Anatomy and Punishment in Late Eighteenth-Century New York

Abstract

The last two decades of the eighteenth century comprised the golden age of American legal reform. Reformers called for replacing frequent clemency under harsh laws with milder codes and fewer pardons. The prison, not the gallows, became the most important instrument of retribution. In the words of Michel Foucault, penal reform meant the rise ofa gentle way of Influenced by debates in neighboring Pennsylvania, New York state also chose this path. Yet the course of reform was not straightforward.1 This essay is about one law that belies any simple understanding of legal reform. It explores the origins and implementation of a 1789 New York statute that provided for the dissection of executed felons. While from the middle of the eighteenth century English statutory law directed that murderers' cadavers be delivered to surgeons, New York's anatomy act marked the first codification of this practice in America. The American genesis of dissection as a means of ret? ribution took place in the midst ofa rhetorical commitment to penal reform. That irony needs to be explained.2 Oddly, American historians have failed to examine the punitive role of dissection. In part this may be due to the fact that the New York anatomy act does not make explicit the relationship between dissection and punishment. Accord? ing to the act's preamble, the law is meant to prevent grave robbing. Using the cadavers of executed felons for medical study would ensure a sufficient number of anatomical specimens. Retribution is not mentioned. Yet it will be argued that the anatomy act was more than simply a pragmatic means of furnishing surgeons with corpses. Applying to executed murders, arsonists, and burglars, the act created a new punishment to be added to the death sentence. New York's anatomy act, then, had two facets. It sought to prevent anatomists from desecrating cemeteries and, although silent about the implications for criminal justice, it introduced dis? section into America's retributive apparatus. The reticence of the statute is equalled by that of its framers. There are no surviving records of legislative debates which might aid in understanding New York's anatomy act. Neither have private papers yielded clues about its goals. In fact, it remains impossible to know the identity of either its proponents or its detractors. The essential documents required for the kind of close textual analysis favored by legal historians do not exist. And even if such legislative sources were available, they would not fully explain the significance of dissection as an innovative mode of punishment. For debate over the role of dissection did not only take place in legislatures and courtrooms. Shaped by a tradition of popular protest against anatomy, the debate also extended to late eighteenth-century streets and alleyways.