Arts and Social Sciences, Irving K. Barber Faculty of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Ikebuchi, Reilly
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
The British Cholera Riots of 1831 and 1832 were a series of working-class protests against public health policies and the perceived proliferation of graverobbing during the Second Cholera Pandemic. For decades, medicine had been increasingly institutionalized as an arm of biopower. Medicine reinforced existing power structures, and in exchange, legislative and judicial bodies granted medical authorities the prerogative to experiment on working-class bodies. When cholera arrived in Britain, the working class was forced to choose between submitting themselves to potentially predatory medical authorities or face disease and death alone. This thesis investigates the historical relationship between doctors and poor communities to understand why the Cholera Riots occurred. It contends that the riots were a reaction by the working class to the encroachment of this biopolitical medical authority on traditional cultural practices and bodily rights. Through a genealogical analysis of medicine’s relationship with the working class and a historical analysis of the Cholera Riots supported by archival research, this thesis broadens the traditional scope of research to introduce new perspectives and contexts. Traditionally studied as an epidemiological event, I posit that the Cholera Riots must be situated in a broader chronological scope to understand the power dynamics at work. This thesis thus aims to return agency to the rioters by providing a historical rationale for their behaviour that moves beyond their reputation as irrational.
Anatomy of a Riot: The Biopolitics of the British Cholera Riots, 1831–1832 by Reilly Ikebuchi B.A., University of British Columbia Okanagan, 2022 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Interdisciplinary Studies) (Power, Conflict and Ideas) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) August 2024 © Reilly Ikebuchi, 2024ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis entitled: Anatomy of a Riot: The Biopolitics of the British Cholera Riots, 1831–1832 Submitted by Reilly Ikebuchi in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts. Dr. Margaret Carlyle, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Supervisor Dr. Agnieszka Doll, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Tim Paulson, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Supervisory Committee Member Dr. George Grinnell, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies University Examiner iii Abstract The British Cholera Riots of 1831 and 1832 were a series of working-class protests against public health policies and the perceived proliferation of graverobbing during the Second Cholera Pandemic. For decades, medicine had been increasingly institutionalized as an arm of biopower. Medicine reinforced existing power structures, and in exchange, legislative and judicial bodies granted medical authorities the prerogative to experiment on working-class bodies. When cholera arrived in Britain, the working class was forced to choose between submitting themselves to potentially predatory medical authorities or face disease and death alone. This thesis investigates the historical relationship between doctors and poor communities to understand why the Cholera Riots occurred. It contends that the riots were a reaction by the working class to the encroachment of this biopolitical medical authority on traditional cultural practices and bodily rights. Through a genealogical analysis of medicine’s relationship with the working class and a historical analysis of the Cholera Riots supported by archival research, this thesis broadens the traditional scope of research to introduce new perspectives and contexts. Traditionally studied as an epidemiological event, I posit that the Cholera Riots must be situated in a broader chronological scope to understand the power dynamics at work. This thesis thus aims to return agency to the rioters by providing a historical rationale for their behaviour that moves beyond their reputation as irrational. iv Lay Summary The British Cholera Riots of 1831 and 1832 were a series of riots against doctors. The medical system had historically mistreated impoverished communities by employing graverobbers and using poor bodies for research. When a cholera pandemic arrived on British shores in 1831, the poor believed doctors opportunistically used the pandemic to further exploit their patients. This thesis investigates the historical relationship between doctors and poor communities to understand why the Cholera Riots occurred. v Preface This thesis was written by Reilly Ikebuchi with guidance from Dr. Margaret Carlye, Dr. Tim Paulson, and Dr. Agnieszka Doll. No generative artificial intelligence was used to write this thesis. vi Table of Contents Abstract ..................................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ........................................................................................................................................... iv Preface ........................................................................................................................................................ v Table of Contents .................................................................................................................................... vi List of Images ......................................................................................................................................... viii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................ ix Introduction ............................................................................................................................................... 1 Historiography ...................................................................................................................................... 5 Theory and Methodology ................................................................................................................. 12 Chapter One: Use of the Dead to the Living ................................................................................... 21 Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 21 Riot or Die ............................................................................................................................................ 23 Anatomical Theatre Premieres ....................................................................................................... 31 Grave Solution .................................................................................................................................... 40 The Anatomy Act ................................................................................................................................ 50 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................... 53 Chapter Two: An Epidemic of Fear ................................................................................................... 56 Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 56 The Blue Death ................................................................................................................................... 57 First Case Scenario ........................................................................................................................... 62 Health Boards and Hospitals .......................................................................................................... 73 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................... 82 Chapter Three: The Cholera Riots ..................................................................................................... 84 Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 84 Bring Out the Burkers ....................................................................................................................... 86 Aberdeen Cholera Riot ..................................................................................................................... 91 Paisley Cholera Riot .......................................................................................................................... 93 Liverpool Cholera Riots.................................................................................................................... 97 London Cholera Riot ....................................................................................................................... 102 Manchester Cholera Riot ............................................................................................................... 103 Consequences .................................................................................................................................. 108 vii Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 113 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 115 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................................... 119 viii List of Images Image 1. Thomas Rowlandson. William Hunter (1718–1783) in his museum in Windmill Street on the day of resurrection, surrounded by skeletons and bodies, some of whom are searching for their missing parts. 1782. Engraving. Wellcome Collection, London, England. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) .......................................................................................................... 29 Image 2. Thomas Rowlandson. Doctor Humbugallo, an itinerant medicine vendor, selling his wares from a stage with an assistant dressed as a court fool. n.d. Watercolour. Wellcome Collection, London, England. Public Domain Mark. .................................................................. 33 Image 3. Thomas Rowlandson. A woman dying in the arms of her family, an unhappy doctor leaves the room realising that it is his final payment. 1786. Aquatint. Wellcome Collection, London, England. Public Domain Mark. .................................................................................... 34 Image 4. John William Gear. A dead victim of cholera at Sunderland in 1832. 1832. Coloured Lithograph. Wellcome Collection, London, England. Public Domain Mark. ............................. 58 ix Acknowledgements I would like to sincerely thank my supervisor, Dr. Margaret Carlyle, for her support throughout my studies these last three years. My thesis began in History 310: The History of Pandemics and it has been incredible to see how far it has progressed. This was only possible because of her constant guidance, encouragement, and dedication to my success. I feel deeply blessed to have benefited from her mentorship. My defense committee has been invaluable to the completion of this thesis. I am incredibly grateful to Dr. Agnieszka Doll and Dr. Tim Paulson who have generously lent their time and expertise to my project. I have learned a considerable amount from their insights. I could not have pursued my studies without my parents’ support. Their love for me and enthusiasm for my work has been a constant source of encouragement. I would also like to thank my partner, Andrea, for her endless confidence in me, especially in the moments I doubted myself. Lastly, I would like to thank Robert Common for his gracious interest in my work and his kind words of advice throughout my writing process. 1 Introduction On 2 September 1832, John Brogan (n.d.–1832) was nearly buried without his head.1 The young boy was killed—not from decapitation—but from an outbreak of cholera. Sometime in the quiet hours of the night, the hospital’s apothecary sawed Brogan’s head from his corpse. The boy’s body was then sealed in a coffin; his head was secretly stashed away. The body would have been buried without concern if not for one small detail. On the way to the graveyard, Brogan’s grandfather, John Hayes (n.d.), noticed that his grandchild’s coffin was unnamed. All other caskets were labelled with their corpse’s identity to avoid confusion during their transportation and burial. At the graveyard, Hayes and others opened Brogan’s coffin. One can only imagine the family’s dismay when they pried off the lid. Brogan’s head had been “taken off close to the shoulders, and a brick put in its place”.2 Shavings littered the inside of the coffin, presumably to muffle or cushion the brick as the body was being transported. News of the mutilated boy spread rapidly across Manchester. That afternoon, a crowd of three or four hundred people gathered at the gates of the Swan Street Cholera Hospital. They demanded to be let in and clamoured to see Brogan’s body. The coffin was disinterred, and Hayes again opened the lid to show the crowd. The Chester Chronicle reported: “The screams and yells of the women, who formed the greater part of the mob, now became horrifying in the extreme; the coffin was seized by several men, who bore it away on their shoulders; and a cry was raised of ‘Burn the Hospital’.”3 The crowd lifted up the coffin and carried it through the streets, passing by the cholera hospital as they marched, and their numbers grew steadily. When the crowd had reached about three thousand people, they turned back and assaulted the cholera hospital, smashing the windows and pulling down the walls that surrounded the 1 See: “Cholera Riot at Manchester,” Chester Chronicle, 7 September 1832. British Newspaper Archive. 2 “Cholera Riot at Manchester,” Chester Chronicle. 3 “Cholera Riot at Manchester,” Chester Chronicle. 2 property. They found the doctors had long since fled.4 The sick patients were ushered from the building as the rioters unleashed their rage, demolishing its interior. Beds, tables, and furniture were turned into kindling as rioters burned a hearse in the street. It was several hours before the police dispersed the mob. The Manchester Cholera Riot was only one incident in a much broader pattern of civil unrest. When the Second Cholera Pandemic spread across Europe and North America for the first time between 1826 and 1837, riots erupted against state authorities.5 From Russia to Quebec, these events collectively known as the Cholera Riots made varying claims that cholera disguised a “Malthusian cull” of the poor by political elites.6 However, when cholera first arrived in the United Kingdom in 1831, the British Cholera Riots that followed focused uniquely on the prerogative of medical authorities over working-class bodily autonomy.7 ‘Medical authority’ here refers broadly to the people and offices whose social and political authority is derived from medical expertise, the sum of whom formed the apparatus responsible for healthcare, medical pedagogy, and epidemiological responses. This encompasses the national community of anatomists, physicians, and surgeons, as well as the institutional bodies—such as the Boards of Health—that existed specifically for epidemiological security purposes. Rather than targeting government officials like their European counterparts, British rioters focused their ire solely on these medical authorities. John Brogan’s story is an excellent illustrative example of the peculiarity of the British Cholera Riots. It is well documented in historical sources, from which we can unambiguously 4 “Shocking Circumstance–Probable Murder,” Poor Man’s Guardian, 8 September 1832. British Newspaper Archive. 5 The First Cholera Pandemic did not reach Western Europe. Richard J. Evans, “Epidemics and Revolutions: Cholera in Ninetenth-Century Europe,” Past & Present 120, no. 1 (August 1, 1988): 125, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/120.1.123. 6 Samuel K. Cohn Jr., Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS (Oxford University Press, 2018), 180, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198819660.001.0001. 7 Evans, “Epidemics and Revolutions,” 138. 3 glean the motivation of the rioters, culpability of medical authorities, and geography of the riot. Such tangible evidence is nonetheless atypical, as most Cholera Riots occurred in response to incidents between the working class and medical authority that are less easily reconstructed. In Paisley, for instance, we know that a mob destroyed a local cholera hospital after discovering that graverobbers were operating in the local burial grounds.8 Yet, there is no evidence that local doctors were involved, and the number of stolen corpses is disputed. In other jurisdictions, like Liverpool, several Cholera Riots were instigated when doctors attempted to remove the sick from their homes to the local hospital—well before any purported misconduct occurred.9 In such instances, it is difficult to establish whether the rioters’ reactions to medical authority were justified using available primary sources, as they were often speculative in nature. Cholera hospitals that were temporarily established to mitigate the disease were whispered to be sites of dissections.10 Cholera burial grounds were frequently suspected of being raided for cadavers. Policies implemented by the Boards of Health, a national network of committees established by the Privy Council to combat the epidemic, resulted in rushed burials and the infringement of working-class customs, while further stoking rumours of clandestine activities.11 As illustrated in Brogan’s case, such rumours were not unfounded. The apothecary almost certainly intended to use the boy’s head for anatomical study. Cadaveric dissections had provided the foundation for medical research and pedagogy for decades. ‘Resurrectionists’—professional body thieves, such as graverobbers—acquired cadavers through unscrupulous 8 For a full description of the riot, see: Michael Durey, The Return of the Plague: British Society and the Cholera 1831–2 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Ltd, 1979), 178–179; R.J. Morris, Cholera 1832: The Social Response to an Epidemic, 1st Edition (London: Routledge, 1976), 109–110, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003278504. 9 Sean Burrell and Geoffrey Gill, “The Liverpool Cholera Epidemic of 1832 and Anatomical Dissection—Medical Mistrust and Civil Unrest,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 60, no. 4 (2005): 478–98. 10 Fiona Hutton, The Study of Anatomy in Britain, 1700–1900, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2013), 236, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315654522. 11 Pamela K. Gilbert, Cholera: Doctoring the Social Body in Victorian England (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 51. 4 means to sell to anatomy schools. These resurrectionists primarily targeted the graveyard corpses of impoverished communities due to the greater number of cadavers and lack of guards.12 As the theft of corpses was not a felony, the poor had very few avenues of recourse against this predatory trade.13 Resurrectionists were sometimes convicted of a misdemeanour; doctors were never prosecuted for their purchases. As such, when cholera first arrived in Britain and the working class was asked to trust medical authority, doctors were treated with immediate suspicion. The culmination of these tensions between the working class and medical authority help explain why the British Cholera Riots were such a peculiar event in the history of British pandemics. Pandemic-era riots in Britain—such as the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381—typically targeted political persons or institutions rather than doctors.14 Even diseases contemporary with cholera failed to elicit a similar reaction. In 1826, a devastating typhus epidemic killed 70,000 individuals in Ireland and an additional 20,000 in London alone.15 In comparison, cholera only killed 32,000 people in Britain within a similar timeframe.16 Despite this numerical disparity, no evidence exists of any ‘Typhus Riot,’ while historians have identified a total of seventy-two Cholera Riots.17 Cholera was therefore unique, and this thesis seeks to uncover why. The greatest difference between cholera and other pandemics is the escalation of tensions between the working class and medical authorities. Cholera arrived in Britain at a time when medical authority had garnered extensive power and began to exercise it over working-class bodies in 12 Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute, 2nd ed. (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 80–83. 13 Richardson, Death, 59. 14 Juliet Barker, 1381: The Year of the Peasants’ Revolt (Harvard University Press, 2014), 143–162, https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674735521. 15 Cohn Jr., Epidemics, 176. 16 Morris, Cholera 1832, 79. 17 Cohn Jr., Epidemics, 163–164. 5 new and increasingly unacceptable ways, and often in tandem with police, judicial, and other state-run authorities. The working class rioted against this power imbalance. This thesis argues that the British Cholera Riots formed a reaction by the lower class to the encroachment of biopolitical medical authority on their traditional cultural practices and bodily rights. I have chosen to implement a biopolitical lens to more effectively highlight the dynamics of power that defined British society at this time. For decades, medical, legislative, and juridical authorities worked in tandem to exert control over working-class bodies for state benefit. Medical institutions experimented on the bodies of the poor—both in life and death—in order to improve care for the socio-political elite. Governing bodies legitimized these experiments through legislation and by the actions or inaction of the judicial system. British medicine had advanced rapidly at the cost of the working class’s trust in its institutions. As such, when medical authorities attempted to combat the pandemic, rather than view them as saviours, the working class suspected they were as dangerous as cholera itself. There was no concerted effort by the working class to replace or overturn institutional authorities in the manner of a coordinated revolt or revolution. Rather, resistance to the encroaching power of doctors was sporadic-yet-persistent. These were small moments where the working class resisted the doctors’ authority over their bodies. The working class was cognizant of their exploitation, at least at individual or localized levels, made only more apparent by their increased proximity to death, the omnipresence of medical institutions in their daily lives, and the epidemiological controls enacted during the pandemic. Historiography Although the Cholera Riots have not been overlooked by historians, they have been undervalued because of how scholarly history has framed their importance. First, the history of the Cholera Riots was initially told by the literate, especially doctors and journalists. Very few first-hand working-class perspectives have survived, which has biased the archives against the 6 rioters. Second, scholarly history has paid little attention to the Cholera Riots in Britain as a distinct historical entity worthy of analysis outside of transnational pandemic histories. More often, historians have situated the Cholera Riots as a subtopic of the cholera pandemic that swept through Europe, favouring epidemiological variables while understating the pre-existing social factors that primed the riots to occur in England and Scotland.18 By discussing the Cholera Riots in the context of the larger pandemic event, scholarship has generally been limited to the years of the crisis without much discussion of the preceding decades. As a result, the rioters are frequently depicted as misguided when their historical relationship with doctors vindicates their distrust, if not their actions. Recognizing these tendencies, this thesis builds on the research of previous historians by broadening the chronological scope of research for a deeper analysis of working-class relationships to medical authorities. In essence, the events and geography of the Cholera Riots have been discussed at length. The literature is now missing an in-depth examination of the historical contexts that precipitated the riots. Nearly all records of the British cholera epidemic of 1831 to 1832 that I have located are memoirs, newspapers, letters, Board of Health minutes and memorandums, and government correspondence.19 That is, primarily administrative and middle-class sources.20 Even the term “Cholera Riot” seems to originate from newspaper articles, though its genesis is unknown. The earliest usage I could find is in the Caledonian Mercury on 26 March 1832, though prior examples doubtless exist.21 The nature of these archives, in which written records produced by educated, literate individuals and authorities are privileged, has resulted in a shortage of 18 See: Durey, The Return of the Plague; Morris, Cholera 1832; Frank M. Snowden, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 236, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvqc6gg5. 19 This cholera epidemic was part of the Second Cholera Pandemic. This was the first time that cholera reached Britain, as the First Cholera Pandemic was limited to Asia and parts of Eastern Europe. 20 Morris, Cholera 1832, 95. 21 “The Late Cholera Riot in Gorbals,” Caledonian Mercury, 26 March 1832. British Newspaper Archive. 7 working-class perspectives.22 Although about two-thirds of the working class at this time could read, fewer could write, and a significant number were entirely illiterate.23 Literacy rates thus impeded the working class from recording their experiences. Furthermore, writings by the working class are seldom collected in archives where they can be preserved and accessed. There are surviving songs and poems from the working class that provide some context for the cholera epidemic, though I have found none that mention the riots specifically.24 For instance, a working-class Scottish poet named James Hogg recorded a few letters from his acquaintances about cholera’s outbreak, but there is no mention of the Cholera Riots.25 Beyond popular culture, we can look for traces of working-class rioters in the records generated primarily by medical and juridical authorities that are now housed in institutional archives. During my research in the National Records of Scotland, for example, I discovered an indictment of, and confessions from, rioters in the Paisley Cholera Riot. These sources are, of course, still few in number when compared to primary sources authored by and featuring the worldviews of middle-class and elite authorities, including those of physicians. The most prominent personal account of a Cholera Riot was written in 1849 by a doctor named Thomas Shapter.26 His memoir, The History of the Cholera in Exeter in 1832, details his experience with the eponymous epidemic.27 Shapter’s bias is apparent. Concerning the fears of 22 On how silences occur in the archives, see: Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 1–30, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb04595.0001.001. 23 See: E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 712–713; Morris, Cholera 1832, 116. 24 See: Morris, Cholera 1832, 96; Gilbert, Cholera, 53.; “Verses on the Report of the Cholera Morbus Entering Glasgow.,” (1831), APS.3.96.5, National Library of Scotland. 25 James Hogg, “'Some Terrible Letters from Scotland Communicated by The Ettrick Shepherd.’” (1832), MS.3810, National Library of Scotland. 26 Shapter’s memoir is cited in: Cohn Jr., Epidemics; Samuel Cohn Jr., “Fear and the Corpse: Cholera and the Plague Riots Compared,” in Histories of Post-Mortem Contagion, ed. Christos Lynteris and Nicholas H. A. Evans (Switzerland: Springer International Publishing AG, 2018): 55–81; Durey, The Return of the Plague; Gilbert, Cholera; Morris, Cholera 1832. 27 Thomas Shapter, The History of the Cholera in Exeter in 1832 (London: John Churchill, 1849), https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/U0106872348/MOME?sid=summon&xid=61b51c3c&pg=1. 8 the cholera rioters, he writes, “With respect to the rumours of improper interference and treatment, they are but the idle tales of mischievous individuals, or the absurd stories of weak-minded persons, who suffer their fears to get the better of them. . .”28 Medicine was perceived to be a prong of modern science and rationality, thus resistance to medical authority was understood by the middle and upper class as irrational and antiquated.29 The privilege of these largely middle-class and administrative sources in the archives has therefore worked to minimize the importance of the rioters’ actions within modern scholarship. Modern scholarship on the Cholera Riots has been written in two waves. The first wave emerged between the 1960s and 1980s. Historians of this generation discussed the cholera epidemic primarily as a threat to British socio-political stability, and the Cholera Riots were one aspect—one prong—of this threat. As R.J. Morris writes, “Cholera demands the historian’s attention. . . as a test and a challenge. . . The response to cholera tested many aspects of the working and quality of British society.”30 However, Morris concludes that the “limited extent of the cholera riots and the manner in which they were controlled were indicators of the inherent stability of British society.”31 Michael Durey agrees with Morris, describing British society as “essentially stab[le].”32 Morris and Durey are prominent scholars in this field, and their books mark the largest single works concerning the Cholera Riots. While their work is invaluable, their conclusions were not universally shared by prominent scholars to follow, like Richard Evans, who pushes back: Morris and Durey’s conclusion that cholera demonstrated the fundamental stability of British society “is foreordained by their assumption that only a revolution along the lines of 1789 in France could have demonstrated the opposite.”33 Although a touch dramatic, 28 Shapter, The History of the Cholera, 238. 29 For example, the Paisley Advertiser described the rioters as “‘unprincipled’, ‘lawless’, ‘ignorant’ and ‘prejudiced’” while those who opposed the rioters were “‘rational’”. See: Richardson, Death, 227. 30 Morris, Cholera 1832, 17. 31 Morris, Cholera 1832, 114. 32 Durey, The Return of the Plague, 215. 33 Evans, “Epidemics and Revolutions,” 143. 9 Evan’s assessment is accurate. Morris and Durey only considered the Cholera Riots insofar as they affected permanent political change. Instead, my thesis will build on this literature in order to examine the value of the riots on their own merit as moments of protest, rather than judge them for not constituting a revolutionary movement. I will explore why the riots occurred and what they hoped to achieve. The second wave of scholarship devoted to the Cholera Riots begins around 2005 and continues until today. Scholars of this generation have remained in conversation with the first wave, but their conclusions introduce a greater degree of nuance concerning the nature of social stability. For example, in her discussion of British society during the epidemic, historian Pamela Gilbert contends that Morris and Durey do not provide a “clear definition of what such stability would consist of.”34 Gilbert discusses the impact of cholera over its successive waves throughout the nineteenth century, of which the 1831–1832 Cholera Riots were just one part. Her most important contribution to this thesis is the introduction of French theorist Michel Foucault’s analysis of the clinic, population, and governmentality to this topic. In contrast to Gilbert’s skepticism, historians Sean Burrell and Geoffrey Gill conclusions align closer to Morris and Durey’s that cholera had a limited impact. Burrell and Gill argue that the “cholera riots. . . failed to significantly influence government health policy”.35 Burrell and Gill further contend that the riots were not properly designed to affect sociopolitical change. They state that the riots lacked cohesive political objectives and that the attacks on medical professionals were unlikely to affect systemic change.36 Although Burrell and Gill state that the riots “failed”, their analysis overlooks the possibility that the Cholera Riots were never designed to create systemic change, and thus did not fail but succeeded at something else entirely. If the working class’s responses 34 Gilbert, Cholera, 7–8. 35 Burrell and Gill, “The Liverpool Cholera Epidemic,” 498. 36 Burrell and Gill, “The Liverpool Cholera Epidemic,” 498. 