Positioned after the attitude of Michelangelo’s Pieta, the cast of a partially dissected body by John Goodsir, a pupil of the anatomist Robert Knox, ca. 1845. Some scholars wonder if the cast was based on a man described in Goodsir’s Anatomical Memoirs (1868): “an Edinburgh carter of intensely whisky habits, who in a drunken state fell from his cart and died on the spot [and] remained free from decomposition during thirty days”
Featured on PDR in the essay The Great Majority: Body Snatching and Burial Reform in 19th-Century Britain
As populations flocked to city centres in the 19th century, church cemeteries began to overflow with the dead. Roger Luckhurst exhumes the history of this period, when anatomists fuelled a body-snatching trade led by “resurrection men” and reformers sought alternatives to the toxic urban graveyards and their pestilent fumes.
Also appearing in the essay…
Cast of a partially dissected body
Artist
Date
ca. 1845
From
The Sack-’Em-Up Men: An Account of the Rise and Fall of the Modern Resurrections
Image Size
1470 x 1026