MEDICAL EXPERIENCES 15 



of the murderers. Public curiosity was satisfied 

 by visitors being admitted by the door, passing 

 round the dead body of this criminal, and, in 

 order to prevent a crowd, walking out through 

 the window, which was opened into the street 

 for the purpose. Tins was during the time of 

 the Reform agitation, when the Bishops in the 

 House of Lords opposed that measure, to which 

 they were the chief obstruction ; and I well recollect 

 a public dinner at which a toast was proposed 

 that embodied in a very singular manner the 

 names of these murderers, in conjunction with 

 that of the ecclesiastical Conservatives. These 

 three men, who were executed for the murder of 

 an Italian boy, whose body they sold to King's 

 College Medical School, were named respectively, 

 May, Williams, and Bishop ; King William IV 

 was then the reigning monarch, and the toast 

 ran as follows : ' May William's Bishops never 

 Burke the British constitution.' 



" My first demonstrations in anatomy were 

 practised at another private school, that of the 

 celebrated Carpue, a surgeon who resuscitated 

 the Talicotian operation of restoring the lost 

 noses which in those days not unfrequently 

 disappeared in the service both of Mars and of 

 Neptune. This was immortalised by Butler in 

 his ' Hudibras ' in some very strong language 

 which is unfitted to these polite pages. Butler 

 maintained if the lost nose was replaced from 

 another person's body> that on the death of the 

 person who supplied the material, the nose in 

 its new location also decayed, and, to use his 

 own language, ' Off dropped the s}^mpathetic 

 snout.' Carpue's anatomical theatre was in a 

 locality that must be known to a large number 

 of my readers. His dissecting room furnished 



