Dying for Victorian Medicine

By: Elizabeth T. Hurren

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Synopsis: In the nineteenth century the business of anatomy was very profitable. However, existing in a Victorian underworld, its shadowy details and potential links to the Jack-the-Ripper murders were seldom exposed. In this accessible and vibrant account, Elizabeth Hurren brings to life lost pauper stories recovered from the asylums, infirmaries, workhouses, body dealers, railway men and undertakers that supplied the medical profession with dissection subjects. The details of those trading networks, corpse sales, body parts fees, railway transportation costs and funeral expenses have never been documented before now, yet this economy of supply in the dead underpinned modern medicine. In Dying for Victorian Medicine, Hurren allows us to look for the first time into the human face of abject poverty, working back in the archives from death to touch the lives of those compelled by pauperism to give up a loved one's body for dissection.