Address to the community, on the necessity of legalizing the study of anatomy / by order of the Massachusetts Medical Society.

  • Massachusetts Medical Society.
Date:
1829
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Address to the community, on the necessity of legalizing the study of anatomy / by order of the Massachusetts Medical Society. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    society, to promote the only means, by which the bodies of those who have relations to feel for them, can be secured from daring and desperate resurrectionists. It is not a small evil, likewise, that the present order of things tends to raise up a band of these villains, who have, in England, reached an alarm¬ ing pitch of audacity and hardihood. Sir Astley Cooper stated recently, in an examination before a Committee of the British House of Commons, that there was no man in England, whatever might be his rank or consequence, whose body he could not obtain, after his death, if he had a mind to dissect it. And recent horrid events, which have happened there, prove that the hands of these wretches are not always unstained with blood. From the great mystery with which anatomical pursuits have hitherto been shrouded, there is no subject upon which mankind are more generally and more profoundly ignorant than in regard to a knowl¬ edge of the structure of their own bodies. This ignorance is one of the principal reasons why they are so readily duped by the pretensions of quacks and impostors, who undertake to perform what an anatomist knows to be physically impossible. Imaginary dislocations and fractures, cured by reduc¬ tions equally fictitious,—the fallacy of which a very little knowledge of Anatomy will serve to detect,— constitute the groundwork of the reputation of half the bonesetting quacks in the country. If dissec¬ tion shall ever become a legalized pursuit, Anatomy will be a popular study, not only with professional men, but with all who are interested in scientific pursuits, or even governed by common curiosity.