In 1752, the British government passed The Murder Act, which aimed to prevent murder through the threat of post-mortem dissection after execution as a punishment for all those found guilty. There were two significant attempts to expand this bill to other capital crimes, one in 1786 and the other in 1796, the former of which was introduced by William Wilberforce, MP for Yorkshire. Both of these attempts failed, as they could not pass through both houses of Parliament.
William Hey, an English surgeon born in Pudsey, 1736, popularised this skull saw and later became the mayor of Leeds. He notoriously used the corpse of the 'Yorkshire Witch', Mary Bateman, after she was hanged for the charge of murder. Her corpse was brought to Leeds infirmary, where William Hey would perform a public dissection to a paying crowd. For each body part that he dissected, he also gave an anatomical lecture, giving a twelve in total. Hey gave all of the profits from the dissections to Leeds Infirmary, which he himself had played a major role in establishing, and helped it grow into a top hospital in England.
William Hey was a key supporter of William Wilberforce’s 1786 bill to extend The Murder Act, and likely gave him the initial idea, with the hopes that it would provide a greater supply of corpses for surgeons to dissect and study. This would not only have helped to prevent body-snatching from graves, but would also have reduced the trend of dissection victims mostly being unclaimed corpses of the poor.
Alexander Walker, Hidden Histories project participant
