Having seen the growing importance of morbid anatomy to the education of doctors in nineteenth-century England and the responses to this in Manchester and Oxford, we can now examine whether the basic material was available to students and what effect supply had on medical school development in the early part of the period. This chapter will examine two themes: firstly, the legal and illegal supply of bodies in Manchester and Oxford (allied with the growing dominance of anatomy within the medical curriculum); and secondly, public attitudes to dissection.

Despite the problems in revealing covert body supply, it has been possible to uncover a rough approximation of legal supply of bodies to surgeons despite the difficulty of using the assize records. This has been done through an examination of the local press in Oxford and Manchester, as trials were covered in detail by Jackson's Oxford Journal and the Manchester Guardian. For Oxford, Thomas Hearne's contemporary account is extremely illuminating, detailing trials that resulted in hangings and ultimately in anatomization, as well as describing instances of bodysnatching in the city. The clandestine nature of bodysnatching results in very little obvious evidence of the practice, unless the state was successful in prosecuting resurrection men. Again the local press is extremely useful in documenting successful and unsuccessful bodysnatching incidents.