Resurrectionist

medical knowledge. There were very few surgeons who did not rely on the resurrection men to provide fresh cadavers for their research.

Hyde’s real-life mentor, John Hunter, certainly made use of them and took delivery of fresh corpses for his anatomy classes at 13 Castle Street, now Charing Cross Road.

Other characters in the story also existed. James McGrigor was Surgeon-General of the Army, Richard Ryder was Home Secretary and both James Norris and James Tilly Matthews were patients at Bethlem Hospital. Mike Jay’s book, The Air Loom Gang, gives a fascinating account of Matthews’ incarceration in Bedlam, as well as great insight into the workings of the mad houses of the time.

Eden Carslow is a fictitious character, though based for the most part on the surgeon Astley Paston Cooper, who was a student of Hunter’s and who later became lecturer in anatomy at St Thomas’s and senior surgeon to Guy’s Hospital. There is no suggestion that Cooper was involved in aiding and abetting murder, though he was in league with the sack-’em-up men, using Thomas Butler, a porter at St Thomas’s dissecting room, as a go-between. Cooper often boasted that he could obtain any body that he wished and he paid the resurrection men handsomely for their services, despite referring to them as ‘the lowest dregs of degradation’.

In that, Cooper was not wrong, as I discovered during my reading of Ruth Richardson’s excellent Death, Dissection and the Destitute. The scene in which Hawkwood discovers that human flesh had been converted into soap and candles in the cellar of the Black Dog is not the product solely of my imagination. If anything, I have held back in describing some of the more bizarre uses to which human corpses were subjected. For example, John Sheldon, another of Hunter’s former pupils, lived with the preserved body of a beautiful woman in a glass case in his bedroom for ten years, while another, dentist Martin van Butchell, had his wife embalmed by Hunter and kept her in his living room where visitors could view her by appointment. I confess I did try to work a similar scenario into the story but decided to abandon the idea, for fear it would be considered too fanciful.

Equally, while some of the medical procedures I have attributed to Hyde during his service in Spain may seem unlikely, they too are based on fact. Crude blood transfusions had been attempted, including one from a sheep to a man by seventeenth-century physicians Richard Lower and Jean Baptiste Denys. John Hunter also conducted transplantation experiments involving both human and animal subjects.

Lest any readers think it a tad convenient that Hyde should have found himself a bolt-hole equipped with both an operating room and an escape route through an adjoining building that just happened to back on to his hideaway, I can assure them this was not poetic licence. Hunter did indeed own the lease to 28 Leicester Square, the house directly behind the Castle Street property. He had the gap between the houses bridged with an operating room specially constructed to aid his anatomy lectures. Above it he built a museum, in which were displayed thousands of his preparations. Following Hunter’s death in 1793, the Leicester Square property was rented out, while the museum remained in place, tended by Hunter’s former assistant, William Clift. The museum’s contents were later purchased by the Royal College of Surgeons. They are now displayed to splendid effect in the galleries in the Hunterian Museum at the RCS’s headquarters in Lincoln’s Inn. Sadly, unlike Hunter’s specimens, neither his home nor the school building has been preserved, though the plaque placed above his grave in Westminster Abbey can be seen, commemorating him as the ‘Founder of Scientific Surgery’. While researching the novel, I referred constantly to Wendy Moore’s immensely readable biography of John Hunter, The Knife Man. I cannot recommend it too highly. I am also indebted to Mick Crumplin, Archivist to the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland, whose knowledge of general surgical history, in particular that of the Napoleonic Wars, is truly encyclopaedic. He responded to my questioning with great patience and good humour. Any mistakes in the story are mine, not his.

The science of electricity was in its infancy during this period, and yet scientists and physicians were already attempting to harness electrical power as a means to dominate nature. Several experiments were conducted to inject life into human cadavers. The attempt to reanimate the corpse of the murderer George Forster did take place as described, as did John Hunter’s efforts to resuscitate the forger William Dodd.

Regarding the latter experiment, there is an intriguing footnote in Wendy Moore’s biography. Despite there being a memorial stone bearing his name in St Laurence’s churchyard in Cowley, West London, there is no mention of Reverend Dodd’s interment in the parish register.

Coming soon from HarperCollins,

the third novel in James McGee’s

MATTHEW HAWKWOOD series

Rapscallion

PROLOGUE

Sark stopped, sank to his knees, and listened, but the only sounds he could hear were the pounding of his own heartbeat and the hoarse, rasping wheeze at the back of his throat as he fought desperately to draw air into his tortured lungs. He tried to delay his inhalations in an attempt to slow down his breathing, but the effect was marginal. Moisture from the soggy ground had begun to soak into his breeches, adding to his discomfort. He raised himself into a squat and took stock of his surroundings, eyes probing the darkness for a familiar landmark, but to his untutored eye one stretch of featureless marshland looked much like any other.

A hooting cry came from behind and he stiffened. Owls hunted across the levels at night. Sometimes you could hear the beat of their wings if you were quiet enough. Sark remained where he was, crouched low. It had probably been an owl, but there were other creatures abroad, Sark knew, and they were hunting too.

There was movement to his left, accompanied by a soft grunt. The short hairs rose across the back of his neck and along his forearms. He turned slowly, not daring to exhale, and found himself under close scrutiny from a large sheep. For several seconds, man and beast regarded each other in eerie silence. The animal was not alone. Sark could make out at least a dozen more, huddled behind.

The ewe was the first to break eye contact. Backing off, it turned away and began to herd its companions towards a clump of bushes. Sark breathed a sigh of relief.

Then he heard the distant baying and the bile rose into his mouth.

They were using hounds.

Sark glanced out of the corner of his eye and saw the sheep pause in their tracks as their ears picked up the unearthly ululation. Then, as if with one mind, the animals broke into a brisk trot. Within seconds they had disappeared into the deepening gloom.

Sark turned and tried to locate the direction of the sound, but the darkness, allied to the dips and folds in the ground, made it difficult to pinpoint the exact bearing.

Ahead of him, the land had begun to rise. Sark inched forward, hoping the slope would provide the advantage of height and enable him to see further than his current position. Reaching the top of the bank, he elevated himself cautiously and stared back the way he had come. The first thing he saw was the bright flickering glow of a torch flame, then another, and another beyond that. From his vantage point he could see that the torchbearers were still some way off and that they were proceeding haphazardly. He suspected they were following the creek lines, but there was no doubt they were moving towards him, drawing inexorably closer with each passing second.

There were more lights, he saw, in the far distance. They were no more than pinpricks, as small as fireflies, and stationary, and he guessed these were the masthead lanterns of ships moored in the estuary. He wondered briefly if he shouldn’t have been heading towards rather than away from them, but he knew that hadn’t been an option. His pursuers were sure to have cut off that line of escape.

He looked around and found he was at the edge of a dyke. The ditch stretched away from him, merging into the moonlit wetlands like a snake into the undergrowth. The smell from the bottom of the dyke was foul; a pungent, nostril-clenching mix of peat and stagnant water.

Another drawn-out howl came looping out of the night. Sark felt the cold hand of fear clutch his heart and he cursed his inactivity. He shouldn’t have remained so long in one place. He got to his feet and began to run.