Dissecting the Criminal Corpse

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxx

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2. Introduction

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

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   2. The Condemned Body Leaving the Courtroom

      • Elizabeth T. Hurren

      Pages 3-32Open Access

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   3. Becoming Really Dead: Dying by Degrees

      • Elizabeth T. Hurren

      Pages 33-68Open Access

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   4. In Bad Shape: Sensing the Criminal Corpse

      • Elizabeth T. Hurren

      Pages 69-118Open Access

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3. Preamble

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 119-123

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   2. Delivering Post-Mortem ‘Harm’: Cutting the Corpse

      • Elizabeth T. Hurren

      Pages 125-169Open Access

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   3. Mapping Punishment: Provincial Places to Dissect

      • Elizabeth T. Hurren

      Pages 171-216Open Access

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   4. The Disappearing Body: Dissection to the Extremities

      • Elizabeth T. Hurren

      Pages 217-274Open Access

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   5. ‘He that Hath an Ill-Name Is Half-Hanged’: The Anatomical Legacy of the Criminal Corpse

      • Elizabeth T. Hurren

      Pages 275-291Open Access

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4. Back Matter

   Pages 293-326

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Those convicted of homicide were hanged on the public gallows before being dissected under the Murder Act in Georgian England. Yet, from 1752, whether criminals actually died on the hanging tree or in the dissection room remained a medical mystery in early modern society. Dissecting the Criminal Corpse takes issue with the historical cliché of corpses dangling from the hangman’s rope in crime studies. Some convicted murderers did survive execution in early modern England. Establishing medical death in the heart-lungs-brain was a physical enigma. Criminals had large bull-necks, strong willpowers, and hearty survival instincts. Extreme hypothermia often disguised coma in a prisoner hanged in the winter cold. The youngest and fittest were capable of reviving on the dissection table. Many died under the lancet. Capital legislation disguised a complex medical choreography that surgeons staged. They broke the Hippocratic Oath by executing the Dangerous Dead across England from 1752 until 1832. 

This book is open access under a CC-BY license. 

• History of crime
• Criminal corpse
• Medical humanities
• Criminal punishment
• Social history

• School of Historical Studies, University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom

  Elizabeth T. Hurren

Elizabeth T. Hurren is Reader in the Medical Humanities at the University of Leicester, UK, and an expert on the history of the body, medicine, poverty and welfare in Europe from early modern to modern times. She has published two major books since 2007, Protesting about Pauperism: Poverty, Politics and Poor Relief in Late-Victorian England and Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and Its Trade in the Dead Poor, c. 1832 to 1929.

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