Oxford, Manchester and the Anatomy Act

The growing affluence of the middle and working classes led to a demand for cheaper, more accessible medical care. The providers of this were the new breed of general practitioners whose grounding was in surgery, and their training was largely provided by the London and provincial anatomy schools. Detailed anatomy was, for most nineteenth-century medical men, a skill rarely called upon in general practice. It was, however, a crucial element in doctors' claims to respectability and status, as it was central to their identity as men of science. Doctors found that anatomical proficiency was a means of distancing themselves from‘quacks’ at a time when there was little uniform medical training or qualification. The elevation of anatomy necessitated a supply of bodies, which was only realized firstly from the gallows and latterly from a widespread trade in bodysnatching. Again, claims to be men of professional standards led doctors to demand a more respectable source of dissection material. Medical men were tainted by their strong link to the degraded and hated resurrection men.

The 1832 Anatomy Act was an effort by Parliament to provide an adequate supply of cadavers for independent anatomy schools, which had become the lynchpin of medical education in the late eighteenth century. Anatomy allowed medical men of all disciplines to claim expertise and status despite little advance in therapeutics.