The Physic Garden by Catherine Czerkawska Page A

away from the jail square and the Saltmarket where the gallows had been erected in front of the brand new High Court building. There was ale for sale and spirits and all kinds of comestibles and sweetmeats. It was a grandspectacle, so people told me afterwards. The children loved it, and if it taught them a lesson in good behaviour, so much the better . One mother actually said that to her ragged brood within my hearing as she herded them towards the High Court! The authorities even had to post soldiers by the timber footbridge over the river, lest the crowds overwhelm it with their numbers and caused a catastrophe as they struggled to get a better view of proceedings . More fodder for the anatomists I suppose.
    There were two hangings that day. A youngster called Simon Ross was hanged for theft, and I believe the poor lad took a long time to die, twitching and struggling on the rope, a truly dreadful procedure to behold. Clydesdale’s end was much quicker. He was by far the bigger man and the weight of his body must have pulled him down and broken his neck and hastened his end, thank-God. Once they had been pronounced dead, Clydesdale was taken down, placed in a cart and trundled up the Saltmarket, across Trongate and into the High Street, to the university college. Poor young Ross was handed over to his grieving relatives and buried somewhere in the Ramshorn graveyard, so the anatomists did not get their hands on him then, and his grave was well guarded, so that they would not get their hands on him afterwards, either. The resurrection men who were hard at work procuring corpses for scholars would have been sorely disappointed.
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    The anatomy theatre was very crowded. I suppose that some who had watched the execution came to watch the dissection. We are wont to talk of nature red in tooth and claw, but there are few creatures of the natural world so lacking in sympathy for the fellow members of their own species as human beings. The dog will fight his enemies to the death, but, on the whole, will spare the lesser canine who submits to him. Even rooks will mob the hunting hawk to protect their own kind. The casualties of the overcrowded rookery are few, and then only when the young tumblefrom the nest. We are more like insects, I think, but even they eat because they must and that for the greater good.
    The anatomists who received the body of the unfortunate Clydesdale were Jeffray and Doctor Andrew Ure, who seemed to have a touching not to say daft faith in the possibility that he really could reanimate a dead body and bring it back to life. James Jeffray, I’m absolutely sure, held no such illusion. He was no fool but he was quite prepared to experiment with galvanisation – the application of the mysterious current to the corpse – in an effort to observe the effects of such stimulation on the human anatomy.
    One of the customers at our bookshop, Hugh Brodie, a Glasgow watchmaker who had a somewhat unlikely passion for the works of Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, that is, for gloomy castles and distressed damsels and mysterious murders, came to the shop specifically to tell me all about it. I suppose it fed his taste for the bizarre. When I pointed out that reanimating a murderer might be something less than advisable, he became quite angry with me.
    ‘There’s no need to tak’ that tone wi’ me!’ he said, as though I had deliberately affronted him.
    ‘What would they have done if he had lived?’ I asked, amicably enough. ‘Would they perhaps have hung him all over again, do you think? And what would the legal position have been in such a case? Would it have been permissible?’
    He departed, muttering and shaking his head, and that was a customer we had lost, but I found I didn’t care. Besides, the question was not such a foolish one after all, for I later learned that Ure had attempted to answer it for me.
    ‘This event, however little desirable with a murderer, and perhaps contrary to the law,