“Indecent and Demoralising Representations”: Public Anatomy Museums in mid-Victorian England

Abstract

On 18 December 1873, at Marlborough Street magistrates’ court in London, Messrs Roumanielle, Davidson, and Dennison pleaded guilty to offences under the Obscene Publications Act 1857, and the magistrate Mr Knox ordered that their property, which had been held by the court since February, be destroyed. The prosecuting solicitor, Mr Collette, asked for the “privilege” of beginning the destruction himself, which was immediately granted, and, accompanied by Police Inspector Harnett and Sergeant Butcher, he proceeded to smash with a hammer a collection of wax anatomical models, the fragments of which were then handed back to the defendants. The destroyed models “which were of the most elaborate character, and said to cost a considerable sum of money” had formed part of Kahn's Anatomical Museum, which for more than twenty years had been the best-known popular medical exhibition in Britain.1 Jonathan Reinarz recently suggested that the museum was to nineteenth-century medical education what the clinic was to its practice: “museum medicine” focused students’ attention on particular anatomical sites of disease, dissected out from the rest of the body.2 Museums were particularly important to anatomy teaching, as they allowed more prolonged and careful study than the dissecting room, and availability of specimens could be guaranteed. In 1836, the anatomist Frederick Knox wrote that “[w]ithout museums the profession [of anatomy] would be in the state of man without a language”.3 Unlike the dissecting room, museums were open to the non-medical public. Only the well connected had an entree to the Royal College of Surgeons’ Museum, but there were smaller anatomy exhibitions in London and the provinces, open to anyone with the price of admission, in which models produced in Italy and France as aids to medical teaching were displayed to the public. The popularity of these museums suggests that, despite the concerns aired around the time of the 1832 Anatomy Act over the provision of cadavers for anatomists, the public regarded anatomy as an interesting and acceptable activity. Public anatomy museums were tolerated, or even recommended, by medical men, until the mid-1850s, when museums at which treatments for venereal disease were sold became targets for anti-quackery campaigns, in the course of which the medical profession made much of the “obscene” content of anatomy shows. The Obscene Publications Act was first employed against an anatomy museum in 1860 in Leeds, but London police and magistrates remained indifferent until the medical profession funded private prosecutions in the 1870s, when the last of the public anatomy museums was closed down. At the same time, anatomy assumed increasing prominence in medical training and by 1875 the General Medical Council required all medical students to undertake dissection. In the twentieth century, public anatomy museums received little attention from historians, and those who did discuss them tended to accept the medical profession's characterization of them as disreputable places, catering for those seeking eroticism and coarse humour. In 1924, a description of Antonio Sarti's exhibition, whose proprietor had been “so gentle, so quiet and patient in his explanations” of models that contemporary journalists and medical men had found unobjectionable, was included in an account of the Judge and Jury show, poses plastiques, and other “questionable” West End entertainments of the mid-nineteenth century.4 Later accounts of nineteenth-century public anatomy museums considered them primarily as popular entertainments or quack medicine shows.5 Rene Burmeister, however, re-evaluated them, accepting some of the educational claims made by their proprietors and noting that medical opposition arose after they had become linked with unorthodox medical practitioners.6 In this essay, I shall examine the content and purpose of popular anatomy museums and the medical profession's response to them. Though advertised after the Anatomy Act as a means of learning something of anatomy without the unpleasantness of dissection, by the 1850s anatomy museums were also dispensing medical advice and treatments for venereal disease: the museum setting gave the vendor an air of medical authority, and horrifying models of diseases alarmed patients and entertained casual visitors. The medical profession's labelling of public anatomy museums as obscene can be seen as a strategy for creating a medical monopoly of anatomy by categorizing it as knowledge from which laypeople could be excluded on moral grounds. Under English obscenity laws, professionals, by virtue of their education, social background and character, were deemed impervious to influences that could corrupt the weaker-minded public. By the 1870s, the practice of anatomy was the hurdle that initiated, and sometimes deterred, entrants to the medical profession. Though it enhanced the reputation of medical men as professional and dispassionate observers, anatomy was also seen as a potentially demoralizing science.