He nodded.
“He told me once that a mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it. I have come to agree with him.”
“I see,” he said, but his eyes betrayed his skepticism. “So then... Jonathan Younger.”
“What about him?”
He smiled. “I told him that I place no restrictions on my very intelligent, educated, logical, independent, willful niece.”
I laughed. “I take after my uncle.”
“And so he would like to take you to lunch tomorrow at noon at The Criterion. I suggested the Holburn. Aunt Susan and I were there the other night for dinner. We had fish, sweets, ices and cheese - wonderful bread, as well. All for three shillings and six pence. Quite good.”
“Did you tell Jonathan that I would meet him there?”
“I advised him to send a page to confirm all this. And I told him that if you had not arrived by half twelve, he’d best have something to eat by himself or go back to Bart’s hungry.”
“All right then,” I said with a smile.
He finished his port and said, “I’m going to get some sleep. You should, too.”
He started to rise but I reached out to touch his elbow. “Uncle.”
“Yes?”
“I heard something... I heard something quite despicable about St. Bart’s today.”
He settled back into the chair. “What was that?”
“Sherlock said that they used to... well, he told me that at a public house there was a room in the back with benches with the grave robbers’ names who waited there with specimens for the surgeons at St. Bart’s to appraise and purchase.”
His face fell. “The Fortune of War public house on Pie Corner. Yes, Sherlock is correct.”
“It’s true then,” I said, heaving a loud breath. “And so, despite acts of Parliament and the Poor Laws, grave robbing still occurs.”
“Yes, it does, because there has been such an influx of medical students that there are not enough bodies for dissection. This has to do with this Wiggins thing, doesn’t it, Poppy?”
“Yes.”
“Poppy, I urge you not to-”
I interrupted him mid-sentence. “Uncle, in a very twisted way, I do see why the purchase of cadavers, this black market is on-going.”
“Oxford is still a somewhat marginalized medical school, Poppy. A lot of the metropolitan medical schools at the hospitals are booming. And we don’t get enough bodies to meet the needs of the medical students. So we still resort to finding beggars, and homeless and prostitutes and poor people who are willing to contract away their dying relatives. Brokers, undertakers, and others still pay the poor to give up their dead or simply help themselves and lie to relatives who want to at least give the deceased a pauper’s funeral. Still, to this day, body-dealers and those who specialize in body parts pick up corpses and sell them for profit... for a sixpence or a few shillings. The price of a meal at the Holburn,” he choked.
“And they are transported to various places on the railway?”
“On what they call dead trains.”
“My God. Uncle, this is-”
“Despicable. Nothing of which the medical profession can be proud. There are those who fight for the poor and unsuspecting. People like Hussey in Oxford.”
“Hussey? I thought he was something of a dolt.”
“Do not believe everything you hear, Poppy. He trained at St. Bart’s. He is the coroner in Oxford now, elected by the town council a couple of years ago. He has refused to provide any unclaimed bodies to Radcliffe Infirmary and he has lobbied against guardians selling the bodies of the poor for dissection. He constantly wages a war against people selling their loved ones.
“Poppy, there are dealers who employ go-betweens, like porters at hospitals and workhouse masters and undertakers. Of course, young medical students must learn all they can about the human body, but this trafficking of bodies and body parts...”
His voice trailed off. I simply nodded. It was exactly what Sherlock had been telling me earlier.
“Poppy, I don’t know what kind of scheme young Wiggins involved himself in. I don’t know if this Cecil Gray he dug up has anything to do with this at all. But stay out of it, will you? Promise me?”
Uncle had asked me this before. His concern for me was always at odds with what Sherlock asked this of me. He had frequently cautioned me to check my feelings for Sherlock and to disentangle myself from Sherlock’s detective pursuits. But it was a tug-of-war - complying with Uncle’s caring requests or submitting to Sherlock’s urgent entreaties.
Uncle always lost.
Chapter 15
I lay in bed for a long time, unable to sleep, thinking about the sordid business of body snatching. Obviously, the Anatomy Act had done nothing to better or cheapen medical training. There was a shortage of bodies and teaching hospitals with a focus on dissection needs must equal corpses being provided somehow... by mortuaries or workhouses or gaols. And if that wasn’t enough... and if coroners like the wrongly reputed Hussey, however well-intentioned he might be, stepped in to thwart relatives from selling bodies and refused to let every corpse that came through the Radcliffe Infirmary be carted off prematurely, then this illegal trade would continue.
Oxford had remained a limited provincial medical school, particularly in development of clinical medicine. So bodies were even more sorely needed. And so, this Professor, this Danford Hopgood would have all the more difficult time obtaining corpses for his ‘research.’ I needed to talk to Wiggins. I needed to ask him to accompany me to meet Sherlock and I wanted to find out everything he knew about this degenerate, repugnant trade.
The following morning, a page called upon us during breakfast with a message from Jonathan that he would send a carriage for me to take me to The Criterion for our luncheon. I asked the page to relate to Jonathan that I needed no carriage; I would walk.
After he left, I
