatomical differences between apes and humans in skeletal structure alone. (Whatever Galen’s shortcomings as a comparative anatomist, the man is to be respected for his ingenuity, for procuring apes in ancient Rome can’t have been easy.) He got a lot right, it’s just that he also got a fair amount wrong. His drawings showed five-lobed livers and hearts with three ventricles.
The ancient Greeks were similarly adrift when it came to human anatomy. Like Galen, Hippocrates never dissected a human cadaver—he called dissection “unpleasant if not cruel.” According to the book Early History of Human Anatomy, Hippocrates referred to tendons as “nerves” and believed the human brain to be a mucus-secreting gland. Though I found this information surprising, this being the Father of Medicine we are talking about, I did not question it. You do not question an author who appears on the title page as “T.V.N. Persaud, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc, F.R.C.Path. (Lond.), F.F.Path. (R.C.P.I.), F.A.C.O.G.” Who knows, perhaps history erred in bestowing upon Hippocrates the title Father of Medicine. Perhaps T.V.N. Persaud is the Father of Medicine.
It’s no coincidence that the man who contributed the most to the study of human anatomy, the Belgian Andreas Vesalius, was an avid proponent of do-it-yourself, get-your-fussy-Renaissance-shirt-dirty anatomical dissection. Though human dissection was an accepted practice in the Renaissance-era anatomy class, most professors shied away from personally undertaking it, preferring to deliver their lectures while seated in raised chairs a safe and tidy remove from the corpse and pointing out structures with a wooden stick while a hired hand did the slicing. Vesalius disapproved of this practice, and wasn’t shy about his feelings.
In C. D. O’Malley’s biography of the man, Vesalius likens the lecturers to “jackdaws aloft in their high chair, with egregious arrogance croaking things they have never investigated but merely committed to memory from the books of others. Thus everything is wrongly taught, …and days are wasted in ridiculous questions.”
Vesalius was a dissector such as history had never seen. This was a man who encouraged his students to “observe the tendons while dining on any animal.” While studying medicine in Belgium, he not only dissected the corpses of executed criminals but snatched them from the gibbet himself.
Vesalius produced a series of richly detailed anatomical plates and text called De Humani Corporis Fabrica, the most venerated anatomy book in history. The question then becomes, was it necessary, once the likes of Vesalius had pretty much figured out the basics, for every student of anatomy to get right in there and figure them out all over again? Why couldn’t models and preserved prosections be used to teach anatomy? Do gross anatomy labs reinvent the wheel? The questions were especially relevant in Knox’s day, given the way in which bodies were procured, but they are still relevant today.
I asked Hugh Patterson about this and learned that, in fact, whole-cadaver dissection is being phased out at some medical schools. Indeed, the gross anatomy course I visited at UCSF was the last one in which students will dissect entire cadavers. Beginning the following semester, they would be studying pro-sections—embalmed sections of the body cut and prepared so as to display key anatomical features and systems. Over at the University of Colorado, the Center for Human Simulation is leading the charge toward digital anatomy instruction. In 1993, they froze a cadaver and sanded off a millimeter cross section at a time, photographing each new view—1,871 in all—to create an on-screen, maneuverable 3-D rendition of the man and all his parts, a sort of flight simulator for students of anatomy and surgery.
7
Sheena Jones, the secretary at the college who told me about the wallet—which she called a “pocket book,” nearly leading me to write that ladies’ handbags had been made from Burke’s hide—said it had been donated by one George Chiene, now deceased. Mrs. Jones did not know who had made or originally owned the wallet or whether Mr. Chiene had ever kept his money in it, but she observed that it looked like any other brown leather wallet and that “you would not know it is made from human skin.”