searching for a lackey to deal with all the dead bodies. Ideally, John would
also perform preparation of the corpses for anatomical lectures, and as the
new term was set to begin in September 1748, William and John met at
their Covent Garden venue to dissect a dead man’s arm. The autodidact’s
practiced hand with the knife had been acquired through years of self-
directed morbid curiosity. To William’s great surprise, John was an
instinctive dissector, and on the occasion of their first anatomic
investigation, William told his unschooled and callow brother that he had
the makings of an excellent anatomist and should never want for
employment.^12
Today, every medical school in the world has fully embalmed cadavers
that have been rigorously treated by experts with fixative agents that
prevent decay and putrefaction. The corpses’ blood vessels are flushed
with embalming chemicals that perfuse all the tissues in a body. A cadaver
can be stored at a cooled temperature for years without rotting, and a
semester’s anatomy lab can be passed without ever smelling decomposing
tissue, and the first-day shock of seeing a dead person fades away in
succeeding days as you realize you will never encounter maggots or pools
of pus.
The anatomy school at Covent Garden faced one major dilemma: the
corpses themselves. By the mid–18th century, many continental countries
had relaxed the Roman-era prohibitions regarding human dissection, but
England still had rigid proscriptions regarding the procurement of bodies.
A minuscule allotment of the bodies of condemned men was granted to the
Company of Barber-Surgeons in London in the 1500s, and little had
changed in the years that the Hunters’ school had started. The summer
months were off-limits for dissection due to the rotting stench of warm
bodies, but autumnal changes signaled the start of another dissection
season. As many as fifty people were hanged each year in London for even
trivial offenses, such as filching a watch.
For centuries, prisoners were kept at Newgate Prison (near St. Paul’s
Cathedral and present-day London Stock Exchange) and hanged at
Smithfield (near St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, one of the oldest hospitals in
the world and the site of the hanging, drawing, and quartering of Scottish
independence leader William Wallace), or more commonly in Hunter’s era
at the Tyburn Tree. In the northeast corner of Hyde Park, near the Marble
Arch, on Bayswater Road, is a small plaque in the middle of a small traffic