10 can be seen as visceral and lacking in coordination, that is because—as I will show—the riots were never intended to coalesce into a revolutionary movement. This discussion of rioters’ intentionality is perhaps the most underdeveloped aspect of existing literature on the British Cholera Riots. Accounts of the riots, beginning with contemporaneous newspapers and continuing to today, have generally attributed some degree of irrationality to the rioters. Cohn posits that the Cholera Riots “relied. . . on wild rumours” rather than “concrete cases of governmental abuses”.37 Elsewhere, Cohn contends that “Cholera riots not roused by imagined plots of surgeons, hospital poisoning of the poor, or murder for cadavers were, however, rare.”38 The emphasis on “imagined” stands out. He concludes that the poor are the “aggressors” and the “elites and physicians, the victims.”39 Perhaps Cohn only meant “aggressor” and “victim” in the sense of ‘perpetrator’ and ‘target’, but the connotations of his language indicate an overly simplistic relationship. As I will illustrate in this thesis, the history of the British working class’s relationship with medical authority is rife with exploitation and, when examined in a broader chronological context, the nature of “aggressor” and “victim” is far murkier. While Cohn is the most outspoken in attributing the working people who participated in the Cholera Riots with irrationality, other historians have taken similar views. For example, Morris describes the rioters as fighting for “the freedom to die and be buried in peace” despite the “more modern values which demanded the maximum use of scientific knowledge to protect life”.40 Morris places some onus on the middle and upper classes for infringing upon this right, however persists in framing the rioters as senseless or naïve in their reluctance to seek medical assistance. Perhaps the one historian to break from this trend is Michael Durey, who instead 37 Cohn Jr., “Fear and the Corpse,” 73. 38 Cohn Jr., Epidemics, 177. 39 Cohn Jr., Epidemics, 179. 40 Morris, Cholera 1832, 125. 11 approaches the motives of the rioters with a greater degree of nuance. For example, Durey describes the Manchester riot prompted by John Brogan’s decapitation as the “victory of popular morality and society’s inequalities in an age when the law failed to give the poor adequate protection.”41 Situating the Cholera Riots in terms of a specific systemic failure, as Durey has done here, is atypical in the historiography of the cholera riots. Durey’s claim that the riots constituted a form of “symboli[c]” resistance to legal injustice deserves further study.42 Historians have considered the Cholera Riots in a relatively narrow chronological scope and the full ramifications of this injustice have yet to be fleshed out. A lack of working-class voices in the archives have exacerbated this issue. This thesis approaches the foundational work by scholars such as Morris, Durey, Evans, and Cohn starting from a working-class perspective. I seek to reconstruct, analyze, and assess the aims and actions of working-class rioters in pushing back against medical authority on their own terms. This aim can be accomplished by foregrounding the history of the Cholera Riots with the work of social historians of medicine, such as Ruth Richardson and Fiona Hutton, who have established the rise of anatomical study and its importance to the consolidation of medical authority, as well as the prevalence of graverobbing until the passage of the Anatomy Act in 1832.43 Similarly, Pamela Gilbert’s work on the intersection of Foucault and the history of cholera offers invaluable insights into the power structures at the time. While these scholars do not specifically focus on the Cholera Riots, their investigation into the same institutions that the riots resisted provides deeper insight into both the rioters’ motivations and the avenues through which power was rendered upon the working class. This thesis picks up where social historians 41 Durey, The Return of the Plague, 184. 42 Durey, The Return of the Plague, 184. 43 Notably, Ruth Richardson mentions "Anatomy Riots", but only in the context of the 1832 Anatomy Act and not as a distinct historical event. The Anatomy Act was intended to eliminate the need for graverobbing. See: Richardson, Death, 219–238. 12 of medicine have left off. I seek to return agency to the rioters by providing a historical rationale for their behaviour in response to the growing power of medicine at a time of pandemic crisis. Theory and Methodology At the core of the Cholera Riots is a question concerning the perceptions of collective demonstration. As we have seen, historians such as Morris and Durey, have measured the value of the Cholera Riots as a revolutionary movement. I posit that riots are worth investigating in their own right regardless of how they affect political change. Not all successful riots lead to revolutions, and failed riots and revolts are worthy of study, as Vincent Brown has shown in his pioneering account of Tacky’s Revolt, a series of failed slave insurrections in eighteenth-century colonial Jamaica.44 Such demonstrations are moments where ordinary voices may rise above the fray to assert themselves and seize the attention of indifferent or antagonistic authority. Even those that fail to achieve any political objective exhibit the socio-political turmoil festering behind the structured order. To this end, I have relied on Foucault’s work concerning biopolitics, governmentality, and the clinic to outline the avenues of power that structured working-class relationships with both medical authorities and the state. The biopolitical framework that I am using will allow me to recontextualize the Cholera Riots as the reaction of the working class to medical authority, while restoring their full historical significance. To do so, I have developed a two-pronged genealogical and historical analysis of archival and secondary sources. I utilize Michel Foucault’s theory of biopower in order to analyze the dynamics of power that defined the working class’s socio-political experience during the Cholera Riots. Biopower—defined by Foucault as the “power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death”—concerns the “techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations”.45 Beginning 44 Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Harvard University Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674242081. 45 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, Vintage Books Edition, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 138–140. 13 in the nineteenth century, states took on the responsibility and power of administering life through biopolitical institutions. For example, public health became a responsibility of the state and also a means of executing the state’s interests.46 However, the healthcare provided to the working class would also often serve as an experimental site or teaching ground to further the quality of British medicine for the elite.47 Under this system, the poor were expendable subjects whose value was not in their monetary worth but in the utility of their bodies. Applied across a population, the working class was transformed into a resource akin to a mineral deposit that could be—often literally—dug from the earth. In building a picture of how rioters interfaced with medical and state authorities during the cholera pandemic, I employ E.P. Thompson’s definition of the working class for this thesis. Thompson, a pioneering scholar of English labour history, writes: By class, I understand an historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness. I emphasise that it is an historical phenomenon. I do not see class as a “structure”, nor even as a “category”, but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relations.48 By Thompson’s definition, class does not describe a universal character, but shared experiences that differentiate one socio-economic group from another. Class “happens.” The working class is not defined by set parameters, but by the relationships within itself and, by contrast, its conflicts with the middle and upper classes. The vast majority of graverobbers targeted poorer communities and potters’ fields.49 This vulnerability to posthumous corporeal exploitation differentiates the working class from other socio-economic groups. The middle and upper classes, whose graves were far less at risk of being raided, had different perspectives on 46 Gilbert, Cholera, 5–7. Not necessarily in the sense of a nationalized social service, but in terms of provisioning and support. 47 Richardson, Death, 164. 48 Thompson, The Making, 9. 49 Richardson, Death, 80–83. 14 graverobbing that influenced governmental policymaking and caused friction with the working class. To discuss biopower in the context of the working class is thus to discuss how biopower produced the working class. The working class is not just a vague socio-economic entity; the working class was defined, in part, by its relationship with biopolitical institutions and how the institutions they created conflict between the lower and middle-to-upper classes. Similarly, biopower should not be studied as a nebulous force, but instead, one situated within specific contexts to reveal its functions. For example, medical biopower has its origins in the philosophical conception of the ‘gaze’. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, British doctors began to change their approach to medicine. The medical “gaze,” as posited by Foucault, is a philosophical shift in the language and approach of medicine. The ‘gaze’ allows doctors to ‘see’ the internal parts and processes of their patients—to act upon the body as a system of organs rather than as a corporeal whole—which was only made possible by anatomical dissection.50 This was only made possible by a new rational language that constructed the body in each of its parts and mechanisms. In other words, medicine adjusted its focus from the patient to the disease. Foucault illustrates this discursive shift in interrogative terms: “whereby the question: ‘What is the matter with you?’. . . was replaced by that other question: ‘Where does it hurt?’.”51 The distinction here is slight, but the difference is that the patient’s individuality then becomes an undesirable variable in the diagnostic process. Patients matter insofar as how they deviate from a supposed ‘standard’ or ‘healthy body’; they must be “abstracted” for the medical gaze to see the disease.52 Through this process, medicine began to isolate and categorize diseases to 50 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, trans. Alan Sheridan, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2003), XI–XII, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203715109. 51 Foucault, The Birth, xxi. 52 Foucault, The Birth, 7. 15 standardize the practice around a universal vocabulary. This language allowed for greater efficiency among medical professionals, but also created an emotional distance between the doctor and the patient. Clinical detachment is necessary, to a degree, as medicine may cause harm in the process of healing. After all, as Foucault puts it: “[the doctor’s] intervention is an act of violence if it is not subjected strictly to the ideal ordering of nosology. . .”53 However, if the individual patient is not reincorporated after the initial steps of the diagnosis, then they are left as a pile of spare parts on the hospital bed. This clinical detachment towards cadavers caused anatomists to behave in ways anathema to the sensibilities of the working class, as we shall see. Anatomical dissection thus served as a useful technique for the employment of biopower. This new medical language empowered a novel form of control over bodies motivated by biosecurity. Pandemics produce an emergency that justifies an expansion of state authority to both surveil and control sick—or potentially sick—bodies. As Belinda Kong puts it, “. . .biomedicine and biosecurity mutually institutionalized each other.”54 Biosecurity is not simply a matter of separating the ‘sick’ and ‘healthy’, nor is it strictly a disciplinary system that regulates behaviour within an afflicted area, but an apparatus of knowledge that both structures and guides epidemiological responses.55 In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault describes this phenomenon as “. . .the [problem of] epidemics and the medical campaigns that try to halt epidemic or endemic phenomena”, which requires a database of statistics concerning the pathology of the disease, the efficacy of medicine, and discrepant impacts between demographics within a population.56 It is not simply a matter of whether an individual is healthy or diseased, but rather the likelihood of a family, a neighbourhood, a community, or a 53 Foucault, The Birth, 7. 54 Belinda Kong, “Pandemic as Method,” Prism 16, no. 2 (October 1, 2019): 369, https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-7978531. 55 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977– 78, ed. Kenneth A. Loparo (London, UNITED KINGDOM: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2007), 1–27, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ubc/detail.action?docID=736155. 56 Foucault, Security, 10. 16 demographic becoming more diseased than the state is willing to permit. Permittable levels of disease may not be consistent across geographies and demographics. In the context of epidemic disease and biosecurity, ‘to foster life or to disallow it to the point of death’ describes the uneven balance of epidemiological policies and controls implemented by a state or states. Regarding the British Cholera Riots, the Central Board of Health implemented disease controls that primarily targeted working-class practices while the socio-political elite simultaneously flouted quarantines for economic gain.57 Middle- and upper-class people were also afflicted with cholera, but did not face the same medical scrutiny.58 In the context of clinical detachment, the working class was perceived not as individual cases, but as a collective geography of disease—vectors of cholera—that could be isolated and acted upon distinctly from other demographics. Biosecurity thus uses its apparatus of knowledge to maintain state authority by designating particular populations as epidemiological threats. One could also construe biosecurity to include illnesses within the social body. The social body is a metaphor for the presentation of a population within society. By the nineteenth century, moral and physical health were theorized to be intrinsically linked.59 Cholera especially was understood to be caused by debauched behaviour. Disease was understood to originate—or at least progenerate—from the working class due to their apparently immoral lifestyle.60 Biosecurity thus constructed the working class as both a moral and epidemiological threat to the nation’s stability. As Pamela Gilbert writes, “With the advent of new statistical practices to measure the population. . . the social body came to be understood as a mass of standardized 57 See: Burrell and Gill, “The Liverpool Cholera Epidemic,” 478–498. 58 Morris provides a quantitative analysis of cholera mortality rates and their relationship to class. See: Morris, Cholera 1832, 79–94. Cholera’s reach above the working class was also recognized by the public. See: Rachel Ogilvie, “Letters to James Ogilvie, New York, from His Mother and Other Family Members in Dundee, Mostly Sending News of Family and Friends,” October 13, 1832, GD1/1391/9/3, National Records of Scotland. 59 Gilbert, Cholera, 5. 60 Gilbert, Cholera, 18. 17 and deviant bodies, making up a whole whose health was dependent on the essential equivalence of its parts.”61 The health of the social body thus required regulating deviant bodies. It was therefore the responsibility of medical authorities like physicians to diagnose social issues, so that the socio-political elites could guide the nation towards a healthier future. This intersection of medicine and government extends to the judicial system. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, British doctors began to act as expert witnesses during court proceedings.62 Criminality thus took on a medical and anatomical component as doctors rationalized violent actions and minds under their medical gaze. This is reflected in the evolution of disciplinary methods and philosophy. Beginning coevally with scientific medicine, disciplinary philosophy shifted from public executions and humiliations to private—almost secretive—administrations of justice.63 In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes the execution of Robert-François Damiens (1715–1757) and his attempted regicide in the mid-eighteenth century as a watershed moment in the history of crime and punishment.64 Damiens’ public torture, dismemberment, and eventual burning at the stake were incompetently administered, so that his pain was beyond that demanded by his just punishment. Less than a century later, this manner of public execution had all but disappeared, replaced by a system intended, in theory, to be a corrective institution rather than a deterrent for crime. Foucault summarizes this shift in perspective around punishment: “One no longer touched the body, or at least as little as possible, and then only to reach something other than the body itself. . . Physical pain, the pain of the body itself, is no longer the constituent element of the penalty.”65 Rather than a single executioner, Foucault argues the judiciary increasingly employed a range of professionals to 61 Gilbert, Cholera, 5. 62 Neil A. Garland, “Forensic Medicine in Great Britain: I. The Beginning,” The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology 8, no. 3 (September 1987): 269, https://doi.org/10.1097/00000433-198708030-00016. 63 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 138. 64 For the full description of the execution, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 1–5. 65 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 11. 18 limit pain—from doctors and psychiatrists to chaplains—right until the condemned person’s last moments.66 Capital punishments were “a contradiction” for biopolitical authorities that purported to foster life as their raison d’être.67 Executions could only be justified as a means of protecting greater life. Doctors thus became essential for the functioning of the judiciary by both validating the state’s appeal for execution and reassuring the public that such violence was conducted in a humane manner. The role of medical authority in nineteenth-century Britain thus clearly went beyond the administration of medicine and diagnosis of disease. The working class was constructed by medical power-knowledge as a source of epidemiological and moral instability, but also a resource for medical advancement. The stability of British society was predicated, to a degree, upon the ability to justify medical supremacy over working class bodies for the sake of public health. The cholera pandemic created an emergency that demanded an unprecedented engagement with this prerogative, thereby inviting resistance by the working class. Drawing on Foucault’s understandings of biopower, this thesis studies the development of this medical authority and how its escalation instigated the Cholera Riots. I begin this thesis with a genealogical analysis, in a Foucauldian sense, of the development of medical authority in Georgian Britain. Foucault describes genealogy as a “history of the present”;68 in other words, a genealogy “analyzes the constitution of the subject within a historical framework.”69 Genealogies critically analyze how power is exercised through “disciplinary discourses and through associated administrative routines of surveillance, individualisation, exclusion, and 66 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 9–11. 67 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 138. 68 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 31. 69 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. C. George (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 117, quoted in Kate Kearins and Keith Hooper, “Genealogical Method and Analysis,” Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal 15, no. 5 (January 1, 2002): 739, https://doi.org/10.1108/09513570210448984. 19 ultimately through normalisation.”70 Pamela Gilbert similarly uses this method to study the relationship between the social body and medicine in Victorian England.71 Though our topics are different, Gilbert’s work focuses on the same biopolitical institutions as my thesis and so provides an excellent framework for this approach. That is to say, like Gilbert, I am less concerned with the evolution of medical institutions in their tangible form than I am with how medical authority was known, and how the production of this knowledge changed over time. It is a history of how medicine claimed its authority over the working class. In order to build a composite picture of biomedical power struggles in the age of cholera, I conducted a research trip to ten different archives across England and Scotland. These include the National Archives in London and the National Records of Scotland, as well as various regional archives in cities across the United Kingdom including Edinburgh, Liverpool, and Lancaster. I have also used digital resources, like The British Newspaper Archive, to round out my primary source research. I critically analyze a range of materials written primarily by middle- and upper-class authorities—including personal letters, government documents, newspapers, and political cartoons—in order to reconstruct working-class experiences. Among these, perhaps my most invaluable find were the judicial records that included the indictment and confessions of Paisley rioters, as well as petitions for clemency by rioters, graverobbers, and prisoners generally. As Arlette Farge notes, “At times, the archive miniaturizes the historical object. . . it also isolates, like a microscope, the expression of individual passions.”72 Such confessions and petitions preserve voices that would have otherwise been unable to assert themselves within the historical record. By featuring and analyzing these records, this thesis highlights oft-overlooked individual working-class experiences and perspectives. 70 Kearins and Hooper, “Genealogical Method,” 736. 71 Gilbert, Cholera, 11. 72 Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2013), 45. 20 Chapter One provides an overview of how working-class mistrust of medical authority germinated. Beginning with the inclusion of punitive anatomisation in the 1752 Murder Act, I show how the increasingly fraught relationship between medical authority and the working class primed the causal factors of the Cholera Riots. Chapter Two is a study of the beginning of the cholera pandemic and Britain’s epidemiological strategy. After decades of exploitation, members of the working class were reluctant to seek medical attention and immediately distrusted the Cholera Hospitals ostensibly founded to assist them. Britain’s epidemiological response placed doctors under increased scrutiny at a time when medical skepticism was at an all-time high. In Chapter Three, I reconstruct and analyze the Cholera Riots themselves. I provide a broad analysis of the mobs’ social makeup, catalysts for action, and general behaviour before investigating individual riots. I focus riots at Aberdeen, Paisley, Liverpool, London, and Manchester for three variables: 1) Chronology 2) Geography, and 3) Causal Factor. These riots occurred throughout the epidemic and across Britain, showcasing the various causes of and contexts in which the Cholera Riots unfolded. This chapter explores how past and current medical policies provoked the Cholera Riots, the perceived legitimacy of the riots, and their repercussions on British society. Through this analysis, this thesis establishes the Cholera Riots as a reaction by the working class to the predation of biopolitical medicine. 21 Chapter One: Use of the Dead to the Living Ignorant physicians and surgeons are the most deadly enemies of the community: the plague itself is not so destructive: its ravages are at distant intervals, and are accompanied with open and alarming notice of its purpose and power; theirs are constant, silent, secret; and it is while they are looked up to as saviours, with the confidence of hope, that they give speed to the progress of disease, and certainty to the stroke of death. Thomas Southwood Smith, Use of the Dead to the Living, 1828.73 Introduction In March 1739, eleven “malefactors” were hanged at the infamous Tyburn Tree.74 When the last man quieted—his kicking feet falling limp—the crowd of spectators charged towards the gallows. Men and women reached out with withered limbs or diseased skin in the hope that, according to folk medicine, touching a hanged man would alleviate their condition.75 Friends and family fought to save their loved one’s corpse. They knew that among the crowd were servants or hired men employed by anatomists to ensure the cadavers were delivered to the dissection table. The Ipswich Journal recorded the event, writing, “. . .tho’ after some skirmishes one [corpse] was carry’d to Surgeons-Hall and two to the hospitals in Southwark; but the rabble were so outrageous, that they tore away one of the bodies from a private surgeon in Featherstone-Buildings after he had got it to his house, and carry’d it off in triumph.”76 The corpses sent to the Surgeons-Hall and hospitals were almost certainly dissected for anatomical study, but it is uncertain what happened to the body carried off by the “rabble”. Perhaps they were given a proper burial. There was even a possibility that the body was revived; condemned men sometimes survived the noose. Whatever the outcome, the working class was willing to fight to protect their corpses. 73 Thomas Southwood Smith, Use of the Dead to the Living (London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1828), 1. 74 Ipswich Journal, 24 March 1739. British Newspaper Archive. 75 Richardson, Death, 52–53. 76 Ipswich Journal, 24 March 1739. 22 The struggle between anatomists and the working class predates the Cholera Riots by at least a century. Although the gallows riots at Tyburn would fade into history well before cholera arrived in Europe, vestiges remained. Doctors increasingly gained authority over working-class bodies, but never resolved the ill-will generated at Tyburn. The 1752 Murder Act incorporated anatomical dissection as a function of the state’s power, fundamentally changing the relationship between doctors and the working class.77 The difference was slight, at first, but the logistics of public executions gradually shifted to favour anatomists. Executions were moved to outside the prisons where guards were close at hand, then finally secreted away inside the prison walls out of reach of rioters. Dissections, however, remained in the public eye. Shortly after the Murder Act, anatomical dissections grew in prestige as the pinnacle of medical experimentation and pedagogy. Combining “head and hand”, the previously limited practice became the fundamental means of showcasing expertise, sometimes to crowds of thousands.78 Public dissections mirrored the horror of public execution, capitalizing on the drama of the violence to attract an audience to the anatomists’ theatres.79 Students learned their craft as both spectators and conductors of anatomical dissections.80 Anatomy schools boomed. To supply the demand for cadavers, doctors employed resurrectionists to acquire bodies by any means—most commonly through graverobbing. Resurrectionists were working-class professional thieves that made their living from the sale of corpses to anatomists. By 1830, resurrectionists had formed gangs to run a nationwide industry of graverobbing and body-smuggling.81 The wealth of this trade combined with a lack of 77 Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed. (London; New York: Verso, 2003). 78 Roy Porter, Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650–1900 (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 212. 79 Elizabeth T. Hurren, “‘Other Spaces’ for the Dangerous Dead of Provincial England, c.1752–1832,” History 103, no. 354 (2018): 27–59, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.12534. 80 Select Committee on Anatomy, “Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy.,” 1828, 4. Accessed May 14, 2024. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/hyjrxujv. 81 Hutton, The Study, 55. 23 governmental oversight had a natural conclusion: if there was profit in selling dead bodies, there was a profit in making dead bodies. William Burke and William Hare are perhaps the most infamous example of those who ‘made’ dead bodies. In 1828, the duo murdered sixteen people for the purpose of selling their corpses to the anatomist Dr. Robert Knox.82 The news of their crimes shocked Britain. It was clear that it was necessary to find an alternate source for anatomical dissections. The 1832 Anatomy Act was proposed as a means of eliminating graverobbing while supplying Britain’s anatomists with needed cadavers.83 The Act would make the unclaimed bodies of those who died in workhouses and prisons available to anatomists. The passage of such prejudicial legislation at a time when the working class was dying of cholera—at a far greater rate than the upper and middle class—may be described as the emblematic epicentre of the Cholera Riots. It symbolized decades of biopolitical development and increasing exploitation of the working class by medical authorities. By tracing the growth of medical authority in the lives of the working class over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this chapter establishes the context for the underlying social tensions of the Cholera Riots. Specifically, it is important to know how medical authority exerted its control over poor bodies. This chapter outlines how tensions between the working class and medical authority evolved from the Tyburn Riots to the Anatomy Act, which sewed the seeds for the Cholera Riots. Riot or Die Riot law in England dates back to at least the Norman conquest in 1066 where a riot was defined as a threat to the ‘king’s peace’. 84 Following the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, rioting 82 Lisa Rosner, The Anatomy Murders: Being the True and Spectacular History of Edinburgh’s Notorious Burke and Hare and of the Man of Science Who Abetted Them in the Commission of Their Most Heinous Crimes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 83 Gilbert, Cholera, 57. 84 Michael Head, Crimes Against The State: From Treason to Terrorism (London: Routledge, 2016), 221, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315574806. 24 became a treasonable offence. Although the 1715 Riot Act lessened rioting to a felony, its language maintained the position that riots directly challenged state authority. The Act defined riot as: . . .any persons to the number of twelve or more, being unlawfully, riotously, and tumultuously assembled together, to the disturbance of the publick peace. . . and being required or commanded. . . by proclamation to be made in the King’s name. . . to disperse themselves. . . and tumultuously remain or continue together by the space of one hour after such command or request. . . shall be adjudged felony. . .85 Notably, there is no consideration of a riot’s purpose. All riots challenged the king’s authority regardless of the rioters' espoused or furtive motivations. The action that prompted the riot was the performative reading of the Riot Act, which both defined it as a ‘riot’ and produced it as a challenge to state authority. The defining legal characteristic of a riot was not the manner or magnitude of destruction, nor any specific action beyond the “disturbance of the public peace,” but rather the “remain[ing] or continu[ing]” of the rioters. Riots under the 1715 Riot Act were inherently defiant. It is this defiance that allows riots to function as a demonstration of moral outrage. Riots, by definition, necessitated confrontation with the state, forcing authorities to acknowledge the body of the mob if not their voices. Before the nineteenth century, despite its illegality, there was an understanding among the middle and upper class that riots were a form of collective bargaining by workers—a “protodemocra[tic]” practice.86 However, as industrialization reshaped British society, riots increasingly threatened to disrupt the progressively regimented capitalist economy. The state relied upon the military to quash dissent from growing urban poor communities through the use of the Riot Act.87 Despite its neutral language, it was understood 85 1 Geo. 1. St. 2. C. 5. 86 Robert Reiner, “Policing, Protest, and Disorder in Britain,” in Donatella della Porta Della Porta and Herbert Reiter Reiter, Policing Protest: The Control of Mass Demonstrations in Western Democracies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 37, https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/23/edited_volume/book/32222. 87 Head, Crimes Against The State, 224. 