Conclusion

Abstract

This book is 125,000 words long. By taking the spine in your hand and thumbing the pages the scale of the human stories can be visualised in the flickering black and white print. Each word represents an equivalent corpse sold in Victorian times. This was the scale of the anatomy trade found in many forgotten entries in burial books or dissection registers. A lot more still need to be added to the 17,500 lives recovered for posterity in the four chosen case studies. This human face of an economy of supply, wrote one social commentator in the British Medical Journal in 1870, was memorable:

Coherent in statistical despairs

With such a total of distracted life…

To see it put down in figures on a page —

Plain, silent, clear, as God sees through the earth

The scene of all the graves; that’s terrible

For one who is not God, and cannot right

The wrong he looks on.¹

Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there also is love for humanity.

Hippocrates, Precepts, vi (Littré, ix, 258)