London: The Biography полностью

Of course there were more genteel, if not more learned, practitioners of healing who came under the aegis of the Company of Barber Surgeons (they were later to split in two, becoming barbers or surgeons) or the College of Physicians. The latter institution, with a roof described as “the distant sight of a gilded pill,” was in Warwick Lane, near Newgate Prison from which many of its anatomical subjects came. Anatomy lessons were its principal and compelling feature. They were conducted in a central chamber, used as the setting for Hogarth’s The Reward For Cruelty in which the corpse of a wretched murderer, Tom Nero, is thoroughly anatomised and degraded. It was known as a “theatre,” and indeed it became an intrinsic part of London spectacle. The taking of the corpses of the hanged for dissection and dispersal was an old custom-we read of the necessity of “a wax candle to look into the body”-but in later years the corpses were also used to test the properties of electricity. One recently deceased killer was “galvanised” in 1803, with the result that one of his eyes opened and he raised his right hand. It is reported by Charles Knight that the instructor “died that very afternoon of the shock.” At an earlier date, in 1740, a specimen was about to be anatomised when “he threw his Hand in the Surgeon’s face, and accidentally cut his Lips with the Lancet.” After this escape from the knife he sat in a chair, groaning, and “in great Agitation”; eventually he recovered and “heartily” asked for his mother.

Hogarth’s engraving is a swirling composition, in which the round complementarity of all parts evokes the circles of Tom Nero’s life within the inferno of London; it also seems to demonstrate the connection between Nero’s own cruelty and that of the physicians who are presently disembowelling him. The violence of the streets fashions Nero’s character so that he becomes an emblem of the worst London “type.” Yet he is not so different from the surgeon delightedly plunging a scalpel into his eye-socket. Hogarth based his portrait upon a surgeon named Dr. John Freke. In this city everything connects.

The skeletons of two famous malefactors, which once hung in the alcoves of the anatomical theatre, can still be seen in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. Jonathan Wild, the most notorious villain of eighteenth-century London, and William Corder, the killer of Maria Martin in the Old Red Barn murder, now hang together as part of a truly old-fashioned London spectacle. In the same gallery can be seen the Irish giant Charles Byrne, whose skeleton of seven feet ten inches has been placed beside the diminutive remains of Caroline Crachami who was only one foot ten and a half inches in height. They were London “freaks” and, in death, they still satisfy the taste for urban theatre.

The apothecaries of London, like the anatomists, were accustomed to stage management. They customarily wore black and it was almost mandatory that their shops, however humble, would contain a skull as well as a folio written in some ancient tongue. Here were sold herbs and powders, pills and electuaries, drugs and dentifrices, pomades and love-charms. In Camomile Street and Bucklersbury, in particular, all herbal remedies were to be found. In Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748) there is a summary of the trading arts-“Oyster-shells he could convert into crab’s eyes; common oil into oil of sweet almonds … Thames water into aqua cinnamoni … when any common thing was ordered for a patient, he always took care to disguise it in colour or taste, or both, in such a manner as that it could not possibly be known.”

The drugs themselves came and went according to the fashion of the age. In the seventeenth century, these included moss, smoked horses’ testicles, may dew and henbane. In the eighteenth century, we find nutmeg and spiders wrapped in their own silk. In the nineteenth century, we read of “Turkey rhubarb and sulphuric acid.” In the early twentieth century, in the East End, there are reports of “Iron Jelloids, Zam Buk ointment, Eno’s Fruit Salt, Owbridge’s Lung Tonic, Clarke’s Blood Mixture.” Anderson’s Scots Pills, first given to the world in 1635, “were still being sold in 1876.”

In his account of the Great Plague Defoe emphasises the credulity of ordinary Londoners, who wore “charms, philtres, exorcisms, amulets” in order to ward off the encroaching disease. Some kept signs of the zodiac, or the written phrase “Abracadabra,” in pockets and seals. They had reverted to the paganism that had dominated the city ever since the first wooden idol was carved in Dagenham (2200 BC).