25 socially at the time that the Act was intended to suppress specifically working-class protests. In fact, the social historian George Rudé argues that crime and protest are overlapping forms of social phenomena that manifest as a response to a perceived injustice.88 As Rudé puts it: “So protest, in this sense, is both a social act (like crime in general) and a collective act, though it may not be carried out in the direct company of others.”89 It should then be understood that protests and riots are not mutually exclusive. One does not replace the other; rather, a protest may also be a riot upon the reading of the Riot Act. The Riot Act makes a protest illegal, but the principle of the original protest has not functionally changed. A riot can be considered a means of demonstrating that a protest is believed to have a greater moral imperative than the demand for law and order. Riots are not inherently protests-turned-violent, as the state defines riotous behaviour. Rather, to riot is to continue a protest in the face of state suppression. For example, the gallows riots in the eighteenth century were fought to prevent the transportation of bodies to anatomists despite the efforts of soldiers. Gallows riots were relatively common at Tyburn. As early as 1674, the Company of Barber Surgeons’ servants faced resistance from the crowd while attempting to collect the executed bodies.90 Despite petitions by the anatomists, these gallows riots only increased in frequency and violence. The class divide and unpopularity of dissection made it difficult to provide ample security. Rank and file soldiers often came from similar backgrounds to the rioters, resulting in soldiers fighting on both sides of the scuffle.91 In both 1729 and 1735, London’s Sheriffs were ordered to provide security for the Barber-Surgeons to deter further violence.92 It is unknown to what degree they succeeded, but it was apparently not worth the 88 George Rudé, “Protest and Punishment in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 5, no. 1 (1973): 1, https://doi.org/10.2307/4048354. 89 Rudé, "Protest and Punishment," 2. 90 Simon Devereaux, Execution, State and Society in England, 1660–1900, Studies in Legal History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 151. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009392129. 91 Devereaux, Execution, 153. 92 Devereaux, Execution, 153. 26 effort. By 1749, the Sheriff of London withdrew his support for the anatomists and personally took charge of the bodies at Tyburn gallows, returning them to their friends and family to avoid a riot.93 These gallows riots could be considered the first instances of working-class protest against medical authorities. Though anatomists were not yet a major authoritative presence in British society, dissections of criminals would prove to be the foundation of their rise in social standing—both through the knowledge gained and by their relationship to the spectacle of death.94 Until 1752, the law only provided London’s anatomists a base amount of ten corpses a year to be procured from condemned criminals.95 Of these, four went to the Company of Barber-Surgeons and six to the Royal College of Physicians. Even before the surge of interest in anatomical dissection around the turn of the century, this number was far too few to satisfy the demand. Eighteenth-century anatomists sent out agents to prisons to barter with the condemned for their corpses.96 By selling their corpse, the condemned could pay for fees incurred in prison, leave money behind for their family, or purchase decent clothes for the execution so that they could die with dignity. Peter Linebaugh describes this phenomenon: “In 1752 William Signal sold his body to the surgeons in order to buy decent clothes to hang in, ‘for, by G—d, he was resolved to die game’.”97 The competition between anatomists was fierce. Though the Company of Barber-Surgeons and Royal College of Physicians were perhaps the most prestigious institutions, they perpetually contended with London’s teaching hospitals to 93 Richardson, Death, 53. 94 This shift would begin in the late-eighteenth century due to surgeons like John Hunter. See: Porter, Bodies Politic, 211. 95 Devereaux, Execution, 151–152. 96 Richardson, Death, 52. 97 Peter Linebaugh, “The Tyburn Riot Against Surgeons,” in Douglas Hay et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 71. 27 purchase, bribe, or steal cadavers.98 After all, it made no difference to whom the corpse was promised if it could be stolen from the noose.99 As for the public, it was well known that hanging was an imperfect method of execution. If the rope was not properly tied, or if it was improperly positioned around the neck, the condemned could survive their execution. Environmental factors also played a part, as the winter cold could preserve the bodies until the “dead” could be brought inside and revived.100 In 1709, a man named John Smith—thereafter called ‘Half-Hanged Smith’—was revived after spending two hours hanging from the noose.101 In August 1736, Thomas Reynolds pushed off the lid of his coffin just before it was about to be sealed; according to Linebaugh, the hangman was about to “string him up again, but was prevented from doing this by the ‘mob’.”102 Stories of these miraculous resurrections only encouraged others to rescue the condemned.103 Gallows riots were fought for ownership of the cadavers and for the souls of the victims. By contrast, as Ruth Richardson writes, “It was popularly understood that the surgeons’ official function and interest in a murderer’s corpse was not to revive, but rather to destroy it.”104 Anatomists were seen by the British public as the final—the most permanent—executioner. This perception of anatomists was precipitated by working-class traditions and beliefs concerning burial rites. The culture of death was still heavily influenced by Britain’s ancestral pagan heritage.105 Thus, many ritualistic beliefs were not strictly Protestant or Roman Catholic and yet were understood to directly affect one’s afterlife. A proper burial would ensure the soul’s transition between the temporal and heavenly realms, whereas an improper burial—especially if 98 Linebaugh, “The Tyburn Riot,” 73. 99 Richardson, Death, 53. 100 Hurren, “‘Other Spaces’," 38. 101 Linebaugh, “The Tyburn Riot,” 103. 102 Linebaugh, “The Tyburn Riot,” 103. 103 Richardson, Death, 76. 104 Richardson, Death, 76. 105 Linebaugh, “The Tyburn Riot,” 102. 28 the body was dismembered—could result in the soul remaining on earth as a ghost.106 Considering that, upon the completion of dissection, as much as two-thirds to three-quarters of the body was reduced to scraps, it was a legitimate concern whether a dissected body could be buried whole.107 In an engraving from 1782, the prolific satirist Thomas Rowlandson depicts Resurrection Day inside an anatomy museum (see Image 1). Several dismembered bodies converse with each other about their incomplete state. While one man asks about his missing head, another searches for his stomach. One man says, “My Wife risen again! That’s one rib more than I wish’d to find.” Rowlandson also references the propensity for atheism within the medical community.108 The prominent anatomist William Hunter (1718–1783) is pictured saying, “Never did I suppose that such a day would come”, of course referring to the Rapture. This issue was further compounded by uncertainties within Christianity’s eschatological doctrine. It was uncertain whether, upon death, the soul immediately went to heaven or if it remained with the body until Judgment Day and the resurrection.109 Traditional burial rites—pagan or not—therefore held great importance to the fate of the soul. Not only did anatomists ensure the death of the criminal, but it was then popularly believed that anatomists condemned the criminal again in their afterlife by denying them a proper burial. At the very least, the idea that the soul was still in or around its body during its dissection would have been horrific to the minds of the public. In 1752, the English Parliament exploited this horror by passing the “Act for Preventing the Horrid Crime of Murder,” better known as the “Murder Act”. It mandated that all murderers were to be hanged and then either dissected or hung in chains.110 The Act was designed to discourage murder by adding “some further Terror and peculiar Mark of Infamy”. To be displayed so crudely before thousands of people was horrific; this horror drew crowds to witness 106 Richardson, Death, 17. 107 Richardson, Death, 248. 108 Roy Porter makes note of this phenomenon. See: Porter, Bodies Politic, 249. 109 Richardson, Death, 15. 110 Devereaux, Execution, 141. 29 Image 1. T. Rowlandson. William Hunter (1718–1783) in his museum in Windmill Street on the day of resurrection, surrounded by skeletons and bodies, some of whom are searching for their missing parts. 1782. Engraving. Wellcome Collection, London, England. Photo courtesy of the Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). the dissection, reinforcing state power at each execution. This relationship between the audience and the cadaver was purposefully constructed to modify social behaviours, but it had the added effect of connecting juridical authorities and anatomists in a more direct and formal capacity. Previously, the 1540 statute that allotted London’s anatomists cadavers did not specify the crime or how the anatomists should utilize the corpse.111 The Murder Act not only specified the relevant felony but also required the condemned to be “dissected and anatomized.”112 Anatomists were now firmly incorporated into the judicial system. 111 Devereaux, Execution, 151–152. 112 25 Geo. II, c37. Quoted in Devereaux, Execution, 141. 30 Following the Murder Act, gallows riots rapidly disappeared. The last section of the Murder Act, as Simon Devereaux outlines, “imposed transportation for seven years upon anyone who, following the execution of a murderer, might ‘by force rescue or attempt to rescue the body of such offender. . .’.”113 The last blow, struck in 1783, moved the site of executions away from Tyburn to just outside Newgate Prison.114 There would no longer be a public procession through London between the prison and the gallows. This allowed for the quick and efficient transfer of cadavers from the gallows to the nearby surgeons’ hall protected by the prison’s security. Though the public spectacle of the gallows would continue, the feuds over gallows cadavers had all but dissipated. Linebaugh explains: The relative peace which settled at the gallows after mid-century resulted from the partial satisfaction of the interests of all parties. The Physicians, as appears from their records, ceased to obtain bodies from Tyburn by the third decade of the century. After 1752 the Company of Surgeons received a regular supply of them. The private surgeons got corpses from parish graveyards and from those of their own hospitals, but not from the gallows.115 However, Linebaugh’s summation betrays the underlying conflict was left unresolved, namely, the interests of the working class were not satisfied by the Murder Act. Fears concerning dissection were only made more prominent by the increasing influence of anatomists. The gallows riots did not because of any new-found apathy or “partial satisfaction” by the working class, but because the usual venue for working-class protests was no longer a tenable site of resistance. The corpses obtained from parish graveyards and hospitals were obtained through extra-legal methods; the exponentially increasing demand for cadavers would impel an industry of body snatchers. Medicine would continue to exploit working-class bodies to gain favour with the social elite. Anatomists’ pursuit of prestige—even over the health of their patients—would continue to antagonize the working class. After all, even though public dissections utilized the 113 Devereaux, Execution, 151. 114 Richardson, Death, 76. 115 Linebaugh, “The Tyburn Riot,” 110. 31 same prerogative of ‘punishment-as-spectacle’ as public executions, its pageantry was justified under a pedagogical pretense.116 Anatomy would become the pre-eminent scientific discipline and the foundation for medicine’s reform. The gallows riots were dead; eighty years later, they would live again. Anatomical Theatre Premieres Medicine in early modern Britain was, at best, an inconsistent practice. Although institutions such as the Royal College of Physicians and the Company of Barber Surgeons provided some structure, the field was largely unregulated. Until the mid-eighteenth century, medical professions had been divided between craft and theory. Physicians represented the highest echelons of medicine.117 They were consulted to determine the nature of an illness and recommend a course of treatment but, traditionally, never practiced any applied medicine and barely even touched the patient in the course of their work. By contrast, surgery was a craft dedicated to instruments and knifework. While lacking the academic education of physicians, surgeons were well-practiced in the menial aspects of medicine: skin conditions, broken bones, venereal diseases, and simple operations.118 As a result, although both professions continued to practice pedagogical dissections, occupational dissections became the purview of surgeons.119 Surgeons and apothecaries were commonly trained through private apprenticeships and while physicians could attend universities, there was no legal requirement for medical practitioners to have formal training. Licensing would not become mandatory until the nineteenth century.120 This sciolism was exacerbated by the post-Restoration print revolution.121 Throughout the eighteenth century, the publishing industry had grown exponentially and disseminated 116 V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770–1868 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 256. 117 Hutton, The Study, 18. 118 Porter, Bodies Politic, 208. 119 Hutton, The Study, 19. 120 Gilbert, Cholera, 69. 121 Porter, Bodies Politic, 27–28. 32 thousands of texts—books, almanacs, journals, and pamphlets—promising miracle cures and promoting private practices. Doctors authored most, but laymen wrote many without any true experience or knowledge. The trustworthiness of such texts was thus inherently unreliable. Similarly, the coeval naissance of newspapers advertised a burgeoning industry of snake oil tinctures and exotic therapies. Doctors were perceived by the public as little more than opportunistic charlatans. Rowlandson (1756–1827) illustrates the popular perception of British doctors in a watercolour (see Image 2). A travelling salesman stands on stage, a tincture in hand, arms out-stretched as if proselytizing to an onlooking crowd. His assistant is dressed as a court jester, and behind them both is a sign that reads: “The Great Doctor Humbugallo/Seventh Son of a Seventh Son/Healer of Mankind and Philosopher/Cures All Infirmities”. The showmanship is palpable. As Roy Porter comments, “Praised or disparaged, medicine’s public presence was inextricably linked to recognition that it was a mode of theatre, be it a turn or a trick, cant, magic, or mumbo-jumbo.”122 In another image by Rowlandson, titled “The Dying Patient or Doctor’s Last Fee,” a woman is reclined on a chair surrounded by her weeping family (see Image 3). The doctor holds his hand behind his back as he exits, receiving one last coin, as he glumly exits the room. He appears more upset about losing a client than a patient. In this way, even doctors with an established practice were understood by the public to be salesmen first. In 1763, following the conclusion of the Seven Years War, John Hunter (1728–1793) established his practice in Piccadilly.123 Hunter had begun his training at his brother William’s anatomy school—one of the first of its kind—and had spent the years before the war studying under the best surgeons in Britain.124 Hunter soon found himself at the forefront of his field as 122 Porter, Bodies Politic, 26. 123 For Roy Porter’s discussion of John Hunter, see Bodies Politic, 210–212 124 Yasemin Kaya and Alper Sindel, “John Hunter (1728–1793) and His Legacy to Science,” Child’s Nervous System 32, no. 6 (June 2016): 1015–1017, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00381-015-2852-x. 33 Image 2. T. Rowlandson. Doctor Humbugallo, an itinerant medicine vendor, selling his wares from a stage with an assistant dressed as a court fool. n.d. Watercolour. Wellcome Collection, London, England. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). 34 Image 3. T. Rowlandson. A woman dying in the arms of her family, an unhappy doctor leaves the room realising that it is his final payment. 1786. Aquatint. Wellcome Collection, London, England. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark. 35 his treatises on anatomy pioneered the utility of dissection for informing medical theory.125 Surgery was slowly recognized as a scientific discipline. This combination of both “head and hand” was seen by professionals as a more rational and progressive philosophy of medicine.126 More importantly, anatomical dissections set a standard of knowledge that was relatively inaccessible to untrained practitioners. This lent a sense of authority to doctors with a formal education or a respected apprenticeship that could not be easily replicated; anatomy provided a professional avenue for doctors that was unassailable by quacks and charlatans.127 Scottish universities in particular would become famous for combining both surgery and physic—the first general practitioners.128 Surgeons, once seen as little more than butchers, could now claim expertise akin to that of physicians. Combined with the social recognition afforded by public dissections, this new ‘scientific surgery’ propelled the profession into newfound authority. Along with this new approach came an “anatomical language”—a set of terms and jargon specific to the burgeoning discipline of anatomy—that would signify the expertise and authority of anatomists on matters of the body.129 This ‘rational language’ enabled the clinical detachment necessary for surgeons to break social norms by cutting up and dismembering cadavers.130 As discussed earlier, the development of this discursive technique signifies a shift in focus away from the patient to the pathology and geography of diseases. In this case, the dissected cadaver was now understood to be a tool of pedagogy—a collection of inanimate parts—rather than the remains of an individual. This marked a cultural divide between the expectations of a proper burial and the utility of a cadaver in the eyes of an anatomist. Anatomists believed the working class was irrational; the working class perceived anatomists as 125 Porter, Bodies Politic, 211. 126 Porter, Bodies Politic, 212. 127 Hutton, The Study, 23. 128 Porter, Bodies Politic, 206. 129 Hutton, The Study, 139. 130 Richardson, Death, 31. 36 cruel. While this conflict may appear as a difference in philosophy, in practice, the working class was consequentially subjected to prejudicial—often inhumane—medical treatment. Surgery was incredibly risky. The wealthy could afford exorbitant medical fees; surgeons would not risk cutting their patient’s purse strings with the slip of their scalpel. Similarly, medical students needed a venue to gain experience before they could serve the wealthy. Both of these problems were solved within charity teaching hospitals. These hospitals were supposedly established to provide healthcare to the poor, but without state funding, they relied primarily on the tuition of medical students to maintain their staff. New procedures and medicines were frequently practiced on indigent patients before being administered to those who could pay. Aside from the obvious dangers of surgery, doctors recklessly prescribed a myriad of drug cocktails in experimental doses—many of which were heavy metals or poisonous chemicals.131 G. J. Guthrie (1785–1856), a council member of the Royal College of Surgeons, even admitted that “. . . the poor frequently object to enter [hospitals] because they think they may be experimented upon. . . . when an operation is to be tried for the first time it is generally done in an Hospital.”132 It is unknown how many died from this policy. The hospital records are obfuscated by the self-interest of doctors and the variables introduced by ignorance of hygiene.133 It is nonetheless obvious that medical treatment for the wealthy was subsidized by working-class lives.134 Yet, death did not end the threat of the surgeon’s scalpel. Those poor patients who were buried were frequently dug up by graverobbers and returned to the same surgeons who put them in the ground.135 Some never left the hospital, as its mortuaries were a constant source of cadavers for anatomical dissection. 131 Porter, Bodies Politic, 300. 132 Richardson, Death, 164. 133 Richardson, Death, 49. 134 Richardson, Death, 48–49. 135 On sourcing cadavers from hospitals, see: Richardson, Death, 105–106. 37 These hospitals were not, however, intentionally murderous. Although maybe lacking altruism, the initial mission behind these institutions was a genuine interest in assisting the poor.136 The pedagogical utility of charity hospitals was supposedly a secondary concern. Yet, its public repudiation by John Abernethy (1764–1831) is evidence that such matters remained controversial. He was a St. Bartholomew’s surgeon who addressed an audience at the Royal College of Surgeons in 1819: . . .as much as I wish for the promotion of medical knowledge, I should be sorry if the bodies of the poor were to be considered as public property. . .in our country. Far better would it seem to me, that medical science should cease, and our bodily sufferings continue, than that the natural rights and best feelings of humanity could not be equally respected in all classes of society.137 Abernethy’s statement emphasizes this underlying tension within British medicine. Although charity hospitals were intended to benefit the poor, their practical raison d’être was to serve as a testing ground for the benefit of the socio-political elite. This pretense may explain the disconnect between working class and elite perceptions of doctors. Anti-medical sentiments among the working class could be perceived as superstitious or ungrateful by the middle and upper classes whose experiences with doctors would have been vastly more advantageous, thereby widening social divides. These tangible concerns of mistreatment extend to burial practices. As mentioned in the last section, the supernatural beliefs surrounding burial rites were also a key facet of the working class’s distrust of anatomists. Doctors were derisive of eschatological concerns. Such questions only served as examples of the working class’s ignorant and superstitious nature. However, the dismissal of working-class complaints as inherently irrational ignored many more tangible problems. In particular, there are several recorded instances of anatomists physically 136 Hutton, The Study, 28. 137 Susan C. Lawrence, Charitable Knowledge: Hospital Pupils and Practitioners in Eighteenth-Century London, Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 72, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511584718. 38 mistreating cadavers in their possession.138 The bodies were negligently transported—often stuffed tightly into boxes or sacks—and thrown around the anatomical theatre with little dignity. Shallow graves provided the final respite. For women, this misconduct was layered with sexual violence. In Rowlandson’s print, one woman asks William Hunter to restore her virginity, exclaiming, “. . .did I keep it inviolated 75 years to have it cork’d up at last?” (see Image 1, pg. 29). There are no clear records detailing the prevalence of sexual misconduct towards cadavers, but there is no question of its occurrence. At the autopsy of Mary Paterson in 1828, the young woman’s body was publicly dissected before an audience of sketchbooks and lecherous comments.139 The doctor then preserved her body in spirits to continue what Richardson describes as “necrophiliac voyeurism”.140 Although historians seem to focus primarily on the working class’s religious and superstitious beliefs, there were palpable reasons to fear dissection. Public dissections were key in growing the social status of surgeons. Once the Murder Act of 1752 established dissection as part of the public spectacle of capital punishment, anatomy theatres became dramaturgical venues for fashionable audiences. As Vic Gatrell has argued, “Even the chief practitioners were seldom innocent of displays which had less to do with the pursuit of knowledge than with medicine’s chronic struggle for public esteem.”141 Public dissections were a delicate balance between appeasing the audience and performing the actual knifework before the body decayed. Before the dissection could begin, sometimes thousands of people queued to view the cadaver and thus participate in the macabre drama of the anatomy.142 In these cases, surgeons could be criticized if they attempted to rush the viewing. People would sometimes rejoin the queue to get a better look. While it may seem 138 On the mistreatment of corpses by anatomists, see: Richardson, Death, 95–98. 139 Richardson, Death, 96. 140 Richardson, Death, 96. 141 Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, 256. 142 Hurren, “’Other Spaces’,” 47. 39 counterintuitive for people whose beliefs were so antithetical to anatomical dissection to participate in such spectacles, it should be remembered that the taboo was a fundamental part of the intrigue, just as with public executions.143 Due to the public’s ignorance of medicine and biology, one can infer that social capital was gained through the drama of the exhibition more than the technical skill of the surgeon. Indeed, even the surgeons revelled in their creative freedom. Dissections were acknowledged by contemporaries as perversely voyeuristic.144 It became “usual” for many anatomists to begin dissections by electrocuting the corpse to see the muscles twitch. As Gatrell has shown, the masses, as much as refined audiences of both sexes, were keen to gain admission and witness the “mangled body.”145 The anatomy theatre used spectacle under the pretense of scientific rationality to draw interest from social echelons previously beyond the reach of medical practitioners. These fashionable audiences of ladies and gentlemen would have certainly introduced surgeons to political and social connections that would allow medicine’s advancement. The consequences of anatomy’s disciplinary promotion were not only social but had significant repercussions on the procedures of the judicial system. Doctors leveraged their anatomical expertise to further infiltrate judicial proceedings by providing expert testimony.146 Lectures on medical jurisprudence appeared at the University of Edinburgh as early as 1791, which suggests doctors had already established a professional presence within the courtroom. By 1807, the university had its first chair of medical jurisprudence.147 Forensic science classes steadily became more popular across Britain as doctors were increasingly called to testify. However, doctors were far less well-received in the courts than in the anatomy theatre. These expert testimonies were often inaccurate due to incomplete or improperly conducted 143 Gatrell discusses the psychology of witnesses to executions and dissections in The Hanging Tree, 242–258. 144 Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, 256–257. 145 Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, 256. 146 Garland, “Forensic Medicine,” 269. 147 Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, 481. 40 investigations of wounds and bodies.148 While this medico-juridical relationship never provoked the same visceral reaction from the working class as the Tyburn gallows, it is important to note that medical authority was not chained to the hospital bed—it increasingly permeated many aspects of the working class’s social and political life. By the nineteenth century, medical practitioners had increasingly become a socially accepted profession by much of British society, especially the middle and upper classes.149 The fear of dissection was still prevalent, if not intensifying, but at least the days of medical quackery were supposedly vanishing under the supremacy of well-trained anatomists and physicians. However, experience with dissections did not necessarily indicate competency. Until the implementation of licensing bodies in the nineteenth century, perhaps the greatest consequence of anatomical dissection on the advancement of medicine was the exclusivity and prestige it offered the profession. Conversely, the popularity of anatomical dissections began a fraught relationship with the working class, who reaped few of the same benefits as the middle and upper classes. Their bodies became rungs on the ladder of social mobility. However, I have so far only discussed the institutions that operated openly. The darkest side of medicine’s rise to social prominence requires examining the working-class labourers who enabled the widespread establishment of anatomy schools: the resurrectionists. Grave Solution The early history of modern medicine was fundamentally intertwined with graverobbing. Doctors or their apprentices would steal bodies for anatomical studies as early as the seventeenth century.150 When the practice of anatomical dissection grew in prestige, body snatching became an industry in its own right. The term ‘body snatching’ refers to stealing dead bodies by ‘body snatchers’ or ‘resurrectionists’. ‘Graverobber’ is sometimes used synonymously, 148 Garland, “Forensic Medicine,” 269. 149 Porter, Bodies Politic, 313. 150 Richardson, Death, 54. 41 though bodies were frequently stolen before they were placed in graves. Corpses were not safe from theft unless heavily guarded or already rotting. For example, a London police officer testified in 1828 that he had recovered over fifty bodies that had been stolen from private residences during their wakes—the period of mourning before burial.151 As competition increased between resurrectionists, these men formed gangs to protect their territorial hold over local graveyards.152 By 1795, a “professional gang of fifteen bodysnatchers” was arrested in London.153 By 1830, the resurrection industry was entirely controlled by working-class gangs.154 Corpses of every socio-economic class were at risk of being stolen, however, body snatchers primarily targeted their fellow working-class communities due to the accessibility of their graves.155 The upper class could afford measures against graverobbing, such as hiring grave guards, that the working class could not.156 The rich bought stone mausoleums or cages—called a ‘mortsafe’—that secured their coffins behind iron bars. Without these resources, the working class resorted to communal methods of protecting their graveyards. Watchhouses stood guard over lantern-lit parish churchyards, manned by volunteers.157 Mortsafes were shared between neighbours—unearthed after the body had decomposed to be used for the next burial. It is perhaps this communal responsibility that primed the mobs to react so violently during the Cholera Riots. There was a basic level of duty shared amongst working-class communities to protect the dead from dissection. A breach of this duty would then undoubtedly provoke a communal response. Small acts of protest, while perhaps not significantly consequential, also demonstrated the working class’s resistance to anatomical dissection. Thomas Southwood Smith (1788–1861) 151 Richardson, Death, 22. 152 Select Committee on Anatomy, “Report from the Select Committee,” 48. 153 Richardson, Death, 57. 154 Hutton, The Study, 55. 155 Richardson, Death, 80. 156 Richardson, Death, 81. 157 Richardson, Death, 83. 42 recalled the discovery of a body on its way to a Glasgow anatomist in 1822: “. . . this gentleman’s premises and their contents, which were valuable, were entirely destroyed by the mob. For some time after this achievement, it was necessary to station a military guard at the houses of all the medical professors in that city.”158 More humorously, a broadside from the Observer describes a hoax successfully played on an anatomist in Leith. A carter, after finding his brood sow dead beside its litter, packaged the body in a box and brought it to Surgeon Square. It is reported that the man” actually sold [the pig] to a certain celebrated lecturer for £.8. The doctor, however, had only £.5. upon him, which he gave to the [the man] in the meantime and promised to pay him the balance on the morrow. This sum the wag pocketed, and it is unnecessary to add, that he has not visited the square since. . .159 Despite these small acts of defiance, neither anatomists nor resurrectionists were deterred in their work. The working class would receive little aid from police, who, even when sympathetic, were frequently discouraged by their commanding officers from investigating stolen bodies.160 The Thames became “a conveyor belt” moving cadavers on an “industrial scale” to anatomy schools in nearby towns.161 The immense demand by these anatomy schools drove up the price of cadavers to the point that the profitability of graverobbing greatly outweighed the relatively meagre risks. Foucault theorized that, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, European states constructed new judicial systems that emphasized disciplining the mind and restricting bodily pain. This marked a shift from the previous reliance on public execution as exemplary punishment. As he puts it, “By the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth 158 Smith, Use of the Dead, 37. 