Dissection, Anatomy Acts and the Appropriation of Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Australia: ‘The Government's Brains’ and the Benevolent Asylum

In July 1864 the brains of the executed murderer Christopher Harrison were the subject of a dispute between the government sheriff and Professor of Anatomy, George Halford, at the new Melbourne University School of Medicine. Halford claimed the brains were his to dissect, but the sheriff maintained they were the ‘Government’s brains’. The embarrassing struggle over these brains was widely reported in the Melbourne newspapers and beyond.