The previous chapter dealt largely with the erratic supply of bodies to the medical schools of Manchester and Oxford in the wake of the Anatomy Act. We now turn to the resulting responses of Oxford and Manchester in the provision of anatomically focused medical education demanded by the General Medical Council in the second half of the nineteenth century. This chapter considers firstly the enduring dominance of anatomy in the medical curriculum (perhaps to the detriment of other specialties such as physiology) and therefore the continuing dependence on large numbers of bodies, by examining the development of Oxford and Manchester medical schools in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The previous chapter provided some evidence to support the claim that private anatomy schools lost out to hospital schools in the metropolis due to the latter's better access to bodies for dissection, the lynchpin of surgery. That conclusion is certainly accurate; private schools did disappear, not only in London but also elsewhere, to be replaced by medical schools attached to hospitals. However, as this chapter aims to demonstrate, it is necessary to examine the wider development of medical education in the nineteenth century, particularly outside the metropolis.

The records at Oxford University, which are in good condition for this later period, demonstrate that the medical staff of the university felt unable to compete with metropolitan and provincial medical schools and so promoted their own medical department as an elite preparatory school for metropolitan high-fliers.