159 “A Full and Particular Account of the Riot Which Took Place in Edinburgh on Thursday Last [Feb. 1829; Being an Account of the Hanging of an Effigy of Dr. Knox by the Mob, in Front of His House]; Also of the Hoax Played off on a Celebrated Doctor. [A Broadside.],” (1829) F.3.a.13(49), Ry.III.a.6(10). National Library of Scotland. 160 Richardson, Death, 86. 161 Cohn Jr., Epidemics. 43 century, the gloomy festival of punishment was dying out, though here and there it flickered momentarily into life.”162 This shift in philosophy may be seen in the movement of executions from the public sphere to private, followed by a dramatic decrease in executions altogether. Although hundreds of people were sentenced to death each year, many of these convictions would be commuted in favour of imprisonment or transportation.163 As an example of this trend, Gatrell details the capital convictions conducted in London and Middlesex between 1701 and 1834.164 Before 1791, an average of 57 percent of capital convictions were pardoned before execution. This jumped to 89 percent between 1791 and 1834. By 1828, London anatomists required more cadavers each year than had been executed in the previous two decades.165 The supply of cadavers was choked at a time when their demand was growing exponentially; capital convictions were wildly insufficient to fulfill the demand. As a result, graverobbing became a widespread and lucrative profession. Under British law, bodies did not constitute property and thus their theft was only a felony if possessions (such as clothing or interred memorabilia) were taken as well.166 For example, in January 1824, a man named Samuel Clark was found guilty of stealing clothes that were interred with a corpse.167 Although the clothes were never found, the prosecution argued that “finding of the body naked, after proof that it had been interred in the clothes mentioned in the evidence, was sufficient proof of asportation. . .”. While body snatching might warrant a misdemeanour, these sentences were relatively light.168 Resurrectionists then found themselves in a socially and legally liminal space. They were intrinsic to the progress of anatomical 162 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 8. 163 Linebaugh, The London Hanged. 164 For this table, see Appendix 2 in Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, 616. 165 Select Committee on Anatomy, “Report from the Select Committee,” 4. 166 Richardson, Death, 59. 167 Smith, Use of the Dead, 34–35. 168 Richardson, Death, 59. 44 knowledge but not recognized as medical employees;169 they were solidly working class and yet preyed upon their own with the same ruthless detachment as a surgeon. In 1832, John Craig Hodgson (n.d.) was convicted and sentenced to imprisonment for one year for “conspiracy to disinter dead bodies” after exhuming the corpse of a suicide victim.170 After six months incarcerated, with cholera threatening the lives of the prisoners, he petitioned the crown for clemency as follows: Your Petitioner therefore humbly supplicating Your Majesty to take into merciful consideration the beneficial tendency of his offence—its universal utility. . . [I am imprisoned] for an offence which would not exist but for the partial civilization of Mankind and who are daily dependent on the knowledge arising from that offence, for the continuance of their Existence and the restoration of their Health. . .171 Hodgson perceived his crime as necessary for anatomical pedagogy and thus responsible for life-saving medicine. However, the presiding trial judge understood the crime much differently. When consulted about Hodgson’s petition for clemency, Judge Patterson (n.d.) wrote, . . .indeed he is an attorney’s clerk, and not a surgeon’s. [. . .] Under these circumstances it appears to me that the Prisoner is far from being an object of mercy, he was a dealer in this traffic for money—not for any purpose of instructing himself—and he attempted to escape by information of perjury.172 His Petition to your Lordship and the letter of Mr. Heaps appear very artful as if to persuade your Lordship that he is a professional that is surgical person, which is wholly without foundation. [. . .] I thought the case and still think it one of much aggravation.173 Hodgson’s petition illustrates the strange relationship resurrectionists maintained with legal and medical authority. Hodgson was correct in his assertion that anatomical study—the preeminent 169 Dr. James Somerville (1799–1847), in a report to a parliamentary committee, described resurrectionists as “. . .the lowest grade in the community, thieves, pickpockets. . .” See: Select Committee on Anatomy, “Report from the Select Committee,” 48. 170 “Prisoner Name(s): John Craig Hodgson. Prisoner Occupation: Clerk to Mr Gaunt, Attorney,...” (August 1832), HO 17/36/159, The National Archives, Kew. 171 “Prisoner Name(s).” 172 Notably, this perjury does not refer to any claim surrounding Hodgson’s profession, but instead regarding the witnesses who testified on Hodgson’s behalf during the trial. 173 “Prisoner Name(s).” 45 medical field—relied on the labour of resurrectionists for its continued advancement. Considering that the work of resurrectionists used to be conducted by surgeons and their apprentices, the idea that Hodgson might consider himself part of the medical profession is not so ludicrous. Similarly, it is interesting that Patterson was dismissive of Hodgson’s motivation—monetary gain, not education—which hardly seems like a reasonable metric when medicine as a field remained a private practice. This is not to exonerate Hodgson. His petition simply illustrates there was an obvious discrepancy in how the judicial system judged resurrectionists versus the doctors who employed them. Hodgson argues that his work was necessary and medically beneficial; Judge Patterson does not dispute this. Rather, Patterson argues the value of Hodgson’s work was undercut by his income and nominal profession, insinuating that Hodgson’s chances for clemency would be different if he were truly part of the medical profession. Graverobbing would not exist but for the anatomist’s ample purse, yet only one profession was denounced by Patterson for its avarice. This commodification of cadavers had only one natural conclusion. If money could be made from the sale of dead bodies, then there was money to be made in creating dead bodies. There were several instances where resurrectionists would murder people and sell their bodies to anatomists. Of these, by far the most infamous were the Edinburgh murders committed by William Burke and William Hare. Their murder spree in 1828 and subsequent trial became the epitomical symbol of working-class anxieties concerning the anatomization of poor bodies. “To Burke” even entered the common lexicon as a shorthand for such murders.174 The Burke and Hare murders are pivotal to understanding why anxieties surrounding body snatching were so widespread. They also provide a critical illustration of the intersection between the judicial system and anatomy schools that empowered the medical field. 174 Almost every scholarly work on the Cholera Riots will mention this fact. For one example, see: Richardson, Death, 143. 46 In November 1827, a pensioner died in a room rented out by the Hares.175 Mr. and Mrs. Hare were not wealthy and as the old man still owed £4 on his rent, his death was inconvenient. William Hare made plans for the body to be buried by the local parish, but the cadaver would have to remain in the room until the parochial authorities could collect it. William Burke—a friend of the Hares—suggested that it would be both profitable and expedient if the body was sold to an anatomy school. After a brief inquest (neither man had any experience trading cadavers), Burke and Hare sold the pensioner’s body to Dr. Robert Knox (1791–1862) for £7 10s. Enticed by this potential wealth, Burke and Hare would commit their first murder a few months later. Assisted by their partner and wife respectively, Burke and Hare would ply lodgers with alcohol and then, when their victims were stupefied with drink and asleep for the night, the duo smothered them with a pillow. 176 Many of the victims were sought out—specifically invited home by either Burke or Hare after a ‘chance’ encounter in the street. Burke and Hare would then sell the fresh corpse to Dr. Knox for upwards of £10 each. Sixteen people were murdered in their ten-month killing spree. Neither man made much effort to hide their crimes; after all, as soon as the body was sold to Dr. Knox the evidence would be destroyed. In early November 1828, a lodger named Ann Gray grew suspicious of Burke’s recent behaviour.177 Once everyone had left, Gray searched the house and discovered a body covered by straw underneath a bed. Burke and Hare had been unable to immediately sell the corpse and had stashed it until it could be safely transported. Ann Gray alerted the police. Burke and Hare were arrested. Hare turned state’s witness in exchange for immunity and testified against Burke, outlining each of their murders. Burke was sentenced to death and was executed by hanging five weeks after his trial. The trial and lead-up to the execution had created a fervour in Edinburgh; the story of Burke and Hare had spread across the country. Thousands turned out to 175 Rosner, The Anatomy Murders, 25–28. 176 Rosner, The Anatomy Murders, 56–58. 177 Rosner, The Anatomy Murders, 19. 47 witness Burke’s execution. After the hanging, his body was taken to a local anatomy school where it was dissected in front of a considerable audience. A crowd of people waited outside the theatre, hoping for a glimpse. Burke’s skeleton was given to the Anatomical Museum of the Edinburgh Medical School. His skin was supposedly tanned and turned into a pocketbook where it is still displayed in the Surgeon’s Hall Museum.178 The Burke and Hare murders were at the epicentre of the medico-juridical machinery that would provoke a volatile response during the cholera epidemic. After all, “One of Burke and Hare’s victims clutched tightly in death to twopence-halfpenny. Her corpse raised £8 from Knox.”179 This perverse juxtaposition highlights the disparity between the value of a person and the worth of their body in this system. Medical and juridical authorities worked in tandem to exploit this disparity for the profit of doctors, to burgeon the authority of the legal system, and to improve the health of the socio-political elite. Burke and Hare personally affected little. However, their infamy both served as a rallying cry for the disgruntled working class and now provides a quintessential example of the dynamics of power addressed in this thesis. Burke and Hare were working-class people who murdered other members of the working class; in the end, only the anatomy schools benefited from their crimes while Burke and Hare were the only ones to face repercussions under the judicial system. The infamy, brutality, and callousness of Burke and Hare’s murder streak are essential to understanding working-class perceptions of anatomists. However, the reaction of the public also holds important implications for the conduct of civil resistance against anatomists. Although Burke met the hangman’s noose, Knox faced no judicial repercussions for his failure to vet his anatomical subjects. On 12 February 1829, a crowd assembled outside Knox’s house, carrying an effigy of the doctor in the vanguard.180 Outside his door, the effigy was throttled, hanged from 178 Rosner, The Anatomy Murders, 244. 179 Richardson, Death, 140–141. 180 Ruth Richardson describes the incident in Richardson, Death, 138–9. 48 a tree, and nearly burned before being torn to pieces amid the cheering crowd. A broadside describing the event recalls that “no actual violence had been committed” but that the crowd was pressed right up to the front of Knox’s house.181 The crowd was dispersed by police action, but the message had already been sent. No one was harmed, and aside from the effigy and a few smashed windows, the damage was relatively contained. Once again, the response of the working class to anatomists was both extra-legal and communal—the only avenue of justice they could pursue with any strength. This focus on symbolic reprisals would echo during the Cholera Riots. Only, instead of an effigy, hearses would burn instead. Burke and Hare had also left an impression on the medical community. Resurrectionists had never been popular among doctors; they had now become a liability. Though Knox had not faced repercussions for his role, the public had grown overwhelmingly disaffected with anatomists’ impunity. It was increasingly likely that the judicial system would begin to consider the culpability of anatomists for the crimes of resurrectionists.182 This threat to anatomists was compounded with the arrest of two London ‘Burkers’ in 1831.183 The push for a legislative solution, which had been building for almost a decade, had intensified to a critical mass. In 1831, the Council of the Royal College of Surgeons in London sent a letter to the Secretary of State for the Home Office, detailing issues of acquiring bodies for anatomical research: “Bodies used for dissection in the anatomical schools have necessarily been procured by illegal means; by the invasion of consecrated ground and the disturbance of graves, in a way disgusting to society at large and especially offensive to the friends and relatives of the deceased.”184 The willingness of the Council to admit to the ubiquity of stolen bodies in anatomical schools—and likewise the employment of resurrectionists—illustrates both the 181 “A Full and Particular Account…” 182 Hutton, The Study, 72. 183 Richardson, Death, 193. 184 “2 Copies Ff 331–338. Council of the Royal College of Surgeons, on the Problems Of...” (December 10, 1831), HO 44/24/89, The National Archives, Kew. 49 systemic and conspicuous nature of this problem. It does not appear that the Royal College of Surgeons intended this letter to be a confession; the ubiquitous reliance of graverobbing was an open secret, if not general knowledge. Rather, the intent of the letter was to highlight that their medical system relied on extra-legal practices that, so far, had only been tacitly permitted by the relative apathy of any government body. The Council’s primary concern was thus the legal liability of consorting with resurrectionists. On this note, the Council continues to write: . . . [the Council has] laboured under much embarrassment from the inconsistencies and contradictions of the law itself, which at the same time that it declares the Student to be guilty of a misdemeanor if the attempt to obtain anatomical knowledge, renders him also, when afterwards engaged in practice, liable to a civil action on account of any mistake which his ignorance of Anatomy may lead him to commit.185 Without a suitable source of bodies, medical students were forced into a dilemma. They could either utilize graverobbers and potentially face a misdemeanour, or they could remain improperly trained and risk civil litigation. It was an untenable situation. The medical community was perpetually uncertain about the legality of their actions. Doctors were not commonly prosecuted for utilizing graverobbers, but neither were they immune, and their culpability had yet to be tested. To what degree should anatomists be expected to vet the source of their subjects? As the Council mused: “It is vain to imagine it always possible to distinguish the body of a person who has been murdered from that of one who has died a natural death.”186 A lawful source of cadavers outlined in clear legislation that eliminated the need for resurrectionists would finally resolve this confusion. The Council of the Royal College of Surgeons offered no answers. However, they did identify one problem with their system: “The large prices which have of late been given for anatomical subjects have operated as a premium for murder.”187 A full solution to the problem of resurrectionists would 185 “2 Copies Ff 331–338. Council of the Royal College of Surgeons, on the Problems Of...” 186 “2 Copies Ff 331–338. Council of the Royal College of Surgeons, on the Problems Of...” 187 “2 Copies Ff 331–338. Council of the Royal College of Surgeons, on the Problems Of...” 50 require a free-flowing supply of cadavers to erase their monetary value. The Anatomy Act was proposed to fulfill this need. The Anatomy Act In 1824, Thomas Southwood Smith published an article in the Westminster Review entitled, “Use of the Dead to the Living.”188 This article would be republished and distributed in many different formats throughout the decade as the debate concerning resurrectionists entered legislative chambers. Smith argued that the public’s resistance to anatomical dissection did not stem from the medical community, but rather the reliance on resurrectionists. “The opposition,” he writes, “is not against anatomy, but against the practice of exhumation: and this is the practice which ought to be opposed.”189 Smith listed his plan to eliminate the need for resurrectionists: 1. That the bodies of those persons who die in all infirmaries and hospitals throughout the kingdom, unclaimed by immediate relatives, be appropriated to the purpose of anatomy. 2. That the bodies of those persons who die in all workhouses and poor-houses be appropriated to the same purpose. 3. That the bodies of those persons who die in all houses of correction, in all prisons, and in the hulks, be thus appointed.190 Smith argued that without anatomical dissections, doctors would be forced to practice their craft on the bodies of the living poor so that they might operate on the rich “with safety and dexterity”.191 By using only unclaimed bodies from public institutions, Smith posited that doctors would have a steady supply of cadavers with minimal inconvenience to the poor. Smith’s article would prove to be highly influential within parliamentary discussions of medical reform—especially on his friend, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), and the other contemporary ‘Benthamites’.192 Bentham and his famous utilitarian ideals were well situated to 188 Smith, Use of the Dead, iii. 189 Smith, Use of the Dead, 41. 190 Smith, Use of the Dead, 49. 191 Smith, Use of the Dead, 53. 192 Ruth Richardson mentions the article’s influence and Smith’s close relationship to Bentham. See: Richardson, Death, 159. 51 defend the compulsory donation of unclaimed bodies to anatomists; the principle of maximizing happiness naturally diminished the rights of (obviously unfeeling) corpses. Upon his death, Bentham donated his body to be dissected as an example to others and asked Smith to conduct the operation. In a lecture delivered over Bentham’s remains, Smith said, “If, by any appropriation of the dead, I can promote the happiness of the living, then it is my duty to conquer the reluctance I may feel to such as disposition of the dead, however well-founded or strong the reluctance may be.”193 This sentiment exemplified the popular rationale of anatomists and their parliamentary sympathizers. They could not fathom any logical opposition to the subjugation of unclaimed bodies to anatomical study. As Smith suggests, “[Bentham] had an utter contempt of the prejudices which withhold the means of pursuing dissection.”194 Such men perceived resistance to the Anatomy Act as superstitious and obsolete. In 1829, Henry Warburton (1784–1858)—an “avowed Benthamite”—introduced the Anatomy Act to Parliament.195 It stated that any corpse within a workhouse or other public institution that was not claimed after forty-eight hours of death could be made available for dissection.196 The arrival of this news within workhouses was met with horror. Anatomization, in a legal sense, had only ever been a punishment for the most heinous criminals. The working class always had many reasons to fear the dissection table, but it had remained an avoidable fate—only inflicted upon criminals and the unfortunate souls whose bodies were stolen. Indigent communities now faced the inevitable terror and shame of dissection. In Shadwell, when the Anatomy Act was read aloud to a workhouse, a rumour spread that the lunchtime soup contained human meat.197 Elsewhere, the workhouse of St Ann’s parish, Blackfriars, sent a 193 Thomas Southwood Smith, A Lecture Delivered over the Remains of Jeremy Bentham, Esq.: In the Webb Street School of Anatomy & Medicine, on the 9th of June, 1832 (London: E. Wilson, 1832), 71. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/F0101325796/MOML?sid=bookmark-MOML&xid=9159572a&pg=72. 194 Smith, A Lecture, 63. 195 Richardson, Death, 108. 196 Gilbert, Cholera, 57. 197 Richardson, Death, 221. 52 petition to the House of Commons asking that the bill “not pass into a law”.198 As the Morning Herald reported, “The petition excited much laughter in the Honourable House.”199 Despite this apathy within the House of Commons, the 1829 Anatomy Act failed to pass through the House of Lords. Many aristocrats and clergymen still supported the working class’s right to a proper burial.200 A few doctors had also opposed the Act, though, only due to logistical objections rather than on moral grounds—primarily concerned that the Anatomy Act would not provide enough bodies or that the requirements for burying the dissected bodies were too stringent. Ruth Richardson also ascribes the Act’s failure to its intricacies, “The first Bill had been lengthy, explicit and detailed almost to pedantry.”201 Each extraneous detail was simply another foothold for Warburton’s opponents to fight the Act. Three years later, a streamlined Anatomy Act was introduced to Parliament. Many of the objectionable elements were removed. Specific locations—such as workhouses and hospitals—were excised along with any language that directly prejudiced the working class.202 In practice, the “unclaimed body” could only apply to the poor, but the term was vague enough to evade easy challenges in Parliament. These changes would prove successful, and the Anatomy Act became law on 1 August 1832. The Anatomy Act would fall short of expectations. A combination of weak administration and fear of the mob crippled its potential. Indeed, considering the Bill’s timing, the greatest effect on the working class was the terror of its potential. Cholera had ravaged Britain for nearly a year by the time the Anatomy Act was signed into law. The indigent faced imminent death and involuntary dissection at an immense scale. As I will elaborate in the next chapter, the British state attempted to deploy doctors to mitigate cholera’s devastation, but medicine had utterly failed to build trust among the working class. Cholera hospitals were treated with immediate 198 The Morning Herald, March 28, 1829. 199 “The Lord Mayor Last Night...” 200 Hutton, The Study, 77. 201 Richardson, Death, 198. 202 Richardson, Death, 198. 53 suspicion; the working class had learned not to trust philanthropic healthcare through their experiences with charity hospitals. This distrust was exacerbated by cholera’s pathology. The disease killed quickly; news travelled slowly. People could die before their relatives even knew they were sick.203 Although doctors urged those afflicted with cholera to seek immediate medical attention through admission to local cholera hospitals, it is understandable that many would fear dying in the anatomists’ clutches without first alerting their families. This was true regardless of the Anatomy Act, but it should be noted that the Act’s stringent deadline for claiming bodies inflated the potential to die unknown and unclaimed. Families only had forty-eight hours to claim the body of loved ones before it was made available to anatomists.204 This same obstacle also made it difficult for the deceased to organize their affairs. The poor had the option to opt out of being dissected, but due to low literacy rates, it was difficult for them to leave behind a declaration of this wish.205 Similarly, there were few resources for the illiterate to understand the parameters of the Anatomy Act and the directions for leaving such a declaration. From a working-class perspective, it was the legal realization of their greatest anxieties. Conclusion Throughout the early nineteenth century, British medicine had grown in status and political influence. However, its authority was perhaps more precarious than anyone realized. By 1831, it had been almost fifty years since the last execution at Tyburn. Public defiance of anatomists and body snatchers had not manifested with the same prevalence of the gallows riots. The shift in execution sites had a role to play in this. Initially, the Tyburn Gallows had a set location and rituals that allowed the working class to consistently rally against authority. As 203 For example, in a letter to his friend, William Smeal (n.d.) writes, “I’m sorry to inform thee that thy d. brother John died at 20 minutes to 5 this afternoon, having been under Asiatic Cholera from about 11 in the morning.” See: William Smeal, “Letter from William Smeal, 70 Portland Street, Glasgow to Robert Gray Concerning the Death of His Brother John Gray from Cholera,” 1832, GD 1/1352/72, National Records of Scotland. 204 Gilbert, Cholera, 57. 205 Richardson, Death, 206–207. 54 executions were moved to progressively more private spaces, the public lost their traditional venue for resistance. British medicine in the early nineteenth century also increasingly relied on the clandestine activities of resurrectionists for its fundamental functions. Although it was well-known that anatomists utilized their services, the secretive and socially liminal nature of resurrectionists made it difficult to establish any direct resistance. While the malpractice of anatomists and doctors is obvious today, it was not so much to the British layman. Classism was only obvious on a systemic level; localized perspectives would have only understood that doctors varied in quality and perceived sporadic instances of graverobbing or malpractice. Layers of academic jargon, legal protections, and philanthropy obscured the functions of medicine. So, in the early nineteenth century, British medicine did not have to contend with any serious challenge to its authority—not until the arrival of cholera. By 1831, medicine was employed within a developing biopolitical system. At this time, nearly all capital punishments were commuted to lesser sentences; the power to take life was greatly diminished. Existing socio-political hierarchies were instead enforced by new biopolitical institutions, including those found within medicine. Doctors poisoned the poor through experimental medicines and cut the bodies of the desperately ill to increase the lifespan of the socio-political elite. The working class was denied proper burials, their bodies were stolen and mistreated by anatomists, and the only people ever punished were their working-class peers—the resurrectionists. Although the relationship between the government and medicine only officially existed through the Murder Act of 1752, as hospitals were funded commercially or by private donations, the symbiosis between these entities indicates a greater informal relationship. The government’s response to the cholera pandemic only strengthened this it. The Cholera Riots of 1831–1832 were a significant test of modern British medicine. Firstly, systems of medical surveillance combined with an ignorance of cholera’s pathology created a widespread awareness of cholera’s presence, but also an immense amount of 55 misinformation concerning its severity and cure. This is why other epidemics did not provoke the same violent reaction. Secondly, cholera inflicted massive death in working-class communities, thereby providing a more consistent confrontation with medical authority. The poor were forced to go to hospitals; medical authorities set up temporary hospitals to better interface with cholera patients. The biopolitical mechanisms inherent in medicine became more visible due to the frequency and magnitude of its sudden intrusion into working-class lives. The next chapter will elaborate on these factors, first through a survey of cholera’s arrival in Britain and then through an examination of the Cholera Riots themselves. 56 Chapter Two: An Epidemic of Fear The medical man who conscientiously believes in the contagious nature of this appalling disease cannot perform his duty zealously or effectually. He is only mortal, and, in this enlightened age, he knows that no spell or charm can guarantee him from the demon contagion. Professor John Lizars, Letter to the Medico-Chirurgical Society of Edinburgh, 1832 Introduction In the weeks leading up to the 1831 British cholera epidemic, medical and political authorities worked in tandem to prepare a national epidemiological response. Cholera’s pathology, as well as its foreign origins, drew significant attention from doctors and the public alike. Britain was well aware of the disease before it arrived in the English town of Sunderland in 1831. Yet, medical authorities were unable to arrest cholera’s spread due to their muddled approach. A disunited medical community undercut the authority of the Boards of Health. Medical authorities gave contradictory advice to patients alongside a plethora of cures and therapies that rivalled the quackery of the seventeenth century. Quarantines were inconsistently implemented. The disease went unrecognized for weeks; misinformation was rampant. These ill-fated efforts would be enough of an imposition on the working class to evoke their ire without establishing sufficient support to manage the crisis efficiently. In effect, the Boards of Health placed doctors under increased scrutiny at a time when medical skepticism was at an all-time high. In this chapter, I outline the spread of cholera from the Ganges Delta to highlight the effects of cholera’s pathology, the public’s awareness of the disease, and Britain’s role in promulgating the disease across Asia. After establishing this context, I examine the strategies employed by medical authorities, their weaknesses, and how institutions like the Boards of Health and Cholera Hospitals exacerbated medicine’s already fraught relationship with the working class. The Boards of Health were created to combat this epidemic as the first 57 nationwide attempt to surveil and respond to outbreaks of disease.206 Cholera hospitals were frequently ramshackle buildings that were temporarily established to treat the disease’s victims, though they were rumoured to be sites of poisoning and dissection.207 Chapter One discussed the historical context for the working class’s distrust of medical authority. This chapter provides further evidence of this fraught relationship by examining the institutions that directly provoked the Cholera Riots. The Blue Death To understand the psychological impact of cholera on British society, it is important to briefly trace the geography of its movement and the pathology of its symptoms. Cholera’s lethality and visceral symptoms certainly played a large role in the public’s reaction to this disease, as Britain was one of the first European nations to experience and document cholera due to their colonial holdings in Asia. Cholera has historically been endemic to the Ganges Delta within the Indian subcontinent. The disease is caused by a bacterium named Vibrio cholerae. Cholera is contracted by consuming contaminated water; the bacteria pass to the small intestine where they latch to the bowel wall, forcing a major response from the body’s immune system.208 As the bacteria die, they release a toxin that disrupts the functions of the small intestine. The body releases massive amounts of fluid, up to a litre an hour, in the form of blood plasma expelled as pale watery diarrhea and vomiting. Within days—often hours—the victim is grossly transfigured by the loss of water. Cholera attacks the musculature and circulatory systems as fluids are pulled from tissues across the body. Muscles cramp and seize as blood pressure drops and the blood itself becomes thick and dark as tar. 209 Death may occur from dehydration, suffocation as the laryngeal muscles contract around the neck, renal failure, 206 Durey, The Return of the Plague, 77–101. 207 See: Hutton, The Study, 84; Morris, Cholera 1832, 104. 208 Snowden, Epidemics and Society, 236. 209 Snowden, Epidemics and Society, 237. 