RRECTIONIST, THE [motion picture]
Series: MCIS film collection
Place of publication: Yale University
Number of pages: 16
Description: This film relates the causes of graverobbing in England and scotland, from the late 18th Century until passage of the Warburton Act in 1832.  Problems developed when the legal supply of bodies became insufficient for teaching increasing numbers of medical students and for anatomical research.  Doctors, aspiring to a thorough knowledge of human structure, feared incompetence and patient suffering.    This produced an ethical dilemma: a choice between grave robbing and malpractice.  The growth of professional body-snatching as an underworld enterprise culninated in murders to supply the dissecting room. William Burke and William Hare were arrested for killing 16 victims, and the outraged public blamed the anatomists as well.  Thomas Wakely, first editor of LANCET and Astley Cooper, London's leading surgeon, argued eloquently for reform that would make possible a sufficient legal supply of bodies.  A murder in London finally stirred Parliament to acton, and new legistlation resolved the problem.
Notes: Miami University's MCIS film collection