generation with a brother journalist, when, on this gruesome subject being
mentioned, he placed in my hands a report of the trial of the murderers of
Carlo Ferrari, which appeared to have been detached from a volume of
criminal trials. No feature of the horrible record impressed me so much as
the cool, business-like manner in which the wretches concerned in the
crime hawked the corpse of their victim from one school of anatomy to
another, and the equally cool and business-like manner in which the matter
was dealt with by those with whom their nefarious occupation brought them
in contact. The procuring of corpses for anatomical purposes was, in fact,
a regular trade, and the biographer of Sir Astley Cooper states that "the
Resurrection-men were occasionally employed on expeditions into the
country to obtain possession of the bodies of those who had been subjected
to some important operation, and of which a _post mortem_ examination was
of the greatest interest to science. Scarcely any distance from London was
considered an insuperable difficulty in the attaining of this object, and
as certainly as the Resurrectionist undertook the task, so certain was he
of completing it. This was usually an expensive undertaking, but still it
did not restrain the most zealous in their profession from occasionally
engaging these men in this employment." The price of a subject ranged from
seven to twelve guineas, but when the "body-snatchers" were specially
employed to procure some particular corpse, the incidental expenses were
often as much more.
As an illustration of the times in which such horrors were possible, the
story of the murder of Carlo Ferrari may, at this distance of time from
the event, be worth telling. In the autumn of 1831, there lived in one of
a row of small houses, known as Nova Scotia Gardens, in the
poverty-stricken district of Bethnal Green, a man named John Bishop, with
his wife and three children. He had formerly been a carrier at Highgate,
but had long been suspected of "body-snatching," as the practice of
robbing graves was termed, and had no visible means of honest living. He
had the look of a man whose original rustic stolidity had been
supercharged with cockney cunning. The house adjoining Bishop's was
occupied by a man named Woodcock, who had succeeded in the tenancy a
glass-blower named Thomas Williams, described as a little, simple-looking
man, of mild and inoffensive demeanour. About two o'clock on the morning
of the 4th of November, Woodcock was awakened by a noise, as of a scuffle,
in Bishop's house, and afterwards heard two men leave it and return in a
few minutes, when he recognised the voices as those of Bishop and
Williams. At noon the same day these two men were in a neighbouring
public-house, accompanied by two other men, one of whom was known as James
May, who had formerly been a butcher, but for the last few years had been
suspected of following the same ghastly and revolting occupation as
Bishop. In the afternoon three men alighted from a cab at Nova Scotia
Gardens, two of them being recognised as Bishop and Williams, and
afterwards returned to the vehicle, when the former and the third man were
carrying something in a sack, which they placed in the cab. The three men
then entered, and it was driven off.
About seven o'clock the same evening, Bishop and May presented themselves
at Guy's Hospital, carrying something in a sack, and asked the porter if a
"subject" was wanted. Receiving a negative reply, they asked him to allow
"it" to remain there until the next morning, to which he consented.
Half-an-hour later, the two traffickers in human flesh called at
Grainger's anatomical theatre, in Webb Street, Southwark, and told the
curator they had "a very fresh male subject, about fourteen years of age."
The offer being declined, they went away, and later on they were,
accompanied by Williams, in a public-house, where May was seen by a waiter
to pour water on a handkerchief containing human teeth, and then rub the
teeth together, remarking that they were worth two pounds to him.
Next morning, May called upon a dentist named Mills, on Newington
Causeway, and sold a dozen teeth to him for a guinea, observing that they
were the teeth of a boy fourteen years of age. On examining them, Mills
found that morsels of the gums and splinters of the jaw were adhering to
them, as if much force had been used to wrench them out. Two hours later,
Bishop and May called again at the anatomical theatre in Southwark, and
repeated their offer of the preceding evening, which was again declined.
Shortly afterwards, they went to Guy's Hospital, accompanied by Williams
and a man named Shields, to remove the "subject" left there the evening
before, and it was given to them in the sack, as they had left it, and
placed in a large hamper, which Shields had brought for the purpose. There
was a hole in the sack, through which the porter saw a small foot
protruding, apparently that of a boy or a woman.