58 or cardiac arrest. Upon death, the muscles have become so stiff that “it has been found impossible to straighten the body” and, in some cases, the muscles “continued to be affected with violent contractions”, causing the corpse to spasm.210 These spasms, alongside the faintness of the victim’s pulse in the hours before death, exacerbated fears of being buried alive. As the body’s temperature drops, the skin becomes cold to the touch and takes on a peculiar bluish shade. This discoloration would become a defining characteristic of the disease in the imaginations of the British public, further engrained by illustrations published by journals like the Lancet to the public (see Image 4).211 The British doctor James Lawrie (1802–1859) wrote at the time, “I have seen the whole body thus shaded, but in general, it is deepest on the lips, face, neck, and extremities. . . The hands and fingers are in all cases shrivelled, and in many have the peculiar appearance of those of a dead body long steeped in water.”212 The victim’s face becomes sunken and discoloured blue with dark circles around the eyes as if physically attacked—to the point of confusion among medical professionals. Another physician, W. Haslewood (n.d.), described the face of a woman who died of cholera: A female who was attacked with the disease and died in about twenty hours, had been engaged in a brawl the day before her attack, and received a slight wound with a fork. This death occurred at an early period of the epidemic, when many influential persons, including some medical men, were loudly asserting that no unusual disease existed in the town. It was, therefore, very generally asserted that the patient had died of the wound, and of blows on the head and face; the marks of which, it was said, were so very obvious.213 210 W. Haslewood and Mordrey, W., History and Medical Treatment of Cholera, As It Appeared in Sunderland in 1831, Illustrated by Numerous Cases and Dissections (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longman, 1832), pp.10, 17, 3.1188. National Library of Scotland. 211 Amanda Sciampacone, “The ‘Scourge of Modern Times’: Cholera, Race, and Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century British Illustrated Print Culture,” Journal of Victorian Culture 27, no. 2 (June 14, 2022): 358, https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac020. 212 James Adair Lawrie, Essay on Cholera, Founded on Observations of the Disease in Various Parts of India, and in Sunderland, Newcastle, and Gateshead, With Notices of the Treatment, and of the Civil and Hospital Police Adopted in These Towns. (Glasgow: John Smith & Son, 1832), pp.19, 3.1192. National Library of Scotland. 213 Haslewood and Mordrey, History and Medical Treatment of Cholera, 10–11. 59 Figure 4. J.W. Gear. A dead victim of cholera at Sunderland in 1832. 1832. Coloured Lithograph. Wellcome Collection, London, England. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark. In stark contrast to tuberculosis, the tragic symptoms of which were perceived to imbue the sufferer with virtuosity, the British public understood cholera to be deeply unsettling.214 Aside from physical havoc wrought by the disease, the visual discoloration evoked an image of alienness in the public’s imagination.215 The visceral nature of the symptoms was compounded by the Asian origins of the disease. Cholera’s escape from the Ganges Delta was primarily directed by environmental causes and facilitated by the colonial presence of the British. The intersection of climate and public health has been recognized by historians in many contexts. For example, historian Brian Fagan’s The Little Ice Age discusses famines and disease caused by climate cooling throughout the late-medieval to early-modern periods.216 Cholera’s spread was due to the Ganges Delta’s 214 Snowden, Epidemics and Society, 281. 215 Sciampacone, “The ‘Scourge of Modern Times,’” 357. 216 Brian M. Fagan, Ebook of The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300–1850 (Basic Books, 2002), https://hdl-handle-net.eu1.proxy.openathens.net/2027/heb31028.0001.001. 60 cycle of wet and dry seasons which maintains its ecological homeostasis. For three months in the summer, monsoons release a tremendous amount of water. This rainfall replenishes reservoirs and irrigates farmland. However, in April 1815, Mount Tambora—located in modern Indonesia—erupted with cataclysmic force.217 Ash and dust spewed high into the air. Volcanic gases reacted with oxygen to form droplets of sulfuric acid, spread out across the upper atmosphere. These aerosols intercepted the sun’s rays and absorbed the Earth’s radiative heat, causing the planet to cool while the stratosphere warmed. For two years, this atmospheric shift caused decreased rainfall and mellow air currents; during these summers, the monsoons never materialized. If the disappearance of the monsoons was devastating, then their return was worse.218 Two years of drought had dried aquifers and river tributaries. When the monsoons reappeared—three weeks early—the torrential rain quickly overwhelmed the barren land. The rain far outpaced the rate at which the dry earth could absorb the moisture, causing floods, destroying crops, displacing communities, and creating aquatic bridges between distant bodies of water. During the drought, cholera was confined to diminishing pools and streams. When the monsoons returned and the riverbanks flooded, these pockets of cholera could now travel freely across the breadth of the territory, connected by a network of newly formed rivers and waterlogged fields. Cholera took on a new vivacity. The spread of cholera was exacerbated by the presence of the British East India Company. British troops regularly travelled around the entirety of the subcontinent, bringing cholera with them as they marched.219 Historians, such as R.J. Morris, have specifically identified the Marquis of Hastings’ (b. 1724–d.1826) campaign against the Marathi Confederacy in late 1817 as a vector of cholera beyond its endemic home. By the end of the campaign, the 217 On the connection between Tambora’s eruption and the arrest of Bengal’s seasonal monsoons, see Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World, 72–96. 218 Wood, Tambora, 82. 219 Morris, Cholera 1832, 21. 61 Marquis would lose 3000 of his 10,000 troops to cholera. Archibald Miller (n.d.), a medical officer in the British army, published his experience with cholera around this time, recounting that: [Cholera] did not reach the force employed in the southern Mahratta country. . . till the month of August 1818. We heard from time to time of the approach of this formidable disease, with as much regularity as if it had been the approach of an invading army, proceeding from town to town, and from village to village, till at last, on the 18th day of August 1818, it entered out camp, attacked and killed a sergeant.220 Out of the eight hundred men placed in Miller’s care, two hundred and twenty-six would contract cholera by the end of October. Fifty-three died. Miller does not appear disturbed by these numbers, describing them as “consolatory”; rather, it is the shift in cholera’s nature that seemed to most perturb the British doctors.221 Another doctor, Whitelaw Ainslie (1767–1837), wrote in a letter, “. . .I had no doubt but that the disorder which I had witnessed in 1815, was, at that period [in 1819], passing gradually from the sporadic into the epidemic type; and we all know, since then, what a wide spreading evil it has become. . .”222 Cholera, which had previously made only intermittent appearances, had begun to spread with shocking intensity. It should be noted that both Miller and Ainslie published these observations in 1831 and 1832 respectively after cholera had made its way across Europe but before the British epidemic had reached its zenith. As such, their recounting may have been deceptively construed as premonitory. However, their descriptions of cholera’s shift from a sedentary disease to a global pandemic are key to understanding how Britain viewed cholera: “an invading army” and “a wide spreading evil” approaching rapidly from their eastern colonies. Despite this initial devastation, the first cholera pandemic never reached Europe. It spread along trade routes to China, the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East, and southern Russia 220 Archibald Miller, Cholera Morbus. Observations on Cholera (Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute, 1831) pp. 4, L.63.b.1(7). National Library of Scotland. 221 Miller, Observations on Cholera, 6. 222 Whitelaw Ainslie, Letters on the Cholera (London, 1832) pp.3–4, 3.1188. National Library of Scotland. 62 around the Caspian Sea, where it subsided in 1823.223 However, this pandemic would leave an impression on British society. When cholera resurfaced in 1826 and began to spread west, Britain looked to its medical professionals from the East India Company for guidance. Numerous books and pamphlets were published in 1831 and 1832 describing both the symptoms and supposed cures of cholera based on the experience of doctors employed in the colonial armies. Doctors and reporters travelled to afflicted cities, including Moscow, Hamburg, and Paris, sending reports back to Britain. Cholera’s potency terrified the British public well before it ever reached their shores. The anticipation of the oncoming disease would undermine efforts to combat the disease, as the public’s expectation of cholera far exceeded its capability to spread and kill.224 The public expected a sudden and vicious onslaught when, in truth, the epidemic crept insidiously amongst them, infecting only a handful of people at a time. It would be months before cholera was declared in Sunderland, and then weeks still before the announcement was accepted by the public. The history of the cholera riots was thus written from the earliest days of the pandemic. First Case Scenario William Sproat should not have made history. The English town of Sunderland had months to prepare for cholera. Doctors Russell and Barry had travelled to St. Petersburg in Russia to witness the epidemic firsthand, and their reports back to Britain were published nationwide throughout the summer of 1831.225 The Sunderland Board of Health was established that June.226 This Board was composed of the leading medical professionals in the area and its members had supposedly spent the summer gathering information and crafting policies to combat the approaching epidemic. These plans were of little use. On 14 August, a pilot named 223 Morris, Cholera 1832, 21. 224 Morris, Cholera 1832, 48. 225 “Collection of Printed Notices, Memoranda Etc. and Three MS. Letters Concerning Cholera and Precautions Against Cholera in Bengal, Odessa, and Europe,” 1833 1831, COL/CC/HEB/04/003, London Metropolitan Archives. 226 Morris, Cholera 1832, 39. 63 Robert Henry died after returning from the Baltic. He suffered severe cramps and blue discolouration in his digits.227 Cases with symptoms of Asiatic cholera increased, but the Board of Health initially refrained from diagnosing it as cholera. Only after William Sproat’s death on 23 October 1831 did the Board acknowledge the epidemic's presence in Britain. 228 However, as late as 12 November, doctors in Sunderland still denied that cholera had entered through the city’s port.229 Despite ample warning, cholera had arrived on Britain’s shores and festered for months unopposed. The announcement of cholera spurred a wave of misinformation. When a nurse named Eliza Turnball died of cholera on 1 November, many papers and periodicals attributed her death to the terror evoked by the announcement rather than the disease itself.230 On 5 November, a barrister named William Loch sent a letter of warning to his father: The papers of today say that the Cholera Morbus has reached England, and that in Sunderland 5 people out of 7 have died, if people are all to die in the same proportions out of our 28,000,000, 20,000,000 will go thoroughly clearing us of our surplus population. I think people here have always been a great deal too confident, and have not taken sufficient precautions. Dr. Scott no longer ago than last Sunday answered my mother that the Cholera would never reach our shores.231 Loch’s predicted trajectory of the mortality rates is indicative of rampant speculation. Fatalist assumptions undermined the ability of local Boards to detect disease, as the milder reality would not align with cholera’s expected presentation.232 It is also notable that Loch criticized Dr. Scott for being ill-prepared, illustrating in three sentences the broad range of expectations the British public held concerning cholera. If such predictions were commonly shared—that cholera was 227 For a full chronology of early cholera cases in Sunderland, see Morris, Cholera 1832, 40–44, 228 Morris, Cholera 1832, 11. 229 Stuart Miller and Michael White, Cholera in Sunderland, Wearside Archives (Sunderland): Sunderland Polytechnic, 1978), 15. 230 This is noted by a contemporary doctor. See: James Butler Kell, On the Appearance of Cholera at Sunderland in 1831: With some account of that disease (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1834): 36. 231 W A Loch, “Papers of the Loch Family of Drylaw” (November 5, 1831), GD 268/326/20, National Records of Scotland. 232 Morris, Cholera 1832, 48. 64 anticipated to kill between zero and seventy percent of England’s population, for example—then it is no wonder that British society was divided on epidemiological policymaking. Lastly, it should be mentioned that, as a barrister, William Loch would have been middle or upper class. Speculation around the disease thus crossed socio-economic boundaries and was not limited to cholera rioters. The arrival of cholera also heralded financial hardships as ports were closed and workers fell ill or were too afraid to work.233 This meant many among the public latched onto misinformation to preserve their economic interests. After a meeting on 11 November, ship owners and merchants in Sunderland issued resolutions denying the presence of cholera in the city, rejecting the need for quarantine measures, and criticizing London newspapers for disseminating misinformation.234 Of course, cholera had existed in Sunderland for many weeks by this point. The next day, many members of the Board of Health published their own notice.235 These “medical gentlemen” admitted the presence of cholera in the city, however, they still opposed closing the port. They claimed the disease had arisen from “atmospheric distemperature” and not by “contagion”. These resolutions clashed with the regulations passed by the Privy Council in October which recommended cordoning off the sick and quarantining ports.236 This clash between authorities was exacerbated when, a day later, the Marquess of Londonderry sent a letter to the editor of an evening paper. He described the reports of cholera as “exaggerated,” writing, “As I reside within five miles. . . I shall neither remove my family nor myself from the neighbourhood. . .”.237 The Marquess included a letter from his physician which 233 For example, a letter from Lord Melville discusses anxiety among workers at the Lasswade paper mills that the rags used for pulp had been taken from towns infected with cholera. See: “Correspondence from Lord Viscount Melville to M. Brooks,” February 12, 1832, GD 51/5/155/1–2, National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland. 234 Miller and White, 13. 235 Miller and White, 15. 236 “Board of Health and Cholera: Establishment of the Board of Health to Investigate The...” (1831–1832), PC 1/4395, The National Archives, Kew. 237 Bristol Mirror, 19 November 1831. British Newspaper Archive. 65 urged similar opinions to both the Marquess and the Board of Health. Britain’s epidemiological response was thus hindered by factions both within the medical system and broader society. By 1831, British medicine had yet to solve the nature of contagion. There was a contentious debate about how diseases—including cholera—proliferated. Two camps had emerged: contagionists and anti-contagionists. The Central Board of Health largely prescribed to a contagionist understanding and thus advocated for quarantines and separating the sick from the healthy.238 However, this opinion was not necessarily shared by every leading member of the medical community. For instance, the anti-contagionist Professor John Lizars blamed the spread of cholera on an “unreasonable” atmosphere: “warm, damp, and surcharged with the electric fluid” from recent lightning storms.239 Lizars would become embroiled in a very public argument with the Edinburgh Board of Health over this debate, eventually leading to his resignation from the Medico-Chirurgical Society of Edinburgh.240 Southwood Smith argued that only one disease existed, manifesting differently depending on local atmospheric conditions.241 These contradictory theories had a tangible effect on both doctors and the public. One criticism of the contagionist theory was that it created paranoia of the sick, undermining communal support networks and preventing doctors from treating their patients.242 This assessment had at least some credibility. In February 1832, George Inlay (n.d.) from the hospital ship H.M.S. Dover wrote to the navy medical commissioner Sir William Burnett, “. . .we are very badly of for necessaries and nurses—our men have taken the alarm and two or three of them have gone on shore because they were desired to keep watch over the sick.”243 The fear of cholera thus 238 Morris, Cholera 1832, 103. 239 John Lizars, “Letters of Professor John Lizars Concerning a Dispute with the Society...,” April 1832, GD 3/6/1, Lothian Health Services Archive. 240 See: “Substance of the Investigations regarding Cholera Asphyxia… to which are added, observations on the Disease in Edinburgh… by John Lizars, Professor of Surgery, printed pamphlet, 1832” (1832), GD 3/6/5, Lothian Health Services Archive; The Caledonian Mercury, 9 April 1832. British Newspaper Archive. 241 Durey, The Return of the Plague, 111. 242 “Letters of Professor John Lizars. . .” 243 “Miscellaneous In-Letters” (c1827–c1832), PC 1/103, The National Archives, Kew. 66 directly hindered the quality of medical care, which would have been exacerbated by this factional in-fighting by undermining any proposed solution to the crisis. There was a large financial incentive to support anti-contagionist theories. Many doctors directly profited from the continuance of trade within their cities. For example, the Liverpool Board of Health charged ships exorbitant rates for Bills of Health since they were the largest harbour still active in England.244 Liverpool’s port remained open far longer than London’s or Bristol’s, essentially funnelling trade through the city, creating a corrupt system that benefited both doctors and merchants at the risk of its indigent population. Anti-contagionist theories also had a direct impact on the Cholera Riots as many incidents were concentrated around quarantining sick patients.245 The Central Board recommended removing patients from their homes to hospitals; the working class was reluctant to let their neighbours leave their supervision. After all, if some doctors declared that quarantining was useless, then the contagionists may have an ulterior motive for separating people from the protection of their community. Although these suspicions likely contributed to dozens of riots, one particular incident illustrates both the working class’s awareness of medical theories and the potential to trigger riots. In November 1832, Mr. Green—the proud owner of a hot air balloon—was assaulted by a working-class crowd for bringing cholera to their town.246 Presumably, the crowd believed the balloon had captured the tainted atmosphere and carried it to the ground. Of course, this was a unique response to fears that hardly reflected the motivations of the Cholera Riots as a whole, but it illustrates that the debate between contagionists and anti-contagionists was not limited to academic forums. All levels of British society had some awareness of current medical theory. 244 Burrell and Gill, “The Liverpool Cholera Epidemic,” 484. 245 The most apparent examples occurred, again, in Liverpool. See: Burrell and Gill, “The Liverpool Cholera Epidemic,” 478–498. 246 Durey, The Return of the Plague, 182. 67 Just as the medical community was divided over the nature of cholera ’s spread, there was no shortage of potential cures. The most common medication for cholera was a combination of calomel and opium, but there was a myriad of other proposed remedies, such as bloodletting, pharmaceutical stimulants, and even igniting gunpowder to “purify the air”.247 Public feuds over what was deemed the correct cure were similarly contentious. In Hull, a duel was issued between two feuding doctors where the loser—presumably if they lived—would be forced to leave town.248 Despite such vehement conflicts, there was no evidence to suggest any cure was significantly effective from a clinical viewpoint. In a study of 497 patients, the Central Board of Health in London compared the deaths and recoveries of eight different cures: calomel and opium, opium, calomel, stimulants, two different combinations of salts, venous injections, and miscellaneous treatments.249 The highest mortality rate occurred with the venous injections (only two patients recovered out of twenty), while the most effective cure was a combination of salts used at Greville St. Hospital (eighteen out of twenty-six patients recovered). The most common medicine—opium (sometimes with calomel)—only saved approximately 42% of patients (128 out of 277 patients). The use of opium would also become a source of fear among rioters, as many believed that the drugged state of the patient would be mistaken for death, resulting in victims being buried alive.250 When cholera first arrived in Sunderland, rumours spread that doctors were suppressing the disease by knocking their patients unconscious with laudanum and then burying them alive.251 This rumour may have originated from the London burkers in November 1831. Two men, John Bishop and Thomas Williams, were convicted of murdering three people to sell their 247 Durey, The Return of the Plague, 121; “Ff 17–18. Thomas Calley, Suggesting That Gunpowder Should Be Used to Combat Cholera, As...” (February 17, 1832), HO 44/25/8, The National Archives, Kew. 248 Durey, The Return of the Plague, 131–132. 249 “Reports of London Cases of Cholera” (1832), PC 1/114, The National Archives, Kew. 250 Michael Durey, The Return of the Plague," 168–169. 251 Durey, The Return of the Plague, 168. 68 corpses to a London anatomy school.252 They killed their victims by serving rum dosed with laudanum—a tincture of opium. The arrest of the London burkers coincided almost exactly with the arrival of cholera on Britain’s shores, and so the public perception of medicinal opiates was tainted right as its usage increased dramatically. In his 1849 memoir, Thomas Shapter quotes a tract published after the Exeter epidemic in which it was reported “that the medical gentlemen were destroying their patients by the application of poisonous medicines, for the purpose of taking the bodies for dissection; also that laudanum was administered in such quantities as caused protracted sleep, so that many were buried alive by immediate interment. . .”253 The Times reported two cases where cholera victims were placed in a coffin while still alive; a third was published in The Globe.254 The veracity of these stories is unknown. However, it seems apparent that the British public believed they could be true and acted accordingly. Consider the prevalence of resurrection stories during the era of the Tyburn gallows where hanged corpses could be resuscitated under proper conditions. It is thus not too speculative to suggest that stories of being buried alive could incite a similar reaction; these fears were deeply embedded in British culture. With the arrival of cholera, everyone was threatened with death and dissection, and the fundamental systems upon which medicine functioned suddenly became an immediate existential threat to the working class. It should be noted that cholera’s pathology also exacerbated these anxieties. It was well known that Asiatic cholera, also called spasmodic cholera, could cause corpses to twitch and spasm. Shapter describes the first time the Exeter undertakers observed this phenomenon: “the motions in the arms and legs that then took place excited so much astonishment and alarm that they refused to complete their purpose until the following day.”255 Due to the medicinal administration of 252 See: Richardson, Death, 196. 253 Shapter, The History of the Cholera, 238. 254 Durey, The Return of the Plague, 168. 255 Shapter, The History of the Cholera, 247. 69 laudanum, it is no wonder that some patients seemed more alive amid post-mortem spasms than they had in the final hours of their lives. There are thus two important variables to consider when assessing public responses to the first waves of cholera in the United Kingdom. Firstly, there were several publicly competing authoritative voices concerning the causes and cures for cholera. Secondly, there was—clinically speaking—no reliable or effective cure for cholera. The combination of these undermined medical authority from the outset of the epidemic. Doctors did not know what caused or cured cholera; they would not know for decades until Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) and Robert Koch’s (1843–1910) work developing Germ Theory.256 However, the working class certainly noticed discrepancies between the doctors’ promises and reality. Medicine could not arrest the spread of the disease nor reliably cure the sick. Such divisions made it apparent that either doctors did not know how to combat cholera, or, that there was some possibly malicious intention behind their inefficacious strategies. Was the broad scope of cures for cholera due to ignorance or an experiment? Did doctors truly not know how cholera spread or did the Boards of Health avoid implementing quarantine for economic gain? Did cholera even exist? A popular ballad entitled, “A New Song on the Cholera Morbus”, illustrates some of these suspicions: In every street as you pass by Take care, they say, or you will die While others cry "It's all my eye," There is no Cholera Morbus. 256 Robert Gaynes, Germ Theory: Medical Pioneers in Infectious Diseases (Washington, DC: ASM Press, 2011), 143–205, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epub/10.1128/9781555817220. 70 If the Cholera Morbus should come here, The best of clothes you then must wear, Eat and drink the best, then never fear, You will get no Cholera Morbus, . . .Some people say it was a puff, It was done to raise the doctor’s stuff And there has now been near enough About the Cholera Morbus.257 The last verse in particular indicates the cynicism surrounding the intentions of medical authorities. Especially in the early days of the epidemic before cholera had spread nationwide, the working class was characterized by a “cholera humbug”—a disbelief or dismissal of cholera’s threat—brought on by suspicions of jobbery among doctors and government offices.258 For example, a riot erupted in York over suspicions that doctors had manufactured the epidemic.259 The local parishes paid doctors a weekly £10 “cholera fee” for attending to the sick; some believed this fee was a financial incentive to perpetuate the epidemic or to invent its existence in the first place. Some historians, primarily Morris, have suggested the veritable tsunami of pamphlets, bill posters, and press announcements by the Board to communities afflicted with cholera only furthered anxiety and misinformation.260 The language used in such publications was complex 257 Gilbert, Cholera, 53. 258 Morris, Cholera 1832, 97. 259 Burrell and Gill, “The Liverpool Cholera Epidemic,” 492. 260 Morris, Cholera 1832, 116. 71 considering its intended audience, who would often be unable to read. As Morris argues, “. . .perhaps worse, [the poor] received partial, alarmist impressions from the second-hand reports they gained from friends and neighbours and their own ability to puzzle out a few words.261 However, this claim overlooks some important variables. By 1832, the working class was mostly literate and was deeply involved in political life.262 As was mentioned in the first section of this chapter, the working class knew enough about epidemiological theory to instigate a riot, which suggests that they were able to access and understand basic scientific concepts. Morris and E.P. Thompson both mention that the literacy rate of the working class was around seventy percent.263 Moreover, literacy was buttressed by strong oral cultures. Morris argues that literate workers were not evenly dispersed throughout working-class communities and that Cholera Riots occurred primarily from the thirty percent who were illiterate and lived in densely populated poor neighbourhoods.264 However, as Thompson notes, “Illiteracy. . . by no means excluded men from political discourse.”265 Periodicals were frequently read by the literate to their workmates and the news was read aloud in public houses. High literacy rates were thus not necessary to disseminate accurate information. While some communities certainly struggled to keep updated on news of the disease, it is difficult to say this was common enough to paint the working class as uninformed. This is to say, there is no evidence that the rioters misunderstood the Board’s regulations. Quite the opposite, the Cholera Riots illustrate that the rioters were very aware of the Board’s policies. For example, there was a policy requiring that corpses were buried within twenty-four hours in order to prevent the spread of disease.266 The working class did not misunderstand this stipulation; they simply believed that it was a method of hiding 261 Morris, Cholera 1832, 116. 262 Thompson, The Making, 712–713. 263 See: Morris, Cholera 1832, 116; Thompson, The Making, 712. 264 Morris, Cholera 1832, 116. 265 Thompson, The Making, 712. 266 “Copy of Supplementary to the London Gazette, February to August 1832 Miscellaneous...” (1832), PC 1/111, The National Archives, Kew. 72 medical misconduct before the body could be viewed and thus chose to ignore it. Finally, the Board must have known that indigent communities would not struggle to understand printed notices. Rather than a misstep, their words were then intended for a reading audience. It is certainly possible that the Boards were ignorant of how their bill posters would be received. This was, after all, the first epidemic where Boards of Health had the responsibility and national authority to disseminate public health announcements.267 There was no precedent of how to communicate across socio-economic populations. However, it must also be considered that medical authorities could have other motives in posting public announcements besides communicating with the working class. Doctors made little to no income from the poor; those patients were useful for teaching students and testing new medicines, and often without their consent. It was the middle and upper classes that could afford the fees and tuition required to earn the credentials to officially practice medicine. Medical authorities had to reassure their paying customers of their competency. The many pamphlets and papers released by the Board can be considered to have a performative value. This deluge of publications demonstrated the Board was taking action against the epidemic at a time when the burgeoning national agency had no effective strategies to combat the disease itself. There were, after all, other tried-and-true methods of communicating information to an illiterate population. It was common for workers to travel to listen to radical orators discuss politics;268 it would have been straightforward to hire someone to communicate the Board’s regulations to less-than-literate or illiterate populations. Since the illiterate poor were the primary victims of cholera, it seems more productive to convey information in some other manner than the written word. So, rather than blame the working class’s illiteracy for the promulgation of misinformation and anxiety, the onus seems more firmly placed on the Board’s indifference. 267 Durey, The Return of the Plague, 78. 268 Thompson, The Making, 712. 