‘save my Body from the Surgeons’
Monday, July 13 2009
This is a picture of the gallows at Tyburn – the infamous “Triple Tree”. For centuries
, this device was used to hang convicts sentenced to death in London. By the 18th century, British law put such a high value on property that even minor property crimes could be punished by death, though not every thief receive the death penalty. (Some were “transported” – sent to America.) Still, it was felt necessary to make the occasional example, so as to keep the lower classes properly mindful of the law.
Around the same time, the medical profession was embracing the radical idea that some knowledge of what went on inside the human body might possibly improve their trade. ‘Bleeding’ was still their go-to treatment for all sorts of maladies; obviously, they had a lot to learn. The problem “the Surgeons” faced was that bodies were hard to come by. Surgical ‘dissection’ was considered an affront to the dignity of the dead. Nobody wanted their body cut up by the surgeons.
So they started using the bodies of the hanged. The surgeons convinced the Crown to let them have a few bodies a year from the gallows (which supply they supplemented through black-market sources). So appalling was the idea of being dissected that Parliament began adding it to the legal code as a further punishment beyond death: you could not only be sentenced to hang, but also sentenced to dissection afterward. This was used to distinguish particularly egregious crimes, like murder and really brazen theft, from all the ordinary crimes that were punishable by death.
Of course, even dead men have friends, and often the condemned’s friends would fight the surgeons’ agents for custody of the body. If the friends won, they would ensure a proper Christian burial (though sometimes, the agents simply dug up the body later). The prospect of dissection also led to impassioned letters from jail, begging friends to intervene against the surgeons’ agents on that awful day. The title of this post is from one letter; here’s a bit more of another, from a man named Charles Connor, hanged in 1735 for murder:
…and I begg of all Love that you would desire all such Friends, that shall come to see me Dye, that they will be so good as not to let the Surgeons have my body but to give me their Assistance, for my Brothers and other Friends have promised me to do so, which I hope in God they will, for my Desire is to lay by my wife if possible I can.
His wife, by the way, was the person Connor was hanged for killing.
Hanging back then killed the victim by asphyxiation – strangling the person – and not by breaking their neck. In at least a few cases, the victim was cut down from the gallows only to revive some time later. When this happened, it was called “resurrection”. In at least one case, the victim revived at the touch of the surgeon’s knife. Sometimes, the surgeons would help “resurrect” a person by bleeding him.
So the next time you go under the surgeon’s knife, remember: it only feels like punishment. In 18th century England, it really was punishment.
(I got all this from the essay “The Tyburn Riot Against the Surgeons” by Peter Linebaugh, in Douglas Hay et al’s book Albion’s Fatal Tree (Pantheon, 1975). I can’t find good source information for the image; it appears to be from 1680 or thereabouts, and long since in the public domain.)
