Anatomy Act 1832 - Provisions of The Act

Provisions of The Act

The Act provided that anyone intending to practise anatomy must obtain a licence from the Home Secretary. As a matter of fact only one or two teachers in each institution took out this licence and were known as licensed teachers. They accepted the whole responsibility for the proper treatment of all bodies dissected in the building for which their licence was granted.

Regulating these licensed teachers, and receiving constant reports from them, were four inspectors of anatomy, one each for England, Scotland, Ireland and London, who reported to the Home Secretary and knew the whereabouts of every body being dissected. The principal provision of the act was Section 7 which stipulated that a person having lawful possession of a body may permit it to undergo anatomical examination provided no relative objected. The other sections were subsidiary and detailed the methods of carrying this into effect.

Section 16 repealed parts of sections 4 and 5 of the Offences against the Person Act 1828 (which in turn replaced an Act of Henry VIII) which provided that the bodies of murderers were to be hung in chains or dissected after execution. It provided instead that they were to be either hung in chains or buried within the precincts of the last prison in which the deceased had been confined. The provision for hanging in chains was shortly repealed by the Hanging in Chains Act 1834 and the whole section was repealed and replaced by section 3 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861.

The Act, provided for the needs of physicians, surgeons and students by giving them legal access to corpses that were unclaimed after death, in particular those who died in prison or the workhouse. Further, a person could donate their next of kin's corpse in exchange for burial at the expense of the donee.

Occasionally a person, following the example of Jeremy Bentham, left their body for the advancement of science, but even then, if his relatives objected, it was not received.

The act was effective in ending the practice of Resurrectionists who robbed graves as a means of obtaining cadavers for medical study.

Gunther von Hagens was accused of (but not charged with) breaking the Act because of performing televised autopsy in 2002.

Fear of the Act's provision that paupers' bodies could be sold for medical research without their consent, protest riots took place as late as a decade after its implementation. An anatomical theatre in Cambridge was vandalised late in 1833 "by an angry mob determined to put a stop to the dissection of a man; this wave of popular protest alarmed the medical profession who resolved to hide its activities from the general public, andto a greater or lesser extent it has been doing so ever since."