About midnight, the bell of King's College was rung, and the porter, on
going to the gate, found there Bishop and May, whom he had seen there
before, it seems, and on similar business. May asked him if anything was
wanted, and receiving an indifferent answer, added that they had a male
"subject," a boy about fourteen years of age. The porter inquired the
price, and was told they wanted twelve guineas for it. He then said he
would ask Mr. Partridge, the demonstrator in anatomy, and they followed
him to a room adjoining the dissecting room. Nine guineas were offered,
which May, with an oath, refused, and went outside. Bishop then said to
the porter, "Never mind May, he is drunk; it shall come in for nine in
half-an-hour." They then went away, returning at the stipulated time,
accompanied by Williams and Shields, the latter carrying on his head the
hamper containing the corpse brought from Guy's Hospital. It was taken
into a room, where it was opened, and the corpse turned out of the sack by
May. The porter, observing a cut on the left temple, and that the left arm
was bent and the fingers clenched, conceived suspicions of foul play, and
communicated them at once to Mr. Partridge. That gentleman thereupon
examined the corpse, and mentioned its condition to the secretary, who
immediately gave information to the police.
In order to detain the men until the arrival of the police, the
demonstrator showed them a L50 note, observing that he must get it changed
for gold before he could pay them. Several constables were soon on the
spot, and the four men were arrested, and taken to the station-house in
Vine Street, Covent Garden. On being charged on suspicion with having
unlawful possession of a corpse, May said he had nothing to do with it,
and had merely accompanied Bishop. A similar statement was made by
Williams, and Bishop said he was only removing the corpse from St.
Thomas's Hospital to King's College. Shields, who was known as a porter,
said he was employed to carry the hamper, which he did in the exercise of
his vocation. They were all then removed to the cells.
The evidence given at the coroner's inquest by Partridge and two other
surgeons left no doubt that the unfortunate lad, respecting whose identity
there was no evidence, had been killed by a violent blow on the back of
the neck, which had affected the spinal cord. The four accused men were
present in custody during the inquiry, and Bishop, after reading a bill
relating to the murder, which was displayed on the wall of the room, was
heard by a constable to say, in a subdued tone, to May, "It was the blood
that sold us." Volunteering to give evidence, he said he got the corpse
from a grave, but declined to name the place whence he had got it,
alleging that the information would get into trouble two watchmen, who
had large families. May also made a voluntary statement, to the effect
that he got two "subjects" from the country, which he took first to
Grainger's theatre of anatomy, and afterwards to Guy's Hospital,
subsequently meeting Bishop, who promised him all he could get for a
"subject" above nine guineas if he would sell it for him. The inquest was
adjourned, and the police proceeded with their investigation.
The houses of Bishop and May had been promptly visited and searched by the
police, who found at the former's a sack, a large hamper, and a brad-awl,
the last showing recent bloodstains. At May's house in Dorset Street, New
Kent Road, they found a pair of breeches, stained with blood at the back.
On a second visit to Bishop's house the garden was dug over, and a jacket,
trousers, and a shirt found in one spot, and in another a coat, trousers,
a vest with blood on the collar and one shoulder, and a shirt with the
front torn. When the brad-awl was produced at Bow Street police-court, May
said, "That is the instrument I punched the teeth out with." Shields was
eventually discharged from custody, but the other three prisoners were
committed for trial on the capital charge.
The identity of the victim remained a mystery until the 19th of November,
a fortnight after the murder, when the corpse was recognised by a
foreigner named Brun as that of a boy named Carlo Ferrari, whom he had
brought from Italy two years before, but had not seen since July, 1830.
The boy picked up the means of living by exhibiting a tortoise and a pair
of white mice in the streets. He had been seen by several persons in or
near Nova Scotia Gardens on the 3rd of November, but he had not been seen
since, nor had he returned on that day to his miserable lodgings in
Charles Street, Drury Lane. The clothes found in Bishop's garden
corresponded with the description given of those worn by him when he was
last seen, and a little boy who played with Bishop's children stated that
they had, on the following day, shown him two white mice in a cage similar
to the one carried by Ferrari.
