{"id":235,"date":"2016-09-19T14:26:49","date_gmt":"2016-09-19T14:26:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/crimcorpse\/?p=235"},"modified":"2025-02-26T13:26:31","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T13:26:31","slug":"diary-of-a-dissection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/crimcorpse\/2016\/09\/19\/diary-of-a-dissection\/","title":{"rendered":"The Diary of a Dissection: Jane Jamieson and the Newcastle Barber Surgeons. By Patrick Low"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The recent furore in France, over the wearing of Burkinis, has shone a new light on an age-old societal problem; the female body.\u00a0 Nowhere was the shock of a woman\u2019s form greater than on the c18th and c19th anatomists\u2019 slab.<\/p>\n

The prospect of total exposure to the eyes of an uncaring crowd and the certainty of physical mutilation was a deeply unsettling prospect to both men and women of the era. Such scruples, were not simply concerned with avoiding being the object of \u2018post-mortem porn\u2019 but intimately connected to, however dimly understood, the importance of the integrity of the body in the prevailing Christian understanding of Resurrection and the possibility of life beyond the gallows. It is to such a case that I shall now turn.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

On the morning of the 5th March, 1829, Newcastle\u2019s Guildhall was full to bursting for the trial of Jane Jamieson, charged with the murder of her mother. Such was the public\u2019s desire to witness the trial that many eager spectators were turned away. Amongst those unable to gain access was apprentice surgeon, Thomas Giordani Wright. His frustration at being denied a view of the proceedings was tempered slightly as, if Jamieson were found guilty, he would \u201cmost likely partake of the benefits accruing therefrom.\u201d The benefits of which Wright spoke were, of course, the use of Jamieson\u2019s body for dissection.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Jane<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Under the terms of the 1752 Murder Act, Jamieson was found guilty and sentenced to be hung and then anatomised by Newcastle\u2019s Barber Surgeons. In one fell swoop she became both the first woman hung on Newcastle\u2019s Town Moor since 1758 and the last. However, it was her anatomisation that proved the most shocking element for herself and the wider public, dissection of a woman being remarkably rare owing to the low execution rates.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The anatomist\u2019s slab was foremost in Jamieson\u2019s thoughts. As with so many before her, she feared the surgeon\u2019s knife more than the hangman\u2019s noose. In her final moments on the morning of her execution, she asked the attendant Reverend Green a \u201cquestion about her body.\u201d The Reverend suggested she was \u201cnot to care about her body but about her soul.\u201d She was not alone in placing the dread of dissection over the fear of hanging, as one ballad of the time makes clear.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cO pity my unhappy state,<\/p>\n

And now take warning by my fate,<\/p>\n

My lifeless body must be torn<\/p>\n

By sad dissection\u2019ss dreadful arm.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lamentation of Jane Jamieson, who was executed at Newcastle, on Saturday, the 7th day of March, 1829, for the murder of her own mother<\/strong><\/p>\n

http:\/\/ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk\/view\/edition\/7162<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jamieson\u2019s case is remarkable for several reasons, but chief amongst them is the detail in which it is recorded. Thanks to a chance discovery in 1985 in a house in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Jamieson\u2019s dissection is one of the very few, in much of the North East in this period, for which we have any sort of detailed record.<\/p>\n

The record in question is the diary of the aforementioned apprentice surgeon Giordani Wright. Wright was apprenticed to one Mr McIntyre of Newcastle between 1824-1829 and kept a near daily diary, which gives a fascinating insight into local medical practice in the early c19th; not least post-execution dissection.<\/p>\n

\"barbersurgeonshall\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Dissections and their attendant lectures took place at Newcastle\u2019s Barber Surgeon\u2019s Hall. The Hall was just a stone\u2019s throw from Carliol Street Gaol, completed the year of Jamieson\u2019s execution and where she spent her last hours. It is first described in the early 1700\u2019s in the marvellously titled Through England on a Side Saddle.\u00a0 <\/em>The author, Celia Fiennes, details a dissection room with a round table at its centre and seats and benches railed round for the convenience of spectators. She also noted the presence of two anatomised bodies, one of whose bones had been fastened with wires and another whose flesh had been boiled off. Both of these are reported in a remarkably matter of fact manner for a sight that we as historians so often believe to have been deeply troubling to the general populace in the period. The building itself was later rebuilt in 1730, and according to a local historian of the time was a stylistic triumph but rather, \u201ctoo great an ornament for such a dirty part of the town.” It was in this \u201cgreat ornament\u201d that Wright witnessed the dissection of Jamieson.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

According to Wright, Jamieson\u2019s body was used for instruction in a series of lectures that ran for just under two weeks, the first of which took place the Monday following her execution. The series was free to surgeons and open to the public on payment of half a crown per lecture or half a guinea for the full course. Records show that the fees were to cover the costs of the lectures and any additional profits were to go to the local Eye Infirmary. Wright gives a fascinating insight into the intended audience of these lectures. Of the few he attended, he found they offered very little information as anatomical lectures. Instead, he thought them far more appealing to the \u201ctyros of the profession\u201d and a more \u201cgeneral audience.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Wright was not entirely dismissive of the lectures. Indeed, in one lecture on Jamieson\u2019s brain, he noted how the freshness of the specimen allowed for far clearer instruction than was often the case. Newcastle\u2019s surgeons were victim to the same shortage of bodies that hindered anatomical instruction up and down the country and Newcastle itself was no less immune to the attendant nefarious practices that so often accompanied such a shortage. Writing just two months before Jamieson\u2019s trial the Newcastle Courant <\/em>noted, of resurrectionists, \u201cSo much does every person\u2026fear such men, that after dark everyone you meet in any bye place is sure to be taken for a resurrection-man.\u201d These popular fears weren\u2019t helped by medical men, like Wright, who relished the thought of his body terrifying others. In one entry he remarked, \u201cI can indeed contemplate with perfect satisfaction the idea of being stuck in a glass case \u2013 the terror of young ladies and little boys \u2013 the admiration and study of professors.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Patrick Low <\/a>is an expert in the history of execution in the North-East of Britain.\u00a0 His research blog, http:\/\/wwww.lastdyingwords.wordpress.com\/, is a must read<\/span> (seriously, go now and read) and Patrick will shortly be completing his PhD at Sunderland University.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 The recent furore in France, over the wearing of Burkinis, has shone a new light on an age-old societal problem; the female body.\u00a0 Nowhere was the shock of a woman\u2019s form greater than on the c18th and c19th anatomists\u2019 slab. The prospect of total exposure to the eyes of an uncaring crowd and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":225,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23,2,43,3,17,46,44,27,11],"class_list":["post-235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-biological-death","tag-criminal-corpse","tag-crowds","tag-interdisciplinarity","tag-medicine","tag-punishment-spaces","tag-spectacle","tag-the-body","tag-university-of-leicester"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/crimcorpse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/crimcorpse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/crimcorpse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/crimcorpse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/225"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/crimcorpse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/crimcorpse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":239,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/crimcorpse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235\/revisions\/239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/crimcorpse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/crimcorpse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/crimcorpse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}