“Indecent and Demoralising Representations”: Public Anatomy Museums in mid-Victorian England

at Marlborough Street magistrates' court in London, Messrs Roumanielle, Davidson, and Dennison pleaded guilty to offences under the Obscene Publications Act 1857, and the magistrate Mr Knox ordered that their property, which had been held by the court since February, be destroyed. The prosecuting solicitor, Mr Collette, asked for the ''privilege'' of beginning the destruction himself, which was immediately granted, and, accompanied by Police Inspector Harnett and Sergeant Butcher, he proceeded to smash with a hammer a collection of wax anatomical models, the fragments of which were then handed back to the defendants. The destroyed models ''which were of the most elaborate character, and said to cost a considerable sum of money'' had formed part of Kahn's Anatomical Museum, which for more than twenty years had been the best-known popular medical exhibition in Britain. 1 Jonathan Reinarz recently suggested that the museum was to nineteenth-century medical education what the clinic was to its practice: ''museum medicine'' focused students' attention on particular anatomical sites of disease, dissected out from the rest of the body. 2 Museums were particularly important to anatomy teaching, as they allowed more prolonged and careful study than the dissecting room, and availability of specimens could be guaranteed. In 1836, the anatomist Frederick Knox wrote that ''[w]ithout museums the profession [of anatomy] would be in the state of man without a language''. nlike the dissecting room, museums were open to the non-medical public. Only the well connected had an entre e to the Royal College of Surgeons' Museum, but there were smaller anatomy exhibitions in London and the provinces, open to anyone with the price of admission, in which models produced in Italy and France as aids to medical teaching were displayed to the public. The popularity of these museums suggests that, despite the concerns aired around the time of the 1832 Anatomy Act over the provision of cadavers for anatomists, the public regarded anatomy as an interesting and acceptable activity.