The incidents of the crime, as revealed from day to day, and the mystery
in which the identity of the victim was for some time veiled, created so
much excitement in the public mind, that when the prisoners were placed
in the dock at the Old Bailey, early in December, the court was crowded,
and a guinea each was paid for seats in the gallery, the occupants of
which, all fashionably dressed, as might be expected of those who could
afford to pay that price for the gratification of their love of the
sensational, had taken their seats the day before. Though the evidence was
but a recapitulation of the story told before in the police-court and the
inquest-room, it was listened to with the utmost avidity. The witnesses
for the defence were few, and their evidence valueless, except in the case
of May, for whom an _alibi_ was established in respect of the time between
the afternoon of the day preceding the murder and noon on the following
day. The prisoners were sentenced to death, but in May's case the sentence
was commuted into transportation for life. A sea-faring relative of mine,
who was second officer of the vessel in which May was sent out to Sydney,
described him as an athletic, wiry-looking man, with features expressive
of sternness, and a determined will, quite a different-looking man,
therefore, to his two companions in crime, who were duly hanged at
Newgate.
The crime of these men, and the deeds of Burke and Hare, created such a
scare, and exposed so vividly the temptation to murder afforded by the
prices paid by surgeons for "subjects," that the attention of parliament
was directed to the matter, and a Select Committee of the House of Commons
was appointed to inquire and report as to the facilities which might be
given for obtaining bodies for anatomical purposes in a legitimate manner.
Sir Astley Cooper, who was one of the eminent surgeons who gave evidence
before this committee, was asked whether the state of the law prevented
teachers of anatomy from obtaining the body of any person, which, in
consequence of some peculiarity of structure, they might be desirous of
procuring. He replied:--"The law does not prevent our obtaining the body
of an individual if we think proper; for there is no person, let his
situation in life be what it may, whom, if I were disposed to dissect, I
could not obtain.... The law only enhances the price, and does not prevent
the exhumation. Nobody is secured by the law; it only adds to the price of
the subject." The result of this inquiry was the passing of the Anatomy
Act, by which the bodies of persons dying in hospitals and workhouses, if
unclaimed by the relatives, may be placed at the disposal of the schools
of anatomy.
Reminiscences of the Cholera.
BY THOMAS FROST.
It is now more than sixty years since the strange and mysterious
visitation, as it was then considered, known as the cholera morbus, for
which fearsome name that of Asiatic cholera has since been substituted,
made its first appearance in this country, or anywhere west of the Ural
Mountains. Coming first from India, from the banks of the Ganges and the
Indus, the dread pestilence moved steadily westward and north-westward
until, creeping along the rivers of Russia, and desolating all the most
considerable towns of that country, it reached St. Petersburg. There it
raged with fearful severity, mowing down as with the scythe of Death more
than a thousand persons daily. So dreadful were the features of the
unknown malady, and so rapidly were its victims carried off, that the
ignorant populace of the capital attributed it to poison administered by
the doctors. A fearful tumult was excited by this belief, and it was with
great difficulty that it was suppressed.
From Russia the dire disease spread rapidly into almost every country in
Europe, and wherever it appeared created the profoundest awe and the most
bewildering terror. In Paris it broke out with extreme malignity in March,
1832, and soon raged there with greater virulence than it had exhibited in
any other city in Europe except St. Petersburg. The deaths soon reached
from four to five hundred daily, and during April they rose to a total for
the month of twelve thousand seven hundred. It was hinted that the ravages
of this new and dreadful disease were caused by the poisoning of the meat
sold in the markets and the water in the public fountains; and the
dwellers in the slums became so infuriated by this horrible and absurd
rumour that mobs perambulated the streets howling for vengeance on the
poisoners. Many unfortunate persons were murdered in the streets on being
denounced as the perpetrators of these imaginary crimes, and so paralysed
was the arm of justice by the influence of terror that nothing was done to
vindicate the majesty of the law. Everyone who could afford to leave Paris
fled from it with precipitation, and the city was abandoned to desolation
and anarchy. The legislative labours of the two Chambers were suspended,
and the peers and deputies were the first to set the example of flight,
though Louis Philippe and his family continued to reside at the Tuileries,
with an occasional sojourn of a few days at Neuilly.
