Taken together, it will be shown that criminal dissections personified on a much broader cultural canvas ‘the social meanings attached to the body which could vary widely according to culture, and period’. Archival material illustrates the spatial architectural arrangements and what these reveal about the theatrical post‐mortem display. It analyses how exactly dissection premises were event‐managed by medico‐legal officials on duty. New research identifies the types of venues requisitioned for post‐execution events in provincial life. This article builds on these revisionist perspectives by broadening the narrow anatomical focus of most work written about criminal dissections covering the Murder Act from 1752 until it was repealed by the Anatomy Act in 1832. 5 New evidence has uncovered sustained public interest in post‐execution punishment events staged in prominent penal spaces in the community. 4 Recently a consortium of scholars has looked with renewed historical efforts at the activities of medico‐legal officials who managed the entire punishment journey of the condemned, known in popular culture as the dangerous dead. In crime studies these public spectacles have often been written‐up exclusively, 3 even though judges also ordered either a dissection by a penal surgeon, or the criminal corpse was hung in chains on a gibbet. 2 Executions consequently attracted enormous crowds that congregated at hanging trees across England. That death penalty reflected the Biblical commandment ‘Thou shall not kill’ and Lex Talionis, the English common law of retaliation. 1 It stipulated that homicide perpetrators were to be ‘ hanged by the neck until dead’ on a public gallows. The Murder Act is central to criminal histories of the long eighteenth century. In ‘Other Spaces’ the ‘Dangerous Dead’ was hence a fascinating feature of the Murder Act outside the Metropolis from 1752 to 1832. Some events worked well, others threatened the social order. It often happened in ‘counter‐sites’ of punishment in the community and involved a great deal of immersive theatre. Yet, managing the ‘dangerous dead’ involved a great deal of discretionary justice with unpredictable outcomes. Event management on location had to have emotional and visual appeal, moral coherence, be timed appropriately, and, if successful, would enhance the deterrence value of the capital code. They had to be able to process large numbers of people who wanted to be part of the consumption of post‐mortem ‘harm’ in English communities. Penal surgeons hand‐picked these performance spaces that were socially produced for legal and practical reasons. Instead, ordinary people accompanied criminal corpses to many different types of dissection venues. It reveals that the punishment parade of the condemned did not stop at the scaffold, contrary to the impression in many standard historical accounts. ![]() This article explores the event management of criminal dissections by penal surgeons in situ. The Murder Act (1752) decreed that homicide perpetrators should be hanged and sent for post‐execution punishment.
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