But admitting the merit of the examples of personal sacrifices, and allowing that they ought to influence the pretended sages who think themselves peculiarly entitled to be called the guardians of the poor, because they pander to their lowest passions, and foster their most unreasonable suspicions; we are still not of an opinion that they supply the strongest argument with the poorer classes, for abandoning their present antipathies to dissection and for giving their voluntary assent to a change in the existing law. That strongest argument is, that they at present afford nearly all the subjects for our anatomical theatres; that they are the chief sufferers by the imperfection of our surgical knowledge, and that they would be the chief gainers by an extension of medical skill.
When a clamour is raised against a proposition for giving up the unclaimed bodies of those who die in hospitals or poorhouses to be dissected, it is, of course, pretended, that at present the poor are exempted from the imaginary calamity. Now what is the real state of the case? Are not the poor as exclusively the subjects of anatomical examination now, as they could be under any change of the law? Whither do the body-snatchers go when they receive an order for the exercise of their repulsive contraband? Do they not bargain with some gravedigger, or the porter of some charitable establishment, for the connivance in seizing bodies which belonged to the poorer classes? The rich are not often disturbed in their tombs by the unhallowed intrusion of the resurrection-man. They are allowed to slumber in their inaccessible vaults, while their poorer neighbours are raised and dissected for the benefit of posterity. If some Bishop or Williams, unable to supply the trade with the fruits of plundered churchyards, think of _making_ subjects, whom do they entice into their den of murder? Not the affluent, the respected, or the known, but the poor unfriended wretches, for whom nobody is supposed to care, and whose loss nobody will deplore,--the very parties, in short, who would, most probably, be borne to their grave, at the public expense, from the wards of a hospital, or the cells of a poor-house. It is not likely, notwithstanding Sir Astley Cooper's remarks, that persons possessed of property more valuable than their bodies, would be killed to obtain their bodies. Neither an alderman, a bishop, nor a member of parliament, could be supposed to labour under any apprehension of being _Burked_; and, therefore, the source of supply, to whatever extent it proceeded, remained exclusively with the poor.