in teaching away from home) my grandfather once more retired to a strictly studious and professional life at his consulting-rooms in New Broad Street, giving much time to literary work, including the writing of a large number of physiological articles for the 'Penny Encyclopædia.'

Dr Southwood Smith at this period assisted in founding the 'Westminster Review.' This Review, supported as it was by men of great ability and earnest thought, took, as is well known, a leading place in the promotion of the political and social reforms of the day.

His own contributions to it were many. Besides the articles on "Quarantine and Sanitary Laws" already mentioned, the one on "Education," which appeared in the first number, may be specially referred to.

There was also one calling attention to the horrors arising from there being no proper provision for supplying the anatomical schools with the means of dissection, which led to very practical results.

Body-snatching" is now an extinct crime. Such was the name given to the practice of robbing graves of the bodies of the dead in order

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to sell them for the purpose of dissection. practices were an outrage against all the feelings which render the resting - places of the dead hallowed spots. One can imagine the horror which the friends of the newly interred must have experienced in finding that their graves had been violated during the night; and worse still were the midnight scenes when the work was interrupted by the police, and struggles ensued.

The men who carried on this trade were called "resurrection-men": they were a depraved and dangerous class, and if the state of things then existing had caused no other evil than that of educating such a class, it would still have been worth much effort to get it remedied.

Without bodies for dissection medical education was impossible, and at that time there was only one legal means by which they could be obtained those of executed criminals were made over to the medical profession for the purpose of dissection. But this source was, happily, even then a scanty one. Until, therefore, some other provision was made, the employment of "resurrection-men," though against the law, and in itself

revolting to the professors of anatomy, was a necessity.

The

The difficulty was an increasing one. wretched men whose trade it was to supply the medical schools were punished with imprisonment and heavy fines, and were, not unnaturally, regarded with abhorrence by the mob—such abhorrence that it was often difficult to protect them from its fury when arrested. In Scotland, especially, this popular feeling was so strong that disgraceful outrages were committed against those even suspected of being concerned in exhumation; the churchyards were watched, and the obstacles in obtaining subjects for the schools had become so many that the students were fast deserting them. Indeed throughout Great Britain it appeared as if there would soon be a general desertion of all the native schools, and that students would go to Paris for the education they could not get at home.

In the article by Dr Southwood Smith which first called public attention to these evils, he points out, in a very striking manner, the paramount necessity of a supply of subjects. He reminds his readers of the wild theories of former

times when anatomical knowledge was not possessed, and enforces on their attention the fact that this knowledge can only be acquired, with any degree of perfection, by means of dissection. He further reminds them that no operation can be performed without torture to the living, and danger to life itself, by the hand of a surgeon unpractised in dissection; and no clear judgment formed by the physician on the diseases of the human frame-diseases generally seated in organs hidden from the eye-without a study of the internal structure.

After shortly passing over the evils of the system then prevailing, which have just been pointed out evils which were then very generally known-he suggests the remedy,--a very simple one. It was, to cease to give the bodies of executed criminals for anatomical purposes, and thus in a measure to take off the stigma on dissection; and then to appropriate to that purpose the bodies of all those who die in hospitals and workhouses unclaimed by relatives.

Nothing was done for some time, till in 1828, three years after this paper was written, there came the horrible discovery that the difficulty

of obtaining subjects from the churchyards had become so great that two men, Burke and Hare, had resorted to murder to supply the need-the temptation having been the large price to be obtained for bodies.

When things had come to this climax, legislalative attention was aroused. At this time the article which had appeared in the Westminster Review' was reprinted as a pamphlet, under the title of The Use of the Dead to the Living.' In this form it went through several editions, a copy being presented to members of both Houses of Parliament.

The measures recommended in it were mainly adopted by the Legislature, and have proved completely successful.

There is something at first sight sad in a plan which lets anything that is painful in the thought of such an appropriation of the bodies of the dead fall exclusively on the poor. This did not fail to suggest itself to my grandfather's mind. But it is to the survivors alone that such pain comes, and these friendless ones would have none left to shrink from this use of their remains. Such were to be chosen for the necessary purpose, not