It is a tale of macabre fascination and ghoulish enterprise: the rampant and horrific practice in early 19th-century London of snatching dead bodies from fresh graves – or in some cases, committing murder – to use the corpses for anatomical dissection. Nearly two centuries later, these stories still serve as a reminder of the tension between medical need and bodily autonomy.
Now an exhibition at the Museum of London adds new archaeological evidence to our understanding of the “resurrection men”, the anatomists they supplied and the occasionally blurry distinction between the two. By balancing this evidence with a careful examination of the social atmosphere, growing field of surgery and grimly simple equation of supply and demand, Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men offers fresh insight into a discomfiting legacy.