ABSTRACT
‘Penal dissection’ – the codification by statute of a set of rules under which the corpse could be dismembered after death for the utilitarian investigation of the body’s internal structure – is held to have begun, in England, with the passage of the infamous ‘Murder Act’ of 1752. The overt context for the passage of the 1752 Act was a response to a perceived break-down in law and order on the part of the authorities. What was needed, it was felt, was a punishment so draconian, so appalling, that potential criminals would be terrified at the fate which awaited them in the event of their detection. Clearly, simple execution was not enough. Some new horror was called for which would thwart delinquent desires on the part of the unruly metropolitan populace. Hence, the Act delineated the full, ferocious, outlines of the practice of ‘penal anatomy’. Designed so that ‘some further terror and peculiar mark of infamy be added to the punishment of death’ (§1), and ‘to impress a just horror in the mind of the offender and on the minds of such as shall be present’ (§2), the Act provided for the execution of a capital sentence within two days of its pronouncement by the judge or magistrate. 1 Dissection was to be understood as a specific alternative to the other form of public display encouraged by the authorities – the gibbeting of the corpse after death (§5). Following the execution of the offender, providing that the execution had taken place in the environs of London, the body was to be ‘immediately’ conveyed by the sheriff or his deputies to:
the Hall of the Surgeons Company, or such other place as the said company shall appoint for this purpose, and be delivered to such person as the said company shall depute or appoint. . . and the Body so delivered to the said company of Surgeons, shall be dissected and anatomized by the said Surgeons.
