Dissection

The 1752 "Act for the better preventing the horrid Crime of Murder", usually known as the "Murder Act", mandated the dissection of the bodies of executed murderers (including female ones) or gibbeting for male murderers in particularly heinous cases. Seventeen year old Thomas Wilford, who had stabbed to death his wife ofjust one week, was the first to suffer dissection under this Act on the 22nd of June 1752, having been first hanged at Tyburn. The words of his sentence were as follows : "Thomas Wilford, you stand convicted of the horrid and unnatural crime of murdering Sarah, your wife. This Court doth adjudge that you be taken back to the place from whence you came, and there to be fed on bread and water till Wednesday next, when you are to be taken to the common

Place of execution, and there hanged by the neck until you are dead; after which your body is to be publicly dissected and anatomised, agreeable to an Act of Parliament in that case made and provided; and may God Almighty have mercy on your soul.” Fights often broke out beneath the gallows between the dissectionists and the prisoners’ relatives over custody of the body. In London, from 1752 to 1809, the bodies were taken to Surgeon's Hall in the Old Bailey where they were publicly anatomised in the lecture theatre, often before a large number of spectators. Women were not exempted from this and the remains of the infamous murderer Elizabeth Brownrigg, who had been hanged at Tyburn on the 14th of September 1767, were kept on display in Surgeon's Hall for many years after her execution. The skeleton of Mary Bateman, “the Yorkshire Witch” hanged at York in 1807, is still preserved.