73 Taken to its furthest extent, this indifference appears more malicious than callous. Remember, medical authority was divided on the very nature of disease pathology, and so could not produce an effective strategy against cholera. It was, in fact, somewhat beneficial for the working class to remain ignorant despite the ceaseless efforts of doctors to enforce sanitary regulations. By blaming the spread of cholera on the stubbornness of the working class—especially their allegedly unclean and debauched lifestyles—the responsibility for the epidemic was deflected from medical authority onto the poor. This is not to say that the Central Board of Health made a concerted effort to deceive the British public. Rather, the classism inherent within the apparatus of medical authority predisposed the various Boards of Health to deflect blame similarly. By controlling the epidemic's discourse, the Boards could maintain their authority at the cost of the working class’s well-being. British doctors had built their practices on the basis that they had acquired greater and more fundamental knowledge of anatomy than their eighteenth-century predecessors.269 This was true to a degree. However, cholera created an emergency that demanded a greater presence of medical authority and drew increased scrutiny towards medical practices. The weaknesses within medical authority, which could normally be excused as isolated incidents or fringe cases, were now on full display for the watching nation. Health Boards and Hospitals The Central Board was created to manage a national system of local Boards of Health; essentially, it would act as a communications hub to advise district boards, manage the flow of information, and provide a centralized authority to direct the epidemiological response until the disease had subsided.270 This information would be collected and disseminated through circulars and by agents who travelled between local Boards. These Boards were mostly 269 Porter, Bodies Politic, 211. 270 For information on the creation and mandate of the Boards of Health, see: Durey, The Return of the Plague, 77–101. 74 composed of doctors with a mix of other officials.271 It was a remarkable initiative. Although Boards of Health had been established during previous health crises, they had only existed at a local scale. This was the first attempt at a national system of epidemiological surveillance. An untested system, this network of Boards overlooked several key factors that would undermine the efforts to limit public unrest. Firstly, the Central Board provided no funding to its ancillaries. The local Boards of Health relied on the charity of private individuals to fuel their enterprises. This created inconsistent and frequently inadequate responses, beginning a trend of disunity among medical authorities. Secondly, the Boards of Health did not recognize the extent to which the working class distrusted doctors. Although the Central Board took measures to mitigate the risk of public unrest against political figures, these same measures placed the onus of public health regulations on municipal or parochial offices. As such, the Cholera Riots primarily targeted local doctors while ignoring national authorities. Finally, the local Boards could not act independently of parochial authorities. If a local Board could not gain the cooperation of the vestry on a policy or program, it would be required to request a proclamation from the Privy Council overruling the parish. As a result of these failings, the Board of Health system was a clumsy apparatus, lacking both funding and authority, that exposed local doctors to increased scrutiny. No sooner was the Board of Health created than it was put to the test. The first effects of the Cholera Riots were felt even before the disease landed on British shores. British medical and political authorities had been watching the progression of the pandemic across continental Europe. In each country, major riots manifested around conspiracy theories of Malthusian plots to cull the poor. So, when the Privy Council established the Central Board of Health in 1831, its initial policies were quite lenient. To avoid public unrest against national authorities, the Central Board would not impose quarantines, the removal of the sick to hospitals, or any other 271 Morris, Cholera 1832, 117. 75 regulation through physical force.272 In a circular reissued in August 1832, the Central Board stated: . . .the Central Board strongly deprecates all Measures of Coercion, which, when tried upon the Continent, have invariably been productive of Evil. The best Inducements to a prompt Acknowledgement of the Disease having entered a Family, as well as to an early and voluntary Separation of the sick from the healthy, will always be found in the Readiness and Efficiency with which public charitable Institutions attend to [deficiencies of food, clothing, and bedding of the poor].273 Superintendent General of Quarantine, Sir William Pym (1772–1861), later wrote to his French counterpart, Alexandre Moreau de Jonnès (1778–1870), “In this country, we cannot establish a cordon by land. . . from the apprehension of the same results as occurred in St Petersburg, Hungary and other places.”274 From the outset, the Boards of Health were mindful that there was a need to compromise between public health and public appeasement. The response to the cholera epidemic and to the Cholera Riots that ensued was inextricably linked. However, though the Central Board proposed courses of action to the local Boards, it was ultimately the local Boards' individual prerogative to implement and enforce public health regulations, and the enforcement of these policies thus varied between localities. As the epidemic progressed, it became obvious that the Central Board’s hands-off approach was ineffective at stopping the spread of cholera. The Central Board’s efforts thus switched from prevention to mitigation. On 20 October 1832, the Central Board of Health published a circular that the quarantine measures had “hitherto been found effectual”.275 Ships arriving from Baltic ports were supposed to be quarantined before entering a British port. As far as the Central Board knew, this strategy had successfully staved off the epidemic. In fact, cholera had been present in Sunderland for weeks—if not months—and the first recognized cholera death in Britain occurred only three 272 Morris, Cholera 1832, 112. 273 “Collection of Printed Notices.” 274 Pym to Jonnès, 14 November 1831, PC 1/108, quoted in Durey, The Return of the Plague, 21. 275 “Collection of Printed Notices.” 76 days later. After cholera was confirmed in Sunderland, the Central Board sent medical officers to liaise with the local Boards.276 This was a sudden move away from the relatively decentralized approach that characterized the summer and early fall of 1831. These medical officers reported the spread of the epidemic and were tasked to “advise, cajole, and frighten” the local Boards into following the Central Board’s recommendations.277 It is unclear whether the medical officers had any official authority over the local Boards. However, their presence marks the start of the Central Board’s pendulous pattern of power. The cholera epidemic was characterized by months of inaction followed by a sudden escalation by the Boards of Health as medical authorities struggled to find a balanced response. In the same circular published in October 1831, the Privy Council and the Central Board of Health established regulations for the local Boards.278 Among these, the Boards were instructed to surveil potentially infected households. If a person refused to be taken to the hospital when they were ill, the door to their home was to be marked with the word “sick”. If, instead, the victim acquiesced to be removed, then their home was to be marked with “caution”, their rags and old clothes were to be burned, and their furniture thoroughly cleaned with lye. There was no national policy to compensate the victim for their destroyed or damaged items. Even if other regulations were flouted, the local Boards were consistently diligent in their destruction of contaminated belongings.279 Historian Michael Durey notes that compensation was sometimes offered by local boards to prevent these items from being hidden, but this appears to be the exception that proves the rule.280 The destruction of these items represented a significant financial loss for the indigent populations primarily affected by cholera. Although rags and old clothes may have seemed insignificant to the Central Board, it was sometimes all 276 Morris, Cholera 1832, 59. 277 Morris, Cholera 1832, 63. 278 “Board of Health and Cholera: Establishment of the Board of Health to Investigate The...” 279 Durey, The Return of the Plague, 164. 280 Durey, The Return of the Plague, 165. 77 that a victim owned and was thus worth protecting. Extra clothing could be used as currency, either traded or stored until sold when needed.281 Some may not have been able to afford their clothes to begin with, as many charities were established to clothe the poor in decent attire.282 Such ill-formed regulations were a legitimate and tangible reason for distrusting medical authorities. The fear of being shamed by one’s house being marked with “sick” or “caution”, the risk to property, and the callous conduct with which medical authorities enforced such policies were significant incentives to hide the presence of cholera, thereby worsening the epidemic, as well as exacerbating the tensions that led to the Cholera Riots. After the initial failure to stop cholera from arriving in, then spreading from, Sunderland, the Central Board demanded greater powers.283 It would take some time, but after cholera arrived in London in February 1832, the Cholera Prevention Act was passed through parliament.284 The Act empowered the Privy Council to “revoke, renew, alter, and vary all such Rules and Regulations, or to substitute any such new Rules and Regulations as to them may appear necessary or expedient for the Prevention [of cholera]” until the end of the year.285 Considering the sweeping nature of this power, it is perhaps commendable that the Privy Council restrained invoking its authority. The greatest extent of the Cholera Prevention Act was implemented on 20 July 1832 when new amendments to the regulations empowered the local Boards with greater sanative prerogatives. Among these, and most pertinent to this thesis, was the “command and order that the interment of all persons certified by any medical practitioner to have died of [cholera] should take place within the space of twenty-four hours from the time of death. . .”286 Historian R.J. Morris goes as far as to describe this burial regulation as “a 281 Alison Toplis, The Clothing Trade in Provincial England, 1800–1850 (London: Routledge, 2015), 89, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315655765. 282 Toplis, The Clothing Trade, 113. 283 Morris, Cholera 1832, 71. 284 Durey, The Return of the Plague, 87–88. 285 “Accounts, Letters and Other Documents Relating to the Control of Cholera by the Board of Health for the Parish of Saint Marylebone,” 1832, MJ/SP/1832/10/149, London Metropolitan Archives. 286 “Copy of Supplementary to the London Gazette, February to August 1832 Miscellaneous...” 78 scientifically-based administrative attack on the burial and mourning customs of the poor and working classes. . .”.287 Although this measure had been recommended in previous circulars, the enforcement of this regulation at a national level contributed to a spike in Cholera Riots in the late summer, especially within Irish immigrant communities.288 As we saw in Chapter One, the wake was an important funeral ritual for the Roman Catholic Irish. While no regulations yet extended to the burial of cholera victims, the Boards of Health highly encouraged doctors to bury the corpses as quickly as possible.289 This recommendation, of course, interfered with wakes and made Irish populations reluctant to surrender themselves to the hospitals. This unprecedented power given to local doctors on a national scale naturally raised suspicions. Cholera hospitals were almost always the targets of these suspicions. The local Boards of Health were responsible for designating temporary hospitals for cholera patients, as well as separate graveyards for the dead. Landowners who provided space for the cholera hospitals or graveyards were met with staunch protests until the offer was rescinded.290 As such, these hospitals were often situated in less-than-ideal locations. Many of the hospitals were intended to be temporary, consisting of repurposed warehouses, schoolrooms, or tents.291 The quality of the hospitals was thus limited by variables beyond doctors’ direct control. Similarly, many patients would only surrender themselves to the hospital once they were desperately sick, thus artificially inflating the mortality rates. This delay in seeking medical attention was due to the same reasons that the working-class distrusted the charity and teaching hospitals discussed in Chapter One. It was commonly believed that the cholera hospitals were a facade for anatomists 287 Morris, Cholera 1832, 104. 288 Samuel Cohn Jr. records a spike in Cholera Riots from two in July to seventeen in August. See: Cohn, Epidemics, 174. 289 For example, in February 1832, the Edinburgh Board of Health required funerals occur within 12 hours of death; the Central Board of Health would not institute this until 13 July 1832. See, respectively: “Miscellaneous In-Letters” (c1827–c1832), PC 1/103, The National Archives, Kew; Durey, The Return of the Plague, 164. 290 Gilbert, Cholera, 58. 291 Morris, Cholera 1832, 104. 79 to conduct their dissections without the need for body snatchers. The Poor Man’s Advocate reported that hospitals were “a means of removing the poor sick from the sight of their friends so that they may more conveniently be butchered and anatomized by the doctors.”292 The cholera hospitals were thus set up to fail from the start of the epidemic, as wariness concerning their efficacy undermined the hospitals’ ability to care for their patients, further exacerbating this mistrust. Certainly, during the early days of the epidemic, there was truth behind this rumour. Cholera was unknown to most British physicians, with the exceptions being those who served in the British East India Company. To learn about the pathology of this new disease, many physicians hastily dissected victims without consideration for their relatives.293 A few of these surgeons published their findings. For example, the body of a two-year-old boy named Thomas Mansel was dissected on 22 July 1832, twelve hours after his death from cholera.294 The surgeon and Prestonpans Board of Health member James Eckford also published a book detailing a dissection undertaken on a cholera victim’s cadaver.295 It is difficult to ascertain how many of these dissections occurred. However, such cadaveric anatomizing combined with decades of pent-up frustration with doctors were more than enough to fuel rumours throughout the pandemic. Working-class suspicions were further exacerbated in July by the Central Board’s decree that the internment of cholera victims must be conducted within twenty-four hours of death.296 Understandably, the quick burial seemed nefarious, intended to hide misconduct. While the working class always despised such anatomical dissections, cholera created a uniquely intense environment. The epidemic generated what Peter Linebaugh describes as a 292 Hutton, The Study, 84. 293 Morris, Cholera 1832, 103. 294 See: “Miscellaneous In-Letters” 295 James Eckford, Facts and Observations Regarding the Disease Called Epidemic Cholera, as It Recently Appeared in Prestonpans and Its Vicinity (Edinburgh: McLachlan & Stewart, 1832), 70–71. 296 Gilbert, Cholera, 51. 80 “death crisis”.297 Although Linebaugh discusses the definition of a death crisis in the context of public hangings and dissections, not in the context of the epidemic, the circumstances are similar. Cholera, similar to public hangings, killed young men and women “fully engaged in family life and when the family as such performs a critical role in the social division of labour, [creating] a social vacuum. . .”298 Massive deaths amongst this demographic thus deeply affected the fabric of British society. Funeral rites and burial customs were necessary to comfort the communities affected by such premature death. Working-class protests for the right to conduct such rites and customs may “appear as bad taste or as superstition,” but were in fact essential to soften the “shock” of death.299 The involuntary dissection of cholera victims was thus an especially severe transgression of working-class social life. It prevented a proper catharsis of grief and often intensified emotions by imbuing the corpse with the humiliation of a murderer’s death. The Cholera Riots almost always targeted hospitals (either the actual building, the doctors travelling to and from, or the patients being taken from their homes) for this reason. Although the Boards of Health instituted the regulations, the hospitals physically brought this power to bear. Staffing these hospitals was an issue, especially regarding nurses. The source of this shortage is uncertain; it was likely a combined terror of cholera, which hampered recruiting efforts, and, later, the risk of facing down a riotous mob. As mentioned, the H.M.S. Dover requested nurses as its crew kept abandoning the ship for fear of the disease. Whatever the reason, archival records from the Home Office indicate that some hospitals were forced to turn to prison labour for nurses. Prison officials promised criminals that their sentences would be mitigated if they volunteered in either cholera hospitals or prison infirmaries. For example, on 6 297 Linebaugh, “The Tyburn Riot,” 116. 298 Linebaugh, “The Tyburn Riot,” 116. 299 Linebaugh, “The Tyburn Riot,” 116. 81 September 1832, J.P. Heyward (n.d.)—Chairman of the Visiting Justices of Wakefield House of Correction—reported that, . . .we found it impossible to procure a sufficient number of attendants to nurse and take care of them without getting some of the Prisoners under our promise to use our utmost endeavours to obtain for them some mitigation of their Punishment. Amongst these was George Vickers who was convicted. . . of Petty Larceny on the 11th of July and sentenced to be imprisoned for four months. He was an Assistant in the Cholera Hospital for seven weeks and conducted himself with such attention and Humanity as to receive the strong recommendation of the Medical Officials to have some Reward.300 There are many such examples of prisoners serving as nurses.301 The exact logistics of this are uncertain. The only records I have found are the petitions for clemency in the National Archives at Kew Gardens. However, the initiative to compel prisoners to serve as cholera hospital nurses it illustrates the mechanisms of biopower beginning to develop within healthcare systems. Prisoners were desperate and expendable. They could be mustered to support a healthcare system that preyed upon the working class—especially after the 1832 Anatomy Act made the unclaimed bodies of prisoners available to anatomists. Instead of executing criminals at the Tyburn Gallows, the British judicial system now primarily imprisoned the working class where they could be used for labour, or their corpses readily dissected upon their death. While the employment of prisoners as nurses did not instigate any known riot, their role in the function of healthcare illustrates the growing power of the British state to manipulate bodies to reinforce its authority. 300 “Prisoner Name: George Vickers . Court and Date of Trial: Yorkshire Quarter Sessions,...” (1832), HO 17/51/53, The National Archives, Kew. 301 For a non-exhaustive list, see: “1 Individual Petition (J Armytage, Visiting Magistrate) on Behalf of Robert Kay...” (October 2, 1832), HO 17/59/121, The National Archives, Kew; “Prisoner Name: John Crossley and William Jennings . Court and Date of Trial: York Lent...” (October 1833), HO 17/60/46, The National Archives, Kew; “Prisoner Name: Robert Hardman . Court and Date of Trial: Lancaster Borough Quarter...” (January 3, 1832), HO 17/78/94, The National Archives, Kew; “Recommendation for the Mitigation of Sentence for Selected Prisoners in Bristol New Gaol...” (August 1832), HO 17/41/74, The National Archives, Kew. 82 Conclusion Despite decades of reform intended to standardize practice, British medicine was still fractured on the eve of the Cholera Riots. Doctors could not agree on the causes or cures for cholera, which furthered mistrust in medical authorities. Even those who had faith in certain doctors could not trust every doctor due to public infighting. The Central Board of Health attempted to use medicine’s authority to enforce its response to cholera—an information network of unprecedented breadth—and found their power insufficient. The Boards interjected themselves into the lives of the working class and, in doing so, opened their new agency to scrutiny without having earned the respect or (at least initially) been granted the political backing to enforce their recommendations. This was partially due to the corruption of local authorities. Many among the middle and upper classes—especially those who served on the Boards—had financial incentives to restrict the disease controls over their towns. However, especially where the Cholera Riots are concerned, the Boards’ policies were fundamentally flawed due to their reliance on the cooperation of the working class. Chapter One illustrated how, over several decades, the working class was mistreated by doctors. Medicine was essentially fueled by graverobbing and recent legislative debates concerning the Anatomy Act illustrated that state authorities were more than willing to legally enshrine medicine’s prerogative to use working-class corpses as doctors saw fit. So, when the poor were encouraged to admit themselves to a cholera hospital at the first sign of illness, many saw this as a ploy to snare cadavers for dissection. This was not an unreasonable concern. Early victims had been dissected. There was good reason to doubt the intentions of medical authorities. The biopolitical mechanisms that emerged as part of the epidemiological response to cholera are evident in the archival and printed sources examined in this chapter. Classist hierarchies are visible when examining the types of care available to different communities. The wealthy and powerful were in little danger of the epidemic, but if they did fall ill, they could afford 83 to bring a doctor to their homes for private care. The Boards of Health published recommendations for the working class to prevent contracting cholera, but the only care available was the makeshift cholera hospitals where the doctors might conduct involuntary autopsies to better care for their wealthier clientele. Even among the working class, there was often a division between the literate and non-literate, given that these recommendations were published as bill posters and in newspapers. Although the illiterate populations were still likely able to access such information, this system disadvantaged the destitute and immigrant communities where literacy was lower and whose presence was the most unwelcome. Finally, when there was a shortage of personnel for the hospitals, prisoners were exposed to the deadly disease in exchange for clemency—their labour was the most cost-effective and expendable to the state. This hierarchy was neither designed with a singular intention nor was it consciously constructed. Rather, medical authority was structured to fit the needs of the state, which thereby influenced a multitude of decisions and relationships that fostered life in some populations while disallowing it in others. The Cholera Riots were a response to the illumination of this medical authority brought about by the scrutiny given to the Board’s response to the epidemic. The Central Board of Health was well aware of the potential for civil unrest against authoritative disease controls. However, as the continental Cholera Riots were directed against strictly political authorities, the Board underestimated the risk to doctors. Although Britain avoided implementing military-backed quarantines, the regulations imposed by the Boards of Health resulted in a similar outcome: the Cholera Riots. 84 Chapter Three: The Cholera Riots The general silence of the city, save when broken by the tolling of the funeral bell, and which, as mentioned in a former page, was eventually silenced, was the most remarkable; the streets were deserted, the hurried steps of the medical men and their assistants, or of those running to seek their aid, alone were heard, while the one-horse hearse, occasionally passing on its duty, was almost the only carriage to be seen in the usually busy streets. Thomas Shapter, The History of the Cholera in Exeter, 1849. Introduction The working class asserted itself against medical authorities through the Cholera Riots of 1831 and 1832. Historians have too often attributed the Cholera Riots to conspiracy theories or recent instances of body snatching, with the Burke and Hare murders cited as a key origin of tension due to the widespread use of the term ‘burker’ during the riots.302303 However, this interpretation overlooks the deeper complexities of the working class's relationship with doctors. While fear and suspicion certainly exacerbated working-class frustrations with doctors, it would be disingenuous to ascribe these riots as solely the product of ignorance or emotionality. Contrary to representations of the impulsiveness of the working class, the rioters were restrained; they caused relatively little damage or loss of life compared to contemporary protests. Moreover, rioters were not uninformed. There was always either precedent or evidence for the accusations levied against doctors. Finally, the riots effectively communicated discontent in a system that offered the working class little legal recourse. This chapter will analyze the various riots—their social makeup, characteristics, and causes—in order to construct a biopolitical understanding of the Cholera Riots. 302 See: Samuel Cohn Jr., “Cholera Revolts: A Class Struggle We May Not Like,” Social History 42, no. 2 (April 2017): 165, https://doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2017.1290365; Cohn Jr., Epidemics, 167, 169; Cohn Jr., “Fear and the Corpse,” 59; Durey, The Return of the Plague, 92, 103; Evans, Epidemics and Revolutions, 138; Gilbert, Cholera, 51; Morris, Cholera 1832, 101, 117. 303 85 Although the Cholera Riots hindered medical response to the epidemic, their lasting consequences are somewhat less certain. The most immediate effects were limited to the destruction of a few Cholera Hospitals and the vandalism of peripheral neighbourhoods. No criminal charges were brought against doctors.304 The Boards of Health were only dissolved in late 1832 when cholera receded. The 1832 Anatomy Act was passed into law unimpeded by the working class’s protest. Some historians argue that the lack of immediate consequences on political or medical institutions indicates the Cholera Riots were ineffectual. This interpretation is supported by R.J. Morris and Michael Durey’s contention that the Cholera Riots’ lack of radicalism indicated the essential stability of British Society. By contrast, Pamela Gilbert and Richard Evans argue that such a position presumes that the Cholera Riots were intended to be revolutionary. My research supports Gilbert and Evans’ thesis. Rather than critiquing the Cholera Riots for what they were not, they should be understood for what they were to contemporaries: as a means of checking the power of medical authority. In this effort, they were politically important and are thus worthy of further investigation. This chapter illustrates the consequences of the neglected relationship between the working class and medical authority through a reconstruction and analysis of riots in Aberdeen, Paisley, Liverpool, London, and Manchester, for which archival evidence is particularly rich and revealing. Whether the instigating factor of each Cholera Riot was a response by the working class to true events, decades of exploitation by doctors meant that when local Boards or hospitals allegedly faltered or overstepped, the working class was quick to riot. Beyond this general distrust, these riots were also a means of protecting family members’ bodies from being stolen and dissected, suggesting that personal motivations played a role as well as communal obligations to defend the gravesites. The Cholera Riots were a means of both retributive 304 Manchester police promised to charge Oldham, but he fled without being apprehended. It is uncertain if he was ever caught. In other cases, such as Paisley, rewards were offered for more information but it is uncertain whether these amounted to anything. 86 violence and forcing medical authorities to acknowledge the working class’s distress. Given the rioters’ motives to keep doctors and hospitals in check, they were by all accounts successful forms of protest, as medical authorities were frequently forced to acquiesce to the rioters or seek support from religious institutions. Long term, the Cholera Riots sculpted working-class consciousness and undermined the effectiveness of exploitative policies like the Anatomy Act. Bring Out the Burkers It is difficult to ascertain the exact number of Cholera Riots. There could be riots that went unrecorded by authorities, whose records have been lost, or have yet to be uncovered. Samuel Cohn Junior, an authoritative historian of epidemics, has identified seventy-two Cholera Riots in the United Kingdom between November 1831 and January 1833.305 However, the exact nature of these riots is not detailed, making it difficult to engage with this statistic. For example, the first riot on Cohn’s list occurred in Sunderland on 12 November 1831. The Morning Post described the event in the following terms: On Saturday evening, while a public Meeting was being held in the rooms of the exchange, a mob assembled outside, vociferating “Down with Clanny, down with Clanny!” merely because Dr. Clanny, as Chairman of a Medical Board, had put his name to that communication from the Board which appeared in the London Papers about a week ago—a communication which, be it observed, was sanctioned by every member of the board present.306 Despite the usage of “mob”, this riot was relatively tame. There was no real violence—neither property nor persons were attacked—and the very nature of the proverbial crowd differed from the later Cholera Riots. Riots rarely occurred due to primarily economic concerns. However, because the Cholera Riots were conducted locally without broader coordination, it can be easier to identify exceptions than similarities. It is therefore more important to identify the common 305 Cohn Jr., Epidemics, 163. 306 Morning Post, 18 November 1831. British Newspaper Archive. 87 cause between these independent events than it is to construct the Cholera Riots as a distinct phenomenon. The vast majority of the Cholera Riots were carried out in response to public concerns over body snatching, either due to the discovery of disturbed graves or to prevent patients from being transported to the hospitals in the first place.307 “Bring out the Burkers” became a rallying cry for the working class. A smaller number of the riots were concerned with the potential of being buried alive.308 Although newspaper descriptions of riots included rumours of poisoned medicine in the description of the riots, I have been unable to find any riots that occurred due to a poisoning incident, perceived or real. The Cholera Riots can be divided into two typal groups: proactive and demonstrative. The proactive riots were instigated by a call to action with a specific urgent objective. For example, the crowd in the London Cholera Riot assembled to rescue a woman who was rumoured to have been buried alive.309 In Liverpool, there were several Cholera Riots intended to prevent sick patients from being transported to hospitals.310 The demonstrative riots occurred after medical misconduct had already concluded. These typically concerned accusations of graverobbing and burking, such as the Aberdeen, Paisley, and Manchester Riots. Demonstrative riots appear to have been more destructive due to their retributive nature and thus resulted in greater police response and arrests, but this is difficult to conclusively state without further research. In both kinds of riots, thousands of people could attend, though it is difficult to ascertain specific figures. The figures for the Aberdeen Riot—the largest recorded—have been impugned by historians. 311 Local variables, such as the size of surrounding populations, make it difficult to productively compare individual riots. It is then perhaps more 307 Cohn Jr., Epidemics, 168. 308 Cohn Jr., 173. 309 “Cholera Riot,” Morning Post, 25 August 1832. British Newspaper Archive. 310 Burrell and Gill, “The Liverpool Cholera Epidemic,” 478–498. 311 Cohn Jr., Hate and Compassion, 170. 