would yet have been pardonable in one instance, as it would have been highly honourable and useful to science,’ were his exact words.
Useful to science
. Ah yes. How many execrable acts have been justified with those glib words? How many will yet be justified? But I repeat that I do not think that Jeffray anticipated any such result.
The way it went was this. The men first dissected the body. There was no flow of blood. Clydesdale was well and truly dead. But they wished to expose areas where galvanisation might be applied. The connecting rods were fixed to heel and spinal cord whereupon Clydesdale’s knee flexed so violently that he appeared to kick one of the assistants in the ribs, thus causing the man almost to fall over, in a somewhat ironic recreation of the actions that had brought the weaver to this pass in the first place.
Then they connected the rods to what they called the phrenic nerve and the diaphragm. Ure thought to restore breathing to the corpse and, indeed, according to written reports at the time, the ‘chest heaved and fell. The belly was protruded and again collapsed.’
Tiring of this, at last, with the corpse showing no signs whatsoever of reviving permanently, they applied the current to the forehead and the heel, encompassing the whole man, as warlocks are said to do when they make their followers swear allegiance to Satan. Then they varied the voltage.
Expressions of all kinds appeared to flit across the murderer ’s features in a terrible imitation of life. He seemed, by turns, enraged, horrified, despairing, amused and desperate. It was at this point, I believe, that several of the spectators turned sick and were forced to leave the theatre in order to vomit in the street outside . One gentleman fainted and had to be carried out. However, some of the students, of a more sanguine disposition, were distinctly heard to clap their hands, whistle and cheer, as such young gentlemen invariably will. The corpse remained resolutely dead, although to make doubly sure, Jeffray despatched him again with a scalpel, slicing right into his neck and almost decapitating the unfortunate weaver in the process.
Clydesdale’s corpse was eventually released to his wife. She, poor woman, had given birth to a son less than a month before the assault that was to result in her husband’s execution. I do not know where the body was buried, although executed murderers were usually laid to rest under the courtyard of the High Court building, with the weight of the forces of law and order pressingdown upon them, presumably to stop their restless ghosts from troubling the populace at large.
There can have been few murderers, however, who proved to be so resolutely, finally, unarguably dead as Clydesdale. Where galvanisation and the combined skills of two professors of anatomy had failed, even the saviour himself might have faltered, Lazarus notwithstanding. But I am an old man and must be allowed my fun, if fun it can be called. A gruesome joke, certainly. And I tell this tale only to bring Jeffray before your eyes. He was this kind of man, you see, quite ruthless in the pursuit of learning. The great mass of people may well approve of him and find his actions both explicable and even praiseworthy. It is universally accepted that the pursuit of knowledge is a very fine thing. And Clydesdale was, after all, a common murderer.
* * *
All of that came later and at the time I knew only that I found Jeffray and his obsession with anatomy disturbing. During the years when we were friends, Thomas would sometimes say to me that observing the way the human body worked was like seeing a machine, a complicated machine, where everything was dependent upon everything else.
‘So much sickness and misery,’ he would say, ‘is caused because the machine that we call our body breaks down. If we could only repair that machine, William! If we knew how these things worked. If we could effect adequate repairs, then so many lives
Useful to science
. Ah yes. How many execrable acts have been justified with those glib words? How many will yet be justified? But I repeat that I do not think that Jeffray anticipated any such result.
The way it went was this. The men first dissected the body. There was no flow of blood. Clydesdale was well and truly dead. But they wished to expose areas where galvanisation might be applied. The connecting rods were fixed to heel and spinal cord whereupon Clydesdale’s knee flexed so violently that he appeared to kick one of the assistants in the ribs, thus causing the man almost to fall over, in a somewhat ironic recreation of the actions that had brought the weaver to this pass in the first place.
Then they connected the rods to what they called the phrenic nerve and the diaphragm. Ure thought to restore breathing to the corpse and, indeed, according to written reports at the time, the ‘chest heaved and fell. The belly was protruded and again collapsed.’
Tiring of this, at last, with the corpse showing no signs whatsoever of reviving permanently, they applied the current to the forehead and the heel, encompassing the whole man, as warlocks are said to do when they make their followers swear allegiance to Satan. Then they varied the voltage.
Expressions of all kinds appeared to flit across the murderer ’s features in a terrible imitation of life. He seemed, by turns, enraged, horrified, despairing, amused and desperate. It was at this point, I believe, that several of the spectators turned sick and were forced to leave the theatre in order to vomit in the street outside . One gentleman fainted and had to be carried out. However, some of the students, of a more sanguine disposition, were distinctly heard to clap their hands, whistle and cheer, as such young gentlemen invariably will. The corpse remained resolutely dead, although to make doubly sure, Jeffray despatched him again with a scalpel, slicing right into his neck and almost decapitating the unfortunate weaver in the process.
Clydesdale’s corpse was eventually released to his wife. She, poor woman, had given birth to a son less than a month before the assault that was to result in her husband’s execution. I do not know where the body was buried, although executed murderers were usually laid to rest under the courtyard of the High Court building, with the weight of the forces of law and order pressingdown upon them, presumably to stop their restless ghosts from troubling the populace at large.
There can have been few murderers, however, who proved to be so resolutely, finally, unarguably dead as Clydesdale. Where galvanisation and the combined skills of two professors of anatomy had failed, even the saviour himself might have faltered, Lazarus notwithstanding. But I am an old man and must be allowed my fun, if fun it can be called. A gruesome joke, certainly. And I tell this tale only to bring Jeffray before your eyes. He was this kind of man, you see, quite ruthless in the pursuit of learning. The great mass of people may well approve of him and find his actions both explicable and even praiseworthy. It is universally accepted that the pursuit of knowledge is a very fine thing. And Clydesdale was, after all, a common murderer.
* * *
All of that came later and at the time I knew only that I found Jeffray and his obsession with anatomy disturbing. During the years when we were friends, Thomas would sometimes say to me that observing the way the human body worked was like seeing a machine, a complicated machine, where everything was dependent upon everything else.
‘So much sickness and misery,’ he would say, ‘is caused because the machine that we call our body breaks down. If we could only repair that machine, William! If we knew how these things worked. If we could effect adequate repairs, then so many lives
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