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Use of the Dead to the Living

Thomas Southwood Smith

Book Overview: 

a pamphlet which argued that the current system of burial in the United Kingdom was a wasteful use of bodies that could otherwise be used for dissection by the medical profession. "If, by any appropriation of the dead, I can promote the happiness of the living, then it is my duty to conquer the reluctance I may feel to such a disposition of the dead, however well-founded or strong that reluctance may be". Southwood-Smith's lobbying helped lead to the 1832 Anatomy Act, the legislation which allowed the state to seize unclaimed corpses from workhouses and sell them to surgical schools. While this act is credited with ending the practice of grave robbery, it has also been condemned as discriminatory against the poor.

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Book Excerpt: 
. . . the most fatal errors, but to enable a person to obtain advantage from those sources of improvement which extensive practice may open to him.

To the surgeon, anatomy is eminently what Bacon has so beautifully said that knowledge in general is: it is power—it is power to lessen pain, to save life, and to eradicate diseases, which, without its aid, would be incurable and fatal. It is impossible to convey to the reader a clear conception of this truth, without a reference to particular cases; and the subject is one of such extreme importance, that it may be worth while to direct the attention for a moment to two or three of the capital diseases which the surgeon is daily called upon to treat. Aneurism, for example, is a disease of an artery, and consists of a preternatural dilatation of its coats. This dilatation arises from the debility of the vessel, whence, unable to resist the impetus of the blood, it yields, and is dilated into a sac. When once the disea. . . Read More