88 useful to consider the Cholera Riots as a collective movement despite its lack of leadership or centralized organization. The identity of the rioters varied between riots, but there were a few general trends that can be discerned from the available evidence. The rioters in Britain tended to be young, were a balance of men and women, and often of Irish heritage. When women appear in the record, it occurs more frequently at the early stages of unrest. By contrast, when the police or militia dispersed the rioters, it was mostly men who were arrested. It is unclear if this is because men were more often violent or if there was a broader gendered bias. Certainly, women were full participants and were not immune to carrying out what the authorities deemed violent acts. The Paisley rioter Joseph Green, for instance, recalls pushing a woman away from breaking a window.312 In Liverpool, a mob was initially “composed mostly of women and boys”.313 At a riot in Pathhead, Cohn writes, “Resistance began with women and children but after the head of the local Board of Health called out a constabulary. . . men joined the ranks.”314 Most newspaper articles did not provide gendered descriptions of the rioters, but there are enough to suggest that both men and women participated on a similar footing. The Irish heritage of Cholera rioters provides further insights. Although most apparent in the Liverpool Riots, many of the Cholera Riots across Britain featured Irish immigrants. Even in the Scottish town of Paisley, the newspapers described the mob as “half-grown lads and Irishmen”.315 This is partially due to the poverty associated with immigrant Irish communities in 312 “Trial Papers Relating to Christopher Welsh, Joseph Green, Thomas Forrester, Thomas Shearer, John Peacock, Philip Docherty, John Cumming, Peter Mulhoran for the Crime of Mobbing and Rioting at Paisley, Various Locations. Tried at High Court, Glasgow” (May 5, 1832), JC26/1832/188, National Records of Scotland. 313 Burrell and Gill, “The Liverpool Cholera Epidemic,” 485. 314 Cohn Jr., Epidemics, 177. 315 Durey, The Return of the Plague, 179. 89 Britain, but also because of religious differences.316 The Irish-Catholic wakes conflicted with the Boards of Health’s policy of burying bodies as quickly as possible—often hours—after death. The practice of filling coffins with quicklime to sanitize the corpse also insulted the Irish, as the solution would rapidly decompose the body, liquifying it even before the coffin was lowered into the ground.317 Considering the eschatological concerns over dissection discussed in Chapter One, this process would have been met with similar aversion. Although there is no evidence of direct xenophobia against Irish communities, it is clear that the Boards of Health did not consider their perspective in prescriptions around burial practices. Similar difficulties arose when the Jewish community in Exeter refused to be buried in the Anglican cholera burial ground, though this event was resolved without much incident.318 The Cholera Riots were differentiated from contemporaneous unrest by their relatively peaceful conduct. The 1830 Swing Riots in protest of agricultural mechanisation had resulted in the execution of nineteen rioters and the transportation of five hundred more to Van Dieman’s Land.319 During the 1831 Reform Riots, when the defeat of the Reform Bill delayed further voter enfranchisement, rioters took control of Bristol for three days, looting and destroying the Council House, jail, customs house and bishop’s palace.320 Twelve people were killed and over one hundred wounded. By comparison, one of the most destructive Cholera Riots occurred in Aberdeen where an anatomy school burned down.321 There was perhaps one fatality during the Paisley Cholera Riot when a stone smashed through the hospital window and hit a patient, but it 316 On Irish immigration to Scotland, see: Tom M. Devine, Irish Immigrants and Scottish Society in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Proceedings of the Scottish Historical Studies Seminar, University of Strathclyde, 1989/90 (Birlinn Ltd, 2001). 317 Morris, Cholera 1832, 105. 318 Gilbert, Cholera, 58. 319 Richardson, Death, 193–194. 320 John Beckett, “The Nottingham Reform Bill Riots of 1831 *,” Parliamentary History 24, no. S1 (2005): 114, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1750-0206.2005.tb00465.x. 321 “Destruction of the Theatre of Anatomy, St. Andrew’s Street,” Aberdeen Press and Journal, 21 December 1831. British Newspaper Archive. 90 is unclear whether he died from the headwound or cholera.322 Of the eight arrested Paisley rioters, the harshest sentence was only nine months imprisonment with hard labour.323 Some of the Cholera Riots ended without damage to persons or property.324 Compared to the economic and political concerns of the Swing Riots and Reform Riots respectively, which occurred on a national scale, the Cholera Riots were characterized by narrow intent due to their localized manifestations. Much of the violence during the Cholera Riots was conducted to protect members of their community. During the most ostensibly destructive Cholera Riots, the crowd would use symbolic reprisals—such as the destruction of Knox’s effigy in Chapter One—to voice their frustration. Frequently, this manifested in the destruction of cholera palanquins and hearses. These expensive vehicles were used to carry patients to the hospitals or corpses to the graveyards respectively.325 As such, their destruction became symbolic of the rioters’ resistance to medical authority. Aside from Aberdeen, the Cholera Riots did not begin in earnest until the spring when the disease accelerated, sweeping across England. The Cholera Riots spiked in late March and April with twenty-seven riots across the two months; they reached a zenith in August with seventeen riots in that month alone.326 It is probably no coincidence that these peaks followed two bills—the Cholera Morbus Prevention Act (or Cholera Act) and the Anatomy Act—both intended to empower medical authority with greater control over working-class bodies. While there is no way to prove a correlation without the perspective of the rioters, it is fair to suggest that the poor would have been aware of these bills, which may have resulted in increased scrutiny of medical authorities. In an article published a few years before the cholera epidemic, 322 See: “Riot at Paisley,” The Scotsman, 28 March 1832. British Newspaper Archive. 323 “Trial Papers.” 324 For example, this riot in London described in the Morning Post, 25 August 1832. 325 Cohn Jr., Epidemics, 167. 326 Cohn Jr., Epidemics, 174. 91 the Westminster Review—a quarterly liberal journal founded by Jeremy Bentham—describes the underlying sentiment potentially behind this phenomenon: . . .this detestable practice [body snatching] leads [the poor] to suppose that they must still serve their masters even after death has set them free from toil, and that when the early dawn can no longer rouse them from their pallet of straw to work, they must be dragged from what should be their last bed, to show in common with the murderer, how the knife of the surgeon may best avoid the rich man’s artery, and least afflict the rich man’s nerve.327 The Cholera Riots were then fueled by the perceived exploitation of the working class by medical authorities. Although the rumours that instigated the riots were not always true—most often, the accusations of the rioters were left unconfirmed—the resentment of medical authorities was rightfully founded on decades of classist policies within healthcare systems. The Cholera Riots only manifested within local contexts without any pretense to nationally or even regionally coordinated action. Although there are patterns of behaviour across the riots, local catalysts were responsible for individual manifestations of unrest. Each riot reflects a distinct aspect of the tension between the working class and medical authority. These aspects fit together like a mosaic to form a larger cohesive picture of the strife between the working class and medical authorities. The next sections will discuss the Cholera Riots at Aberdeen, Paisley, Liverpool, London, and Manchester to provide a fuller understanding of how the riots were conducted, the various objectives of the rioters, and how each riot represents a piece of the larger resistance to the encroachment of medical authority. Aberdeen Cholera Riot At two o’clock on Monday 19 December 1831, a group of young boys spotted a dog digging a hole in the grounds outside the local anatomy school.328 The school had been discussed with some suspicion by locals due in part to the “dark frowning front” of the façade 327 Westminster Review, vol.10, (1828–9), 128. Quoted in Morris, Cholera 1832, 102. 328 “Destruction of the Theatre of Anatomy, St. Andrew’s Street.” 92 and in part to the stench emanating from the yard. According to the Aberdeen Journal, the boys first fetched a group of adults before investigating further, but there must have been some indication of foul play—and indeed, a foul smell—to warrant excitement. Soon, twenty to thirty people had gathered to “[finish] what the dog began.”329 Upturned in the loose earth, the crowd found fragments of skulls, bones, and rotting entrails. The crowd broke into the anatomy theatre; they chased the surgeon out a window, destroyed or stole the medical “paraphernalia”, and “made every attempt” to start a fire. Upon entering, the crowd had found three “mangled corpses”—certainly not an unusual sight in an anatomy school—but to the crowd it was evidence. “Burn the house—down with the burking shop!” the crowd chanted as they carried the bodies into the streets.330 Having poured a barrel of tar onto kindling, the mob set the place alight. The Lord Provost, supported by the local magistrates and several constables, attempted to negotiate with the crowd, promising that the anatomists and arsonists alike would be fully investigated, but to little avail. The crowd—which had grown to over a hundred during the initial raid of the school—now numbered twenty thousand wrapped around the block. Smaller groups chased down the surgeon and a medical student, both of whom evaded the mob. By ten o’clock, the anatomy school had been reduced to rubble and Aberdeen was quiet once again.331 It is doubtful whether twenty thousand people truly participated in the riot. Just over thirty thousand people lived in Aberdeen’s six parishes; including the surrounding area, the city numbered just shy of sixty thousand people.332 If this number is to be believed, the Aberdeen Cholera Riot was the largest in British history. The Aberdeen Journal only states that the streets around the block were “completely crammed, and all roads thither impassable.” It is most likely that the Aberdeen Journal made a rough estimate—perhaps exaggerated—as it would be 329 “Destruction of the Theatre of Anatomy, St. Andrew’s Street.” 330 “Destruction of the Theatre of Anatomy, St. Andrew’s Street.” 331 “Destruction of the Theatre of Anatomy, St. Andrew’s Street.” 332 Cohn Jr., Hate and Compassion, 170. 93 impossible to determine accurate figures. As will be illustrated by the Paisley Cholera Riot, such crowds shifted in numbers and demographic composition throughout the day; any headcount of such a large gathering would be inaccurate by the time of completion. However, there is reason to believe that the fire contributed to the size of the crowd. The arson of the anatomy school made this riot one of the most destructive.333 Certainly, the spectacle of the fire may have drawn a larger crowd than the relatively tamer events of the later Cholera Riots. The Aberdeen Cholera Riot was the first and only riot to occur before February 1832.334 The date of its occurrence is odd not only because of its isolation, but also because cholera had ostensibly not yet reached the town. The Aberdeen Journal reported that cholera has afflicted the area around Sunderland and Newcastle, notably excluding Aberdeen.335 Although cholera’s approach was watched with great anticipation, the fact that it had not yet reached Aberdeen indicates the reasons for the riot were multi-faceted. It was the result of more than just panic caused by the unknown disease. As the weather warmed, cholera’s once slow pace accelerated. By the spring, cholera had crisscrossed Britain and with it, a wave of riots began. Paisley Cholera Riot On 26 March 1832, on the outskirts of the Scottish town of Paisley, a group of boys discovered two shovels and a hook—graverobbers’ tools—in the cholera burial grounds.336 The news of their find spread rapidly. By the late morning, a crowd had gathered to unearth the graves, determined to verify whether any bodies had been stolen. One can only imagine the anticipation as the coffins were heaved from the cold earth. Reports differ on how many coffins 333 Durey, The Return of the Plague, 183. 334 Notably, Samuel Cohn Jr. counts the mob at Sunderland as the first Cholera Riot, but I have already discussed my opinion on why it should be excluded from this category. No other historian lists any earlier riots. 335 “Destruction of the Theatre of Anatomy, St. Andrew’s Street.” 336 For a full description of the riot, see: R.J. Morris, Cholera 1832, 109–110; Michael Durey, The Return of the Plague, 178–179. 94 were disinterred but one of the very first was found empty.337 Outraged at the apparent presence of graverobbers, the crowd uprooted the wooden staves that fenced the graveyard and carried them like clubs toward the town. They marched south; those in the lead carried the empty coffin on their shoulders. As the crowd re-entered town, they were stopped by the local magistrates, who offered a £50 reward for the graverobbers in an attempt to diffuse the mob. However, the offer failed to sway the rioters, and a scuffle broke out that injured two police officers and broke the empty coffin.338 From here, the crowd split into two groups. A small portion wandered eastward and smashed the windows of the houses and ships belonging to doctors. The rest continued south to the cholera hospital. There, the crowd tore down the hospital gate. They threw stones through the windows, pelting the patients and nurses. Some newspapers say that a patient died after being struck by a stone, but it is unclear whether the sources meant the patient died of the wound directly or if the stress exacerbated their case of cholera.339 The crowd then demolished the cholera hearse—a cart used to transport bodies to the graveyard—and dragged it through the streets.340 They hauled it south, then east across the river before being met by a party of cavalrymen from Glasgow. The rioters were subsequently dispersed with no further violence. Eight men were later arrested for ‘mobbing and rioting’ and assault. These eight men each testified to their conduct during the riot, which was recorded by a clerk in the sheriff's office and later entered into the National Records of Scotland.341 As 337 The official indictment of the rioters claimed four graves were opened and two were empty, but newspapers describe many more. The Scotsman claimed 8 graves were opened and 7 were empty. See: “Riot at Paisley,” The Scotsman; the Perthshire Courier claimed 7 coffins were opened and 6 were empty. See: “Dreadful Cholera Riot at Paisley,” Perthshire Courier, 29 March 1832. British Newspaper Archive; For the indictment of the rioters, see: “Trial Papers.” 338 This skirmish is described in the Perthshire Courier. See: “Dreadful Cholera Riot at Paisley.” 339 See: “Riot at Paisley,” The Scotsman. 340 It is here that the exact path of the rioters becomes uncertain. The rioters certainly dragged the cholera hearse through these specific streets, but the exact path and junctions they took can only be speculated. See Image 3. 341 “Trial Papers.” 95 expected, these men were all working class. They were labourers, weavers, and chimney sweeps. None of them could write; their declarations were recorded by a clerk in the sheriff’s office. Two of the rioters were still children: Philip Docherty was sixteen years old, and John Cumming was only fifteen at the time of the riot. The oldest recorded, Thomas Shearer, was thirty-two years old. The rioters were quite young on average. Seven of them pleaded guilty and were sentenced to hard labour ranging from three to nine months. One man, John Peacock, fled and was named an outlaw and fugitive. The confessions do not provide much more description of the rioters themselves. This is not surprising given the nature of the archive. Judicial archives are composed of the supposedly spontaneous answers rendered under the pressures of police interrogation. As Arlette Farge writes in The Allure of the Archives, “Usually, the [judicial] archive does not describe people in full. It cuts them out of their daily lives, cements them in some complaint or pitiful denial, and, even when they are consenting, pins them down like trembling butterflies.”342 The purpose of judicial archives is not to record the person, but their complaint or their behaviour as it pertains to the law. The only depiction of the rioters I have found was in an article by the Morning Advertiser that described them as “half-grown lads and Irishmen”.343 Considering the relatively young age of the rioters, and the prominent role of Irish immigrants in other Cholera Riots, this assessment is likely correct. The convicted rioters gave very little incriminating evidence in their declarations. Aside from personal pride, there was perhaps a worry of inadvertently condemning one of their peers. A confession could not be used as evidence against others, but this information could still prejudice police and jurors in future cases.344 At this time, police were expected to use their personal knowledge of the offender to determine their conduct.345 Most rioters stated that they 342 Farge, The Allure, 26. 343 “Riot at Paisley,” Morning Advertiser, 30 March 1832. British Newspaper Archive. 344 David Bentley, English Criminal Justice in the 19th Century (London: The Hambledon Press, 1998), 228. 345 John Field, “Police, Power and Community in a Provincial English Town: Portsmouth 1815–1875,” in Policing and Punishment in Nineteenth Century Britain (Routledge, 1981), 46. 96 only joined the crowd in passing, either when it was still mustering at the burial ground or as it marched through the streets. However, two declarations may be of note. Christopher Welsh and Joseph Green had returned to Paisley from their work when they found the crowd gathered around the cholera hospital. Welsh’s wife and child had died of cholera and were buried in the same graveyard where the riot began. For Green, this was even more personal. Upon reaching the crowd, Green was told that it was, in fact, the body of Green’s brother that had been stolen by the resurrectionists. Though the declarations do not indicate much emotion—possibly because they were closer to descriptive summarizations rather than perfect transcriptions346—it does not take much imagination to conclude the reasons these men joined the rioters. Both Welsh and Green stated that they were eventually admitted into the hospital by a porter to help the remaining staff protect the patients. However, both admitted that they became intoxicated on the hospital’s stores of whiskey, which suggests their true intentions were far less noble. Both men were eventually apprehended by constables at the hospital, and though Green admits he had initially refused to leave, the clerk left no specifics of their arrest. Green and Welsh received the longest sentence out of the convicted rioters—nine months with hard labour—though there is a chance Green’s sentence was mitigated. His mother wrote a petition asking that his sentence be shortened or that she be allowed to provide him with some extra food, as Green’s “previous behaviour was always good and orderly.”347 However, the outcome of this petition is uncertain. Two aspects of the riot are clear from the declarations of the rioters. First, the riot occurred in stages. The arrested rioters joined the crowd throughout the day and claimed to have left the crowd for various reasons—dinner, drinks with friends, or on a whim—at different 346 For example, the passage where Green learns his brother’s body was stolen is recorded as such: “That finding a mob at the Hospital the declarant asked what was the matter and he was told by persons in the crowd whom he does not know that they had been at the moss burying ground and that the Bodies of the declarants Brother and Michael Crossan had been lifted and taken away.” See: “Trial Papers.” 347 “1 Collective Petition (7 People Including, Prisoner’s Mother, Wife, Clergymen And...” (May 1831), HO 17/14/45, The National Archives, Kew. 97 times. The crowd present at the graveyard in the morning was not necessarily the same that raided the hospital. This has implications when considering popular perceptions of the mob as homogenous in their intent or behaviour. Second, and most importantly, the rioters often had individual motivations for this retributive violence. Joseph Green had returned from a job outside of town to learn that his brother’s body was one of those stolen by the graverobbers. Another rioter, Christopher Welsh, saw his wife and child died of cholera in that hospital before being buried in the graveyard where the riot began. This riot was more than the result of a distrust of medical authority. It was also a means for the rioters to prevent their family members from being stolen and dissected by demonstrating the lengths to which they would protect their graves. Condemnations of the cholera riots tended to make sweeping statements concerning the general character of the working class: ignorant, violent, and self-destructive. These declarations are evidence that such crowds were not so monolithic. Finally, from a historiographical perspective, the Paisley Cholera Riot proves that these riots were an effective strategy to amplify working-class concerns. The working class used these actions to demonstrate their frustration in a society where they otherwise had little recourse. Although the rioters faced juridical punishment, their actions ensured that their concerns would receive national media attention. Similarly, the documentation recorded during the prosecution of the rioters ultimately preserved their individual experiences and perspectives in the historical archive—a rare feat for the working class throughout history. The conclusion of this chapter will further discuss the reactions and consequences of the Cholera Riots further, but for now, the Paisley Cholera Riots are an excellent example of how they effectively highlighted social issues to a broader audience. Liverpool Cholera Riots Like in Sunderland, the Liverpool cholera epidemic festered for several weeks before it was recognized. The first officially recorded case of cholera occurred on 17 May 1832, but 98 reports of cholera stretch back to at least the beginning of the month. For example, on 5 May, the Liverpool Journal reported that there was a suspected case of cholera in the city.348 Although these cases appear to be retroactively acknowledged (at least in the press)349, the harm caused by the delayed response fundamentally undermined trust in medical authority. The local Board of Health had the power to issue bills of health to ships leaving port.350 Ship owners paid as much as £2000 for these bills. Considering that both London and Bristol had closed their ports due to the presence of cholera, Liverpudlian medical authorities were highly incentivized to ignore the presence of cholera—both for their personal gain and for the benefit of the local economy. Unfortunately, it was the lower class who suffered from this selfishness. On 18 May—one day after cholera was officially recognized in the city—the ship Brutus left Liverpool’s port for Quebec with three hundred and thirty passengers.351 It is uncertain whether Brutus’ departure was spurred by the declaration of cholera in the city or whether the timing was coincidental. However, if Captain Neilson had intended to leave the city ahead of the ravages of cholera, then he was unsuccessful. A week into the voyage, a man fell ill with cholera. Deaths soon mounted. On 13 June, after three weeks at sea, Brutus was forced to return to Liverpool’s harbour. Out of the 117 people who contracted cholera, only 20 recovered. Brutus would return to a city wracked by riots. The Liverpool Board of Health had spent weeks denying that cholera existed within the city. The acknowledgement of its presence on 17 May directly contradicted the statements of local doctors.352 This confused response to the epidemic only exacerbated the decades of 348 Burrell and Gill, “The Liverpool Cholera Epidemic,” 482. 349 On 22 May 1832, The Liverpool Times numbers the total of real or suspicious cholera in Liverpool dating back to 4 May. See: “The Cholera in Liverpool,” The Liverpool Times, 22 May 1832. 610.5 LIV. Liverpool City Council. 350 Burrell and Gill, “The Liverpool Cholera Epidemic,” 484. 351 “Ship Brutus. Awful Mortality,” Lancaster Gazette, 16 June 1832. British Newspaper Archive. 352 Doctors publicly disavowed claims that early cases were Asiatic cholera, instead claiming that it was an outbreak of common cholera. See: Burrel and Gill, “The Liverpool Cholera Epidemic,” 482. 99 distrust of medical authorities among the working class. In an article published on 1 June 1832, the Liverpool Mercury condemned the anti-medical sentiments arising in the city, It is very strange, but very true, that amongst the great numbers of the lower classes in this town an idea is prevalent that the cholera is a mere invention of the medical men to fill their own pockets, and that the hospitals are nothing more nor less than receptacles for victims of experiment and we have heard that on more than one occasion, when poor persons have been attacked by the prevalent disease, and been about to be removed at their own request, the neighbours have assembled in crowds, and endeavoured to prevent the removal of the patients.353 From a historical perspective, it does not seem so strange that the lower classes believed cholera was an invention of “medical men” for economic gain. Although those members of the working class were incorrect concerning the existence of the disease, the indictment of the corruption within the Board of Health was accurate. The tragedy aboard the Brutus was a direct consequence of the inaction and obfuscation by local doctors to maintain Liverpool’s open port. And, in fairness to those who disbelieved cholera’s existence, local medical authorities had dedicated efforts toward discrediting accounts of Asiatic cholera within the city. On Tuesday 29 May, Liverpool faced the first of eight Cholera Riots. That afternoon, the wife of a sick dockworker (only named Clarke in the papers) sought out medical assistance for her husband.354 While being attended by the doctors, Clarke also fell ill. Both were confirmed to be suffering from cholera. With Clarke’s consent, she was swiftly taken away to the hospital in a palanquin. Her husband followed an hour-and-a-half later. During their transport, a mob of “women and boys of the lowest order” verbally harassed the medical attendants. A crowd soon gathered outside the cholera hospital and demanded that the ‘burkers’—pejoratively referring to the medical attendants—come outside. The crowd threw bricks and stones through the windows and chased down suspected fleeing doctors, although no one was seriously injured. After some 353 “Cholera. Disgraceful Outrage.,” Liverpool Mercury, 1 June 1832. British Newspaper Archive. 354 The full account of the riot was published in: “Cholera Riots in Liverpool,” The Liverpool Times, 5 June 1832. In “Articles on the cholera epidemic of 1832 compiled from The Liverpool Times,” 610.5 LIV. Liverpool City Council Records. 100 trouble mustering the Park constables, the police were eventually summoned and dispersed the crowd. In all, the riot lasted only a few hours. However, fearing that this was only the beginning, magistrates printed addresses in an optimistic attempt to educate the working class, forty more constables were sworn in, and a reward of £10 was offered for information concerning the identity of any rioter. It is unknown whether anyone took up the reward money, but it is obvious that the other two measures did little to dissuade the working class from rioting. Between this event on 29 May and 10 June, seven more riots erupted in the streets of Liverpool.355 Each of them focused on the transportation of patients to the hospital. This was likely a combination of the general destitution of cholera victims as well as the city’s large Irish immigrant population. These demographics were the most vulnerable under the sanitary regulations implemented by the Board of Health. One Liverpool riot on 10 June occurred when a patient agreed to go to the hospital only if the surgeon could assure his wife that his body would be returned for a wake.356 The surgeon could not promise this and was attacked on the way back to the hospital. The Liverpool Cholera Riots would only end when the Roman Catholic Church was pressured into stepping in. At a meeting of the Board of Health, medical authorities asked local priests to mediate with their congregations.357 A statement was read from every Roman Catholic pulpit in Liverpool and the words were printed in the Liverpool Journal. As Sean Burrell and Geoffrey Gill suggest, “The statement was a masterpiece in defusing an increasingly dangerous situation.”358 The Church first stated that cholera was a very real and present disease before making assurances that the victims’ bodies were not being dissected, and that permission would be granted for families to visit the sick and to view the bodies before the burial. Medicine was 355 Geoffrey Gill, Sean Burrell, and Jody Brown, “Fear and Frustration—the Liverpool Cholera Riots of 1832,” The Lancet 358, no. 9277 (July 21, 2001): 234, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(01)05463-0. 356 Durey, The Return of the Plague, 165. 357 Burrell and Gill, “The Liverpool Cholera Epidemic," 493. 358 Burrell and Gill, 494. 101 supposed to have supplanted the clergy as the “interpreter of events affecting the social body.”359 Whereas epidemics were once managed by the clergy through prayers and donations, this responsibility had shifted to the modern rationality and science of medical authorities. However, this biopolitical shift apparently had yet to fully develop, as the clergy was still required to manage the epidemic. The population now soothed by the promises of the Church, the Liverpool Cholera Riots disappeared as abruptly as they emerged. The Liverpool Cholera Riots offer a stark depiction of the socio-economic variables that produced tensions between rioters and doctors. Despite local newspapers emphasizing that the poor believed doctors had invented cholera or that the doctors were poisoning patients, the riots appear to have originated due to economic and cultural differences.360 The hospital was not seen as a place of healing. Decades of distrust and fear of dissection placed doctors at an immediate disadvantage during the epidemic. The greed of medical authorities exacerbated this distrust during the first weeks of cholera’s spread. The Board’s denial of cholera only obfuscated the truth when the disease was finally acknowledged. Of course, there were also reasons for the working class to deny the presence of cholera. If the disease was detected in a house, the family could face shame and ostracization; a mark on their door would warn the neighbourhood of their disease. The few items they owned could be destroyed. Most importantly, being taken to a hospital could deny the working class a proper funeral, whether through dissection or a rapid burial. In 1831, just over ten percent of Liverpool’s population was Irish.361 Although the rates of cholera were relatively low for the size of the city, the Irish community was disproportionately vulnerable to both the disease and the Board’s regulations. Such rituals were important for the victim’s immortal soul, but also provided families with the necessary time to process and grieve their loss. In this way, the Liverpool Cholera riots were perhaps the most obvious instance of the 359 Gilbert, Cholera, 6. 360 “Cholera Riots in Liverpool,” Liverpool Times. 361 Burrell and Gill, “The Liverpool Cholera Epidemic," 496. 