HiSCoD

Description (langue originale) : -

Description (anglais) : ‘Crowds targeted the cholera hospitals, set up by the new local boards of health, and the palanquin carts which were rumoured to carry (p.133) stolen pauper bodies.10 The Anatomy Act was a connected cause. Passed during the same session as the Reform Act, the legislation allowed surgeons to claim the bodies of paupers who had died in workhouses or hospitals if those corpses were unclaimed for burial.11 Gothic literature such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) shaped popular imagination about dissection, and fears were heightened further by the infamous Burke and Hare murders in Edinburgh in 1828. Rumours arose that hospital governors would use the clause to their financial advantage, especially after the new poor law enabled the construction of workhouses as punitive institutions designed to increase efficiency. Marxist historians have argued that the populace regarded the Anatomy Act as a piece of class legislation. Gwyn Williams described it as ‘the pursuit of the propertyless beyond the grave’.12 As with radical reform protests, the issue revolved around the non-propertied and non-represented being excluded from the civic body politic. This time, they were excluded not just in life, but also in death. The main opponent of the bill in parliament was Henry Hunt, then MP for Preston, who thereby cemented connections between the issue, radical politics and the legacy of Peterloo. The cholera and anatomy rioters mirrored the tactics of food rioters, employing prior threats and community justice against perpetrators of immoral actions seen to have transgressed moral norms.’ Navickas (2016) p. 131.