In the 1800s was becoming a modern, advanced science. Doctors had to train for many years and qualify at universities. The leading medical universities were in Scotland, but Liverpool also trained doctors.
One of the biggest problems holding back improvements in medicine was the fact that medical students could not develop their understanding of how the human body worked. This was because there was a lack of bodies which the students could dissect (cut up).
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| The Body Snatcher was a short story written by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1884 based on the Burke & Hare story. |
There were two main reasons for this lack of bodies. One was that people in the 1800s were strongly religious. If a family lost a relative they wanted their family member to have a Christian burial in a church graveyard. They did not want their relative cut up.
The second reason was pride. Most people lived hard lives and were poor. Despite this, they usually saved a penny a week for their funeral expenses when they died. They wanted a good ‘send off’. Being buried without a decent funeral was seen as shameful.
All of this meant it was hard to get bodies for medical students to cut up. This in turn led to some very dodgy goings on. In the early 1820s, bodies were often imported to Liverpool from Dublin, and taken to dissecting rooms in Pomona Street and Seel Street. Port officials would often seize the bodies at the docks leading to a bizarre corpse-smuggling practice. In 1823 a local surgeon in a letter to the local newspaper defended this practice. The following year two local men were convicted of digging up bodies from churchyards.
William Rathbone, a well respected surgeon in Liverpool, added to the controversy by suggesting that their fines be paid by the Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society. He called for a change in the law to allow unclaimed bodies from workhouses, prisons, and hospitals to be available for anatomical dissection. Attitudes like this spread panic in the general public. They did not want the bodies of their relatives dug up from graves to be cut up in hospitals by medical students. | 
