The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (The Penguin History of Europe Book 7)

by Richard J. Evans

The workhouse, with its minimal level of support, its harsh discipline, its uniforms, its degrading delousing sessions, and its social stigma, was popularly regarded as something to be avoided if at all possible. Its reputation was made even worse by the 1832 Anatomy Act. This was a response to the growing price of corpses supplied to the Anatomy Schools, which encouraged ‘resurrection men’ to dig up newly interred bodies to sell them to the medical schools, and the grisly Burke and Hare murders in 1829, in which two criminals in Edinburgh, William Burke (1792–1829) and William Hare (1807–1829) killed people in order to make money by selling their corpses to the anatomists. From 1832 the bodies of paupers were assigned free of charge to the medical schools if they were unclaimed by relatives. In a religious age when most people believed in the physical resurrection of the body, this was probably even more disturbing than the workhouse itself.

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