102 failure to implement biopolitical controls. The Board was meant to moderate the socio-economic life of the population through surveillance, sanitation, and the regulation of bodies. In the end, the Board required the assistance of the Catholic Church—a classic example of institutional sovereign power—to regain control. London Cholera Riot The third largest cholera riot in Britain occurred on 23 August 1832.362 That morning, a woman died of cholera and was promptly prepared for burial six hours later.363 This rapid pace provoked concerns that the woman was about to be buried alive. A crowd gathered at the hospital, then followed the funeral to the churchyard, protesting that the woman was not yet dead. As the grave was being filled in, the curate in charge of the funeral—irritated with the constant noise—told the crowd that he did not care whether the woman was dead or alive, only that “it was his duty to have her”. It is unclear what happened to the curate; the Morning Post only writes that the crowd “hissed and hooted in the most violent manner”, which supposes that no physical violence befell the man. However, at his response, the crowd rushed to disinter the woman’s coffin. The police arrived shortly before the grave was clear, but allowed the coffin to be opened to prove there was no medical misconduct. They could find no evidence that the woman was buried alive. Some among the crowd threatened to vandalize the curate’s house anyway, however, the police were able to de-escalate the situation and disperse the crowd of some 2000 people. Despite the size of this London Cholera Riot, it was one of the least violent in Britain. Hypothetically, one would imagine that a woman trapped inside a coffin would demand immediate action, especially considering the violence exhibited in Paisley. However, the crowd 362 Cohn describes this as the second largest Cholera Riot, but the Chester Chronicle describes one in Manchester with about one thousand more people. See: Cohn, Hate and Compassion, 173; “Cholera Riot at Manchester.” 363 “Cholera Riot,” Morning Post. 103 inflicted no physical injury and caused no property damage. This is in no small part due to the actions of Inspector Young who allowed the crowd to examine the body before dispersing the crowd. As the concerns of the working class were recognized and the crowd was treated fairly, most were content to leave without further conflict. The working class was not wantonly violent; for the most part, these crowds desired acknowledgment. This is perhaps why the greatest violence occurred over concerns of graverobbing where decades of precedent illustrated legal recourse was ineffective. Once a body was stolen, there was little chance of restitution and even less chance of juridical justice. Perhaps the one exception was the Manchester Cholera Riot. Manchester Cholera Riot As we may recall, on Sunday, September 2, 1832, John Brogan was nearly buried without his head. The four-year-old boy had fallen sick on Friday and died Saturday morning, but the Swan Street Cholera Hospital did not have a suitable-sized coffin on hand.364 The body could not be buried until the next day. That night, the Dispenser of Medicines, Mr. Robert Oldham, was tasked with supervising the patients. During his shift, Oldham severed Brogan’s head and stashed it at his residence in the morning—apparently to be dissected later. Oldham would have successfully conducted this mutilation without detection except for Brogan’s perceptive grandfather: John Hayes. Hayes had visited Brogan’s body shortly after the boy’s death; he was certain that Brogan had died a natural death.365 After the riot, Hayes would confirm that the hospital had otherwise treated his family kindly and done everything possible to save Brogan’s life.366 There was no reason to suspect foul play. However, as Brogan’s body was being transported to the 364 Robert Oldham’s actions are detailed in the minutes of the Manchester Board of Health. See: Alan Kidd and Terry Wyke, eds., The Challenge of Cholera: Proceedings of the Manchester Special Board of Health 1831–1833, 2010, pp.215–218, 942.7206 REC, Liverpool City Council Records. 365 Kidd and Wyke, The Challenge, 215. 366 “Cholera Riots at Manchester,” Morning Post, 7 September 1832. 104 local burial ground, Hayes noticed that the coffin was unmarked.367 Each cholera victim’s coffin was labelled with a name except for Brogan’s. Fearing that his grandchild was not inside, Hayes asked that the coffin be opened. One can only imagine the family’s dismay when they peered inside. Brogan’s head had been “taken off close to the shoulders, and a brick put in its place”.368 Shavings littered the inside of the coffin—presumably to muffle or cushion the brick as the body was being transported. News of the mutilated boy spread rapidly across Manchester. That afternoon, a crowd of three or four hundred people gathered at the gates of the cholera hospital. They demanded to be let in, that the ‘burkers’ be brought to justice, and clamoured to see Brogan’s body. The coffin was disinterred and Hayes again opened the lid to show the crowd. The Chester Chronicle described a chaotic scene in which “the screams and yells of the women, who formed the greater part of the mob, now became horrifying in the extreme; the coffin was seized by several men, who bore it away on their shoulders; and a cry was raised of ‘Burn the Hospital’.”369 The crowd took up the coffin and carried it through the streets, passing by the cholera hospital as they marched, and their numbers grew steadily. When the crowd had reached about three thousand people, they turned back and assaulted the cholera hospital. The doctors had fled and left the sick behind. Those patients who could walk returned to their homes; those who were immobile were carried away by the rioters.370 Many died soon after. The rioters smashed the windows and broke the hospital’s furniture in the street. The cholera van (or hearse) was demolished and burned. Once the police had gathered in force, they charged the crowd. Thirteen alleged ringleaders were arrested and taken to the lockups across the street on Shude Hill. The ire of 367 “Cholera Riot at Manchester,” Chester Chronicle. 368 “Cholera Riot at Manchester,” Chester Chronicle. 369 “Cholera Riot at Manchester,” Chester Chronicle. 370 “Shocking Circumstance–Probable Murder.” 105 the crowd then turned toward the police; a hailstorm of stones soon destroyed every window in the lockup. There was no respite until the boroughreeve and a Catholic priest spoke to the crowd. The Chester Chronicle especially lauds the efforts of the priest, Mr. Hearne, who explained the circumstances of the affair and that only Robert Oldham was to blame.371 Three troops of Hussars then arrived to clear the crowd “without arms. . . and with a degree of coolness and good temper. . .”. Despite the earlier violence, the crowd was treated fairly. It was apparent in this case that working-class outrage was justified. The Manchester Board of Health took immediate action to distance itself from the actions of Robert Oldham. Brogan’s head had been found and sewn back onto its body, but Oldham could not be found. The next day, 3 September, the Board invited the public press to attend a deposition meeting where several key figures gave their accounts of the riot.372 First, Mr. Lynch—the resident medical officer of the Swan Street hospital—described Brogan’s stay and Oldham’s conduct. He emphasized that Brogan had not been given laudanum, probably to dissuade any rumours of burking. Next, John Hayes spoke of his experience at the graveyard, reaffirming his certainty that Brogan had died of cholera. Though Hayes’ exact words were not included in the minute book, the Morning Post reported that: [Hayes was] convinced, from the conduct and kindness exhibited towards him by Mr. Lynch and all the other Medical Gentlemen whom he has seen, that every possible remedy was applied at the Swan Street Hospital for the relief, and, if possible, the recovery of his grandchild; and that the subsequent circumstance, so much to be deplored, took place after the natural death of his grandchild, and entirely without the concurrence or knowledge of any other medical practitioner, or of any other person than the Gentleman [Oldham] immediately implicated.373 It is not certain if Hayes was coached ahead of this deposition, but regardless of his sincerity, the Board could not have asked for a better testimonial. Certainly, if there was any lingering 371 “Cholera Riot at Manchester,” Chester Chronicle. 372 Kidd and Wyke, The Challenge, 215. 373 “Cholera Riots at Manchester,” Morning Post. 106 resentment among the Manchester working class, then Hayes’ clemency put the matter to rest. However, for good measure, Mr. Hearne—the Catholic priest—also opined that Mr. Lynch was unaware of Oldham’s conduct until the events at the graveyard. The meeting concluded with a unanimous resolution to censure Oldham and exculpate the rest of the medical staff. The Manchester Cholera Riot was perhaps the most apparently justified. Most Cholera Riots were based on rumour and suspicion, and while the working class had legitimate reasons to distrust medical authority, it was rare to be able to definitively prove culpability. In this case, there was no doubt about the guilt of Robert Oldham and the responsibility of the Swan Street Cholera Hospital. Oldham’s treatment of Brogan’s cadaver exemplifies the arrogance and entitlement endemic to British medical authority. The lack of supervision over the medical staff, as well as the brazenness of the crime, indicates that there were few measures in place to address the working class’s concerns about body snatching. There is no way of knowing if Oldham had done this before or whether such conduct was common within the medical profession, but the resident surgeon at the Swan Street hospital stated that Oldham regularly inspected the cadavers of cholera victims.374 It should be remembered that, although the details of Brogan’s mutilation are shocking due to the boy’s age and Oldham’s irreverent conduct, the actual action of dissecting and dismembering stolen cadavers was commonplace. Chapter One illustrated how British medicine was founded on the practice of involuntary dissections. The greatest difference between Oldham and most British doctors is that, at least in this instance, Oldham did not rely on bodysnatchers to procure his cadaver. The relationship between the Board and print media is also an important dynamic to consider. The day after the riot, the press attended a Board meeting that absolved the doctors (aside from Oldham) of wrongdoing. Then, a few days later, the newspaper press reported the 374 Hutton, The Study, 84. 107 incident as a matter of a rogue individual who acted without the knowledge or assistance of the hospital. The ability to dictate the narrative of the riots speaks to the privilege and authority medicine had gained over the decades, now an entrenched institutional power. This bias in the press has certainly contributed to the narrative of the Cholera Riots as their accounts remain the dominant source for both contemporary readers and modern historians. On 8 September 1832, the Poor Man’s Guardian published an article entitled, “First Fruits of the Anatomy Bill. Shocking Circumstance—Probable Murder.”375 Although the Poor Man’s Guardian was known for its steadfast anti-authority leaning, it was a rare occurrence of public sympathy for the rioters. Although the content of the article was basically identical to other neutral reports of the riot, the title contains two important details. Firstly, the reference to the recent passage of the “Anatomy Bill” (or Anatomy Act) indicates a contemporary understanding of the link between state authority and the Cholera Riots. Most newspapers blamed the riots on the working class, sometimes placing responsibility on graverobbers or individual doctors, but never the legislative body. This article not only reinforces the theorized biopolitical source of the riots but also illustrates the contemporary media bias. Newspapers were more than able to recognize the classism inherent in medicine; very few published it. However, the reliability of the article is somewhat undercut by its claim of “probable murder”. By 8 September, all evidence had been established that Brogan was not murdered but had died of cholera. As important as the article is for the historiography of the Cholera Riots, it should be noted that its title is sensationalized and thus may not have been taken seriously by other publications—an alternate reason why working-class perspectives were not more broadly publicized. 375 “Shocking Circumstance–Probable Murder.” 108 Consequences Most riots had very little further effect on British society. However, this is not to say they were meaningless. Rather than a vehicle for change, the riots should be understood as a consequence of the working class’s relationship with medical authorities in and of themselves and had no further objective than their retributive or protective violence. Just as the mob hung an effigy of Dr. Knox outside his door following the Burke and Hare trials, such symbols were common throughout the Cholera Riots. The symbolic destruction of the hospitals—especially the hearses and palanquins that transported bodies to and from the hospital—was a cathartic release of frustration against medical men. Samuel Cohn Junior describes the destruction of these vehicles as “ritualistic”;376 their great expense represented a significant loss to the hospitals, mimicking the loss felt by the victims of graverobbing. Thirty-seven Cholera Riots involved the destruction of hearses—over half of the riots identified by Cohn.377 Similarly, in cases where rioters found physical evidence of medical misconduct, it was common for them to parade said item through the streets. In Paisley, the rioters carried the empty coffin. In Manchester, the rioters carried Brogan’s open coffin, showing the corpse to people on the street to spread outrage and gather more for their cause. As Durey suggests, “These were emblems which symbolised the victory of popular morality and society’s inequalities in an age when the law failed to give the poor adequate protection.”378 These riots were demonstrations, not revolutions, and did not appear to have any intention beyond symbolic vengeance and asserting the working class’s autonomy. When the riots had a more proactive objective, such as rescuing the woman buried alive in London or preventing the removal of the sick in Liverpool, the riots were quelled through compromises and communication. I could find no evidence that the rioters severely injured any doctor or policeman, and the property damage was deliberately targeted; 376 Cohn Jr., Epidemics, 167. 377 Cohn Jr., Epidemics, 168. 378 Durey, The Return of the Plague, 184. 109 damage to property other than hospitals and doctors’ houses was almost always incidental. Then, to suggest that the Cholera Riots were insignificant because they did not cause systemic changes, as posited by Durey and Morris, misrepresents the rioters’ intent. In this understanding, the riots were often effective. The consequences of each riot are beyond the potential of this thesis to investigate, but generally, there were token compromises from political authorities and sometimes resignations by doctors from the Boards of Health in response to the demands of the rioters.379 The Central Board would advise the local doctors to avoid unnecessary conflict with the working class by limiting anatomical dissections, opening hospitals to visitations, and relaxing regulations. However, aside from a few sympathizers, the response to the Cholera Riots was more cynical than understanding. On 14 April 1832, the Lancaster Gazette indicated that “the misguided rabble have risen against their best, and, in the hour of the present visitation, their only friends, the medical men, in visiting the sick, have been insulted, threatened, and even assaulted, in such a manner as seriously to endanger their personal safety. . .”380 It continues to report that after the Paisley Cholera Riot, twenty surgeons resigned and refused to treat cholera victims “owing to the brutal treatment they have received in the discharge of their duties.” Similarly, on 4 June 1832, the Liverpool Albion announced: “We hear that several of the medical men, who devote their time and their skill to the service of the poor without fee or reward, alarmed at the ferocious spirit displayed by the ignorant during these disgraceful riots, have come to the resolution of sending in their resignation.”381 Thomas Shapter writes in his memoir that the suspicions against medical authorities were “but idle tales of mischievous individuals, or the absurd stories of weak-minded persons, who suffer their fears to get the better of their reason. . .”.382 So, although the Cholera Riots were sometimes effective in 379 Morris, Cholera 1832, 112. 380 Lancaster Gazette, 14 April 1832. British Newspaper Archive. 381 “Cholera Riots in Liverpool,” Liverpool Albion, 4 June 1832. British Newspaper Archive. 382 Shapter, The History of the Cholera, 238. 110 pushing back against encroaching state authority in local instances, they appear to have failed to convince the larger British public of ongoing injustice. This is also evident from the lack of support given to the rioters by political reform groups. Across all European countries, the Cholera Riots were generally disavowed by radicals—some of whom believed that cholera was a distraction or an attempt to discredit the working class during reform movements.383 Similarly, despite the clear class divisions during the cholera epidemics, neither Karl Marx (1818–1883) nor Fredrick Engels (1820–1895) ever commented on their relevance to working-class rights.384 Although Cohn notes that this class struggle did not necessarily align with the Marxist focus of labour, this lacuna may be illustrative of the Cholera Riot’s negligible impact on contemporary politics. Perhaps the only immediate effect of the Cholera Riots on Britain’s politics was the passage and execution of the Anatomy Act, which protected people from body snatching by utilizing unclaimed bodies.385 The most obvious consequences of the Cholera Riots can be viewed in the continuing relationship between medical authorities and the working class. Just as there were riots against surgeons before the Cholera Riots, there were riots against surgeons for years following the epidemic, though without their previous frequency or perceived legitimacy. In December 1833, a body was taken to the Cambridge University Anatomy School apparently to be provided a coffin at the parish’s expense.386 A mob, believing the body had been stolen to be dissected, broke the school’s windows and destroyed many of the supplies and materials. Similarly, in Sheffield, a woman had run from a Medical School screaming that she was about to be murdered. In truth, the woman was the wife of the school’s physically abusive caretaker, but a crowd quickly gathered believing that a surgeon had attempted to burke the woman. The mob attacked the 383 Evans, “Epidemics and Revolutions,” 139. 384 Cohn Jr., “Cholera Revolts,” 176. 385 Burrell and Gill, “The Liverpool Cholera Epidemic," 498. 386 On the Cambridge University and Sheffield riots, see: Hutton, The Study, 85–86. 111 school, destroying it entirely. British authorities had obviously failed to dissuade the working class from wielding violence against doctors. In fact, the working class had likely learned that such riots were an effective measure to keep medical authority in check. Certainly, the riots had undercut the effectiveness of the Anatomy Act, which had promised to legitimize the systemic theft of working-class bodies. Morris argues that the Anatomy Act was responsible for “[cooling] the conflict between people and doctors,” but this does not seem entirely correct.387 The Anatomy Act benefited the middle and upper classes by removing the potential for their bodies to be involuntarily dissected. Although graverobbers primarily targeted the poor, the Anatomy Act would ensure that only the poor would fall victim to the surgeon’s knife. Instead, the relaxed tensions between the working class and medical authorities were due to a combination of cholera’s withdrawal from Britain and, more importantly, the mediation of parochial authorities. For the first decade after the Anatomy Act’s enactment, the bill could not satisfactorily fulfill the demands of the anatomy schools.388 Key to this failure was the requirement that bodies could only be delivered to the anatomy schools with the assent of the parish officials, and the poor also had the option to opt out of the Anatomy Act by signing a declaration stating their wish before their deaths. The Cholera Riots had inadvertently countered both of these variables. Firstly, the Cholera Riots caused many to scrutinize the Anatomy Act, bringing awareness to its existence and the possibility of opting out of its provisions. Secondly, parish authorities were reluctant to antagonize the mob. In the previously mentioned 1833 Cambridge University riot, the body was in fact taken from a workhouse to be dissected. However, out of fear, the parish officials denied that they had allowed the body to be handed over. This was not a unique occurrence. In 1834, James Somerville—the inspectorate overseeing the Anatomy Act—visited an anatomy theatre 387 Morris, Cholera 1832, 103. 388 On the consequences of the Anatomy Act, see: Durey, The Return of the Plague, 212–215. 112 in Hull to find it graffitied with accusations of burking. As Durey concludes, “Although the teachers indignantly denied any connection with the bodysnatchers, the local authorities’ refusal to implement the Anatomy Act had forced the surgeons to revert to obtaining bodies illegally.”389 This difficulty in procuring bodies eventually diminished the prevalence of private anatomy schools, which could not compete with the hospital medical schools supplied by their internal mortuaries.390 So, although anatomical dissection did not disappear, they were severely limited by the Cholera Riots and the undermining of the Anatomy Act. When cholera reappeared in 1848, the Cholera Riots did not return with it. By this time, graverobbing had largely disappeared alongside the prevalence of anatomy schools. The difficulty in obtaining bodies had forced private schools to merge with hospitals or to be shuttered entirely.391 With anatomical dissections subdued from their heyday, as well as the lack of burking since 1831, the medical profession posed a less present threat to working-class corpses. British authorities—like many in Europe—had learned their lesson from the first epidemic and were far more cautious in implementing disease controls.392 Although the systems and institutions in place during the 1831–1832 epidemic were essentially the same almost two decades later, their relationship with the working class was fundamentally changed. After the Anatomy Act and subsequent Poor Law Amendment Act, there was a more defined class consciousness that united the British working class against state authorities. In this regard, the Cholera Riots can be considered successful in asserting working-class autonomy over the longue durée. 389 Durey, The Return of the Plague, 215. 390 Hutton, The Study, 89. 391 Durey, The Return of the Plague, 215. 392 Evans, “Epidemics and Revolutions,” 142. 113 Conclusion Although there were many independent causes of the Cholera Riots, each can be reduced to a collective resistance against medical authority. The riots were composed of men, women, and children; English, Scottish, and especially Irish immigrants; and people of all ages, though the bulk were between twenty and forty years old. The Cholera Riots were fought either proactively to prevent the doctors from inflicting harm or as a demonstrative form of protest against perceived or realized medical misconduct. While it is impossible to unequivocally prove the inherent guilt or innocence of the doctors in each individual riot, it is fair to say that the rioters acted on legitimate suspicion based on past conduct. Even if the local doctors did not dissect the bodies of cholera victims, they had certainly anatomized working-class bodies supplied by graverobbers in the decades prior to the Anatomy Act. While the Cholera Riots affected few immediate changes, the working class was successful in resisting medical authorities. The rioters forced the Central Board to ease their policies and caused the resignations of dozens, if not hundreds, of doctors, thereby weakening the presence of medical authority. Following the epidemic, however, the threat of the mob was enough to convince parochial authorities to bury indigent corpses rather than relinquish them under the direction of the Anatomy Act. The subsequent reduction of private anatomy schools meant that, by the second British cholera epidemic in 1848 and 1849, medical authority posed relatively little threat to working-class corpses. Though the Cholera Riots did not cause systemic change—medicine continued to expand as a biopolitical institution—they successfully asserted the working class’s collective autonomy. Although a sanitary revolution would soon provide systemic changes to passively prevent disease, Britain would refrain from policing epidemics in 114 such a direct manner until the work of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch provided precise information on the nature of germs and how to combat disease.393 393 Evans, “Epidemics and Revolutions,” 145. 115 Conclusion The 1831 to 1832 British Cholera epidemic was the first major test of its scientific medical institutions. The Boards of Health were responsible for addressing an epidemiological crisis; it was an unprecedented task. For the Board to effectively respond to the cholera epidemic, it would need the unified support of both the medical community and the afflicted populations. The Board had neither. Cholera eventually subsided on its own, but the epidemic illustrated the weaknesses inherent to British medicine despite, or perhaps because of, the considerable authority of doctors and hospitals over the working class. The medical community was rife with internal competition and lacked sufficient knowledge concerning the nature of diseases despite decades of scientific advancement. Worse, this advancement was achieved at the cost of the working class’s trust in medical institutions. When the Boards of Health attempted to regulate the lives of the working class, their intentions were immediately suspected as a façade to mask exploitative and violent practices. Rather than saviours, the working class perceived medical authorities to be as dangerous as cholera itself—for legitimate reasons. For decades prior, medical institutions had gradually claimed greater prerogatives over working-class bodies. Modern doctors began as secondary executioners who performed anatomical dissections on executed criminals, and they would soon use this platform to leverage greater authority in all aspects of political and social life. Medical pedagogy became intrinsically linked to the anatomical dissection of working-class bodies and experiments performed on poor patients within teaching hospitals. Resurrectionists—professional body snatchers—were essential to this function. As the 1752 Murder Act was unable to supply enough corpses to fulfill the demand of anatomy schools, anatomists hired gangs of resurrectionists to pillage the burial grounds of primarily indigent communities. These involuntary dissections were first legitimized through the tacit permission of the judicial system and then directly through the legislation of the Anatomy Act. The resurrectionists were 116 sometimes prosecuted if they were caught, but never the doctors who employed them. After all, the social and political elite benefited greatly from doctors’ ability to practice on poor cadavers. The prerogative of medical authority to experiment on working class bodies was protected, first tacitly then later explicitly under the Anatomy Act, by the law. As such, the working class had little legal recourse for the flagrant transgression of their cultural and religious beliefs. This resentment was only further exacerbated by the widespread publicization of William Burke and William Hare’s shocking crimes. Indigent populations were now at risk of being murdered to support a system that primarily prolonged the lives of the rich and powerful. It was biopower at its most fundamental. Between 1831 and 1832, this same indigent population was fully exposed to death. Suddenly, whole communities faced their mortality simultaneously as cholera swept across the country. While Britain had faced other epidemics, cholera was unique because it killed quickly and it was alien to the public prior to 1831. A perfectly healthy man or woman could wake up healthy and be dead before the end of the day, perhaps before any family or friends could be notified of their fate, by a mysterious illness that lacked a consistent cure. The cholera hospitals were not an appealing solution, especially once the Central Board declared that all burials should occur within twenty-four hours of death. Given that doctors rarely bothered to obtain permission to perform dissections—nor questioned the origin of an opportune cadaver—these hospitals must have seemed like the proverbial lions’ den. To the working class, the Boards of Health were simply a new apparatus within the same matrix that produced burking. Wherever medical authority extended its power, it fell under the intense scrutiny of the working class, thus even a hint of medical misconduct was enough to provoke the mob. In this way, the Cholera Riots were provoked by the increased visibility of biopolitical systems resulting from the epidemic’s strain on medical institutions. 117 I have used this thesis to develop a deeper understanding of the Cholera Riots, exploring the origins of the working class’s distrust of doctors, the medical response to the epidemic, and the parameters of the riots to the furthest extent possible using available sources. As there has been very little scholarship focused on the Cholera Riots themselves, I have drawn from a range of secondary sources to provide the necessary context. I have also utilized primary sources from my research in England (London, Liverpool, Lancaster, and Manchester) and Scotland (Edinburgh) as well as digital resources like the British Newspaper Archives. Many of the images analyzed in this thesis were drawn from the online catalogues of the Wellcome Collection. The sources that I have drawn on are thus varied, ranging from published medical accounts to manuscript petitions hidden in archives to visual resources. However, by the very nature of the historical record, these resources tend to privilege the literate and the powerful. It is rare that marginalized perspectives survive centuries and are accessible to historians. To analyze the Cholera Riots from the perspective of the working class, I found it necessary to implement a biopolitical lens to illuminate the power structures that were not overtly apparent within the historiography. This framework has allowed me to return some agency to the rioters by demonstrating the mechanisms of medical authority that had exploited indigent communities for decades, thereby providing a rationale for the rioters’ behaviour that contrasts with their age-old reputation of being ‘irrational’. My research thus advances the historiography of the Cholera Riots and the interdisciplinary field of historical epidemiology. The Cholera Riots were a collective resistance against medical authority due to decades of medical exploitation and growing concerns of bodily autonomy. Through my archival research, I have established the demographic diversity of the riots, the evolution of the body of rioters throughout their progression, and the geography of the riots. By framing the Cholera Riots as a response to biopolitical institutions rather than their immediate local stimuli, this thesis provides an understanding of a subject dominated in the 118 historical record by doctors’ perspectives. Interdisciplinary approaches to history, such as this, promise to recontextualize existing historical records, thereby expanding previously limited areas of scholarship. For example, while the riots did not directly affect grand political change, it would be a mistake to describe them as inconsequential. Rather, this thesis establishes the Cholera Riots through a biopolitical lens as significant to the history of medical skepticism and social unrest in pandemic societies. As such, this thesis provides a foundation for future research into patterns of class struggle within pandemic societies and the dynamics that cemented cholera as one of the most infamous epidemics of the nineteenth century. 119 Bibliography Primary Sources “1 Collective Petition (7 People Including, Prisoner’s Mother, Wife, Clergymen And...,” May 1831. HO 17/14/45. The National Archives, Kew. “1 Individual Petition (J Armytage, Visiting Magistrate) on Behalf of Robert Kay...,” October 2, 1832. HO 17/59/121. The National Archives, Kew. “2 Copies Ff 331–338. Council of the Royal College of Surgeons, on the Problems Of...,” December 10, 1831. HO 44/24/89. The National Archives, Kew. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Interdisciplinary Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Carlyle, Margaret Eileen
Anatomy of a riot : The biopolitics of the British cholera riots, 1831–1832
Text