]f}28.] to the Students of Analogy. 471 



and enormous tax upon the study of anatomy is it not likely to be a 

 disposition on the part of those who are engaged in that study, to neglect 

 the most important branch of it dissection ? or at least to engage in it 

 no farther than is absolutely required by the forms of their profession ? 

 The student in medicine 'is seldom rich. The direct reverse, on the 

 contrary, is generally the fact : the young men educated for that profes- 

 sion are, five in six of them, hard put to it to make their way in the 

 ordinary course, far less able to bear any imposition, or call for large or 

 unlocked for expenditure. Does it not almost inevitably follow then, 

 that a man who has to pay twenty guineas for a subject (which might per- 

 fectly well be supplied to him for twenty shillings) will often be induced 

 how often will he not be compelled to content himself with making one 

 experiment, where it would be infinitely for the advantage of the public 

 that he should make two ? Such a man starts in " practice" (a green 

 painted door, and a brass knocker upon it, make a ' ' surgeon" of him) 

 after an examination, which assures very little in the way of ability. 

 The lives of those who happen to trust him are equally, hazarded, 

 whether he avoids undertaking measures which ought to be taken, 

 because he knows he is incompetent to perform them, or in the pressure 

 of emergency, and the impossibility of even decently escaping, from the 

 trial attempts to execute them, and fails. If fortune favours him, he 

 goes to work in ignorance and succeeds. Or he may even fail, and 

 yet an obvious result covers his blunder. If he makes a slip that is 

 detected, but capable of being bolstered, the disposition of the profes- 

 sion perhaps from fellow feeling, or from a sense of collateral interest 

 is generally if possible to bring him off. And, perhaps, in the end, 

 he really becomes an excellent surgeon; having erred at first, not from 

 want of talent or understanding, but from want of the necessary know- 

 ledge ; and having, with the help of time, and some abatement of the 

 population, acquired that information in the course of his practice, 

 which he ought to have possessed before he entered into it. 



Then the course by which the members of the medical profession pro- 

 pose to get rid of this dangerous temptation to neglect and ignorance, 

 and to secure a competent supply of subjects, for anatomical study is a 

 simple one : and one which persons however strong their aversion may 

 be to interference with the question are at least bound to consider 

 before they reject it. Nothing is more certain this fact ought never to 

 be lost sight of than that there must be a sacrifice somewhere. If the 

 law, as it stands, were regarded, the sacrifice would be a dreadful one : 

 it would be that of the lives of individuals out of number, almost in 

 every class of society. Under the existing practice of breaking and 

 negativing the law, there is still a sacrifice, and a heavy one. A trade 

 of direct and unequivocal theft is organized under the patronage of a 

 large and respectable body of persons, and indirectly, we might almost 

 say openly, countenanced by the legislature. Bodies are procured for the 

 use of the surgeons, though at large cost and in insufficient number ; 

 under circumstances highly offensive to public decorum, and painful to 

 the feelings of individuals. And, even subject to all these drawbacks, 

 the system is unequal to the objects for which it is designed. 



To remedy these various evils then it is suggested by the medical 

 profession, that the country should give up, for the purposes of anato- 

 mical inquiry, the bodies of whom ? Not " of those persons who 

 die in poor houses or hospitals" this is a demand which, unless under 