I have a vivid recollection of the mingled awe and terror which this fell
disease inspired when it was announced that it had crossed the sea and
made its first victims in this country. It had made its way across the
continent from town to town on the banks of the great rivers, but into
England it was imported by sick sailors. Many generations had passed away
since anything like a pestilence had been known in England, and the
cholera therefore created a panic among all classes of the people, which
served to augment its virulence and render those of a nervous temperament
more liable to be attacked by it. Doctors were utterly unacquainted with
its proper treatment, and indeed had no knowledge whatever of the disease.
Hence it raged without check wherever it appeared, and the rapidity with
which it carried off its victims added to the terror inspired by its
approaches. The first death at Lower Norwood, where my parents then
resided, was that of the pastor of the Independent Chapel, situated only
two doors from my father's house. He died in a few hours from the time he
experienced the premonitory symptoms, and such was the dread of infection
that the corpse was buried the same night by torchlight, in the
burial-ground of the chapel, wrapped in a sheet coated with pitch.
Though a period of seventeen years separated the first cholera epidemic
from the second, the lessons which the former should have taught had not
been so well learned as they should have been, and the latter, with which
these reminiscences are chiefly concerned, inspired a wild, unreasoning
terror in only a little less degree than that of 1832.
I remember a case at Mitcham, in which the women attending a patient were
seized with a panic on the approach of death, and rushed out of the house,
leaving the poor wretch, a woman, to die alone, the corpse being
afterwards found rigid and distorted.
The apparently erratic manner in which the disease spread, sometimes
carrying off victims from one side of a street and sparing the other side,
sometimes smiting every member of a family in one house, and passing over
all the other houses in the same street, was a puzzle to persons who had
given no attention to the causes of the disease, and were content to
regard it as a sign of the wrath of God, reasoning about the matter as
little as did the Israelites whose relatives were swept off at
Kibroth-hattaavah. They had not given sufficient attention to the laws of
health to understand that the disease found its victims where those laws
were neglected, whether from carelessness or from ignorance.
I remember two cases at Croydon in which all the inmates of the houses in
which the disease manifested its dread presence were carried off by it.
One occurred in a cottage in St. James's Road, one of a row which had
originally been level with the road, but had become overshadowed by the
approach to the railway bridge. There were three victims in that house,
and no other case in the same row, or in the neighbourhood. The other case
occurred in King Street, one of several narrow, closely-built streets in
the centre of the town, and the victims were a widow and her only child,
the latter dying not alone, for, like Byron's Haidee,--
"----she held within
A second principle of life, which might
Have dawned a fair and sinless child of sin;
But closed its little being without light,
And went down to the grave unborn, wherein
Blossom and bough lie withered with one blight."
A remarkable incident occurred while the fell disease was in the full
swing of its ravages. The wife of a working man living in the Old Town, a
low-lying and densely populated quarter, was attacked by it, and at once
removed to a temporary hospital that had been established on Duppas Hill,
a tabular eminence overlooking the town, and in the thirteenth century the
scene of the tournament in which the son of Earl Warrenne was by
misadventure slain. There her husband went, on his return from labour, to
ascertain her condition, and heard with a shock which the reader may
imagine that she was dead. When the poor fellow had in some degree
recovered from the blow, he expressed a wish to see the corpse and take it
to his home. He seems to have been unable to realise that his wife was
really dead, though the nurses and doctors assured him that she had passed
away. The idea that life yet lingered in the form that was apparently
lifeless grew upon him as he gazed and though he may never have read "The
Giaour," he may have felt the force of the thought so finely expressed by
Byron in the lines that introduce his picture of the Greece of his day:--
"He who hath bent him o'er the dead,
Ere the first day of death is fled,
The first dark day of nothingness,
The last of danger and distress
(Before Decay's effacing fingers
Have swept the lines where beauty lingers),
And marked the mild angelic air,
The rapture of repose that's there,
The fixed yet tender traits that streak
The languor of the pallid cheek,
And--but for that sad shrouded eye,
That fires not, wins not, weeps not, now,
And but for that chill, changeless brow,
Where cold Obstruction's apathy
Appals the gazing mourner's heart,
As if to him it could impart
The doom he dreads, yet dwells upon;
Yes, but for these, and these alone,
Some moments, aye, one treacherous hour,
He still might doubt the tyrant's power;
So fair, so calm, so softly sealed,
The first, last look by death revealed!"
