New season of D&G Heritage features a talk from Cat Irving, curator of the Surgeon’s Hall Museum in Edinburgh

Ms Irving's talk was entitled Bloody Knives and Body Snatchers: the Rise of Surgery in Edinburgh.

The speaker at the first meeting of the new season of Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society (D&G Heritage) was Cat Irving, curator of the Surgeon’s Hall Museum in Edinburgh, and her talk was entitled Bloody Knives and Body Snatchers: the Rise of Surgery in Edinburgh. The meeting was also held on Zoom.

Cat started by explaining that while today surgeons are regarded as the elite of medical practitioners, this was not the case in the early days of medicine. A surgeon was essentially a technician whose main duty was to carry out amputations – done without anaesthetic until the mid 19th century – under the direction of a physician, who would be medically trained. Surgeons also worked as barbers.

The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh was founded by Royal Charter in 1505, and is the oldest in the world. Much of its work was concerned with dissection of bodies for training physicians, but there were also public dissections, where important people were allowed to see dissections in order to appreciate the beauty of God’s creation. However, dissection was only permitted using the bodies of criminals who had been hanged, and as a result, demand for corpses greatly outstripped supply. This gave rise to the infamous ‘body snatchers’, who would steal bodies of the recently deceased from coffins and sell them to surgeons. In the mid 19th century a body snatcher could be paid over £7 for a corpse, a substantial sum in those days. Coffins were therefore often placed in large iron cages, or mortsafes, to protect them. A small one designed to protect an individual coffin can be seen in Dumfries Museum.

The notorious William Burke and William Hare took advantage of this situation and committed a series of murders, selling the bodies of their victims to the anatomist Robert Knox. Following their arrest, Hare turned King’s evidence and was released, but Burke was hanged – and his body used for dissection. His skeleton is still in the Surgeon’s Hall Museum; Cat Irving was involved in recent restoration work, which at one point involved having the infamous skeleton’s arms draped over her back in order to reach difficult areas! In 1828 the law was changed to allow unclaimed bodies of non-criminals to be used for dissection (as was already the case in France) and body snatching declined.

The last part of Cat Irving’s talk turned to 19th century improvements in surgery. Most notable was the development of anaesthetics. Ether was used initially, but it’s inflammability led to it being replaced by chloroform, which was used for the first time by Sir James Young Simpson in Edinburgh. However, many of the early anaesthetised patients died, and through the work of the Glasgow bacteriologist Joseph Lister and others, this was found to be due to bacterial contamination transmitted by the surgeon’s hands. This led to staff and operating tables being sterilised with carbolic acid (phenol), and eventually to modern-day anti-infection procedures.

Despite the rather ghoulish nature of her presentation, Cat Irving’s lecture was both highly informative and entertaining. Her extensive knowledge of the subject was obvious from the ready answers she provided to a range of questions from the audience at the end. Members then adjourned to the foyer of The Bridge for a chat over tea and biscuits.

The next meeting will be held at The Bridge on Friday, October 25 at 7..30pm when the speakers will be Johnny Burks and John Martin. Their talk is entitled Twenty years of studying pine martens in Galloway Forest Park. This meeting will be on-line only, via Zoom. Further information can be found on the Society’s website, www.dgnhas.org.uk, or its Facebook page.

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