Whether it was feeling or reason that inspired the thought that life yet
lingered in the apparently inanimate, but not yet rigid form, which the
loving husband conveyed to his humble dwelling, it was undoubtedly to that
inspiration that the woman owed her preservation from death. For she was
not dead. Signs of returning animation were perceived when the supposed
corpse was placed upon the bed, and the neighbour women who came in to
perform the last sad offices for the dead were there to welcome her on her
return to life. I will not attempt to describe the feelings with which the
husband beheld the eyelids of his wife unclose, and the rose-tints return
to the pallid cheeks. Like the Greek painter who, conscious of the
inadequacy of his art to fully portray the grief of Agamemnon for the loss
of his son, covered the countenance of the old king with a veil, I draw
the curtain upon the scene, and leave it to the imagination of the reader.
Among the remedies for the cholera which came into vogue during the
prevalence of the epidemic of 1849, the rubbing of the stomach with brandy
and salt obtained a considerable degree of repute; and the chemists vied
with each other, as in the recent epidemics of influenza, in the
concoction and advertising of various cholera mixtures, one of the most
efficacious of which was a preparation of opium and chalk.
The lessons of the cholera were not so entirely neglected on this occasion
as they were after the epidemic of 1832; but it is a sad reflection on our
legislation that we were indebted to the ravages of disease, or rather to
the fear inspired by them, for sanitary reforms which ought to have
resulted from foresight. There had been sanitary inquiries by Royal
Commissions between 1842 and 1849, but little had been done towards
carrying out the recommendations which resulted from them. The existence
of cholera in India, and the causes which produced it, had long been
known; but so long as its ravages were confined to the people of that
country no one seemed to think that it concerned the people of England. It
was known, too, that whatever might be the true causes of zymotic
diseases, concerning which medical opinions differed, accumulations of
filth, contaminated sources of water supply, and an impure condition of
the atmosphere tended to produce their outbreaks, and to aggravate their
virulence. But then we had been used to these evils since the days of the
Plantagenets, and though they had become intensified with the increase of
population and the growth of the large towns, had not Malthus taught us
that epidemics of disease were one of the means used by divine providence
to prevent the numbers of the human race from exceeding the means of
subsistence?
The cholera epidemic of 1849 roused the public mind from its lethargy, and
prepared it to act upon the recommendations of the General Board of Health
and to comply with the Sanitary Act of that year. The old wells of London
were closed, and the like course was adopted in Croydon, where a constant
supply of practically pure water was obtained by boring down to the chalk.
Other towns followed the example, one of the foremost being Birmingham,
which received a supply which enabled the inhabitants to dispense with the
insalubrious rain-water butt. Sewerage works were undertaken where no
efficient system of drainage had before existed. Attention was called to
the important questions of sewage disposal and the pollution of rivers;
and though much even now remains to be done in this direction, and in the
improvement of the water supply of the large manufacturing towns of
Yorkshire and Lancashire, sanitation has been cleared of most of its
difficulties by better knowledge of the philosophy of cause and effect, so
that we no longer regard the calamities resulting from our own ignorance
and neglect of the laws of nature as the inflictions of Providence.
Some Old Doctors.
BY MRS. G. LINNAEUS BANKS.
It is not my intention to go back to those Greek fathers of the healing
art, Hippocrates and Galen, or to dwell on the days when every monastery
held within its walls some learned brother accredited to administer to
bodies as well as souls diseased, or when the mistress of every feudal
castle, every baronial-hall, was trained and skilled in leechcraft,
distilled herbs, concocted potions and unguents, and not only physicked
her household, but was prepared to staunch and dress the gaping wounds
received in siege or tournay. Nor yet have we ought to do with those
pretenders to science who mingled astrology with pharmacy, ascribed to
every plant its ruling planet, and held that the potency of all herbs
depended on the conjunction of planets, or the phase of the moon under
which they were gathered--a belief, indeed, under which old Nicholas
Culpepper compiled his well-known "Herbal" early in the seventeenth
century.