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Pathology Museum

Bellingham

"That you be taken from hence…to a place of execution, where you shall be hanged by the neck until you be dead; your body to be dissected and anatomised."

Skull of John Bellingham
Skull of John Bellingham, courtesy of Scott Grummett

The skull of John Bellingham is a very unique specimen. In May 1812 John Bellingham assassinated the British Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, the only British Prime Minister to have ever been assassinated.

While we do not have much information about this skull, we do know the museum acquired it because the punishment for murder at that time was to be "hanged and anatomised". 

Prior to the Anatomy Act of 1832, there were two ways in which Medical Schools such as the one here at St Bartholomew's Hospital, established around 1790 by John Abernethy, acquired cadavers for teaching: they were prisoners sentenced to death and then dissection, or they were purchased from Resurrection Men.

The trade of the Resurrection Men was unsavoury but it was necessary practice if medical students were to train to become doctors and surgeons.

In this case, the skull of Bellingham was acquired legitimately after he was dissected in entirety at The Royal College of Surgeons by Sir William Clift, who meticulously recorded his findings so that to this day we know what he and the audience observed during the procedure.

  • The stomach contained a small quantity of fluid, "which seemed to be wine"
  • The bladder was empty and contracted
  • The brain was found to be "firm and sound throughout"

The scene would have looked a lot like this famous drawing of The Dissecting Room by Rowlandson.

The Dissecting Room by Rowlandson - Courtesy of Project Gutenberg
The Dissecting Room by Rowlandson, courtesy of Project Gutenberg

According to other records, "something of interest" was found in his stomach and left testicle and these particular parts were kept in the Royal College of Surgeons Museum. After the dissection and other subsequent experiments, the body was placed into the care of Edward Stanley, one of the favoured pupils here at Barts.

Also at that time there was a fascination with animation of the dead and surgeons carried out experiments to "explore how long a heart could be made to move after death". In this case, the surgeons experienced one of their greatest triumphs as Bellingham's heart continued to move for a period of nearly four hours after death.

In fact it was the dissection of Bellingham at The Royal College in 1812 that led directly to their "Regulations Relating to the Bodies of Murderers" being written. This was a set of guidelines specifically meant to ensure that the dissection of criminals was not a public spectacle and was done purely for medical knowledge.

This skull began life as a man, not just a specimen: a man who believed that he was acting in a perfectly rational way after he was "mistreated" - in his eyes - by the government in the years prior to the murder. For that reason, in order to humanise this most well-known item in the museum's collection, a digital facial reconstruction of the skull was carried out in 2018, by forensic artist Hew Morrison, with the consent of Bellingham's extant descendants. The image and its story made national press.

John Bellingham
John Bellingham

You can read more about the case on the Public Domain Review but they do leave out the RCS dissection in this article. The centenary, in 2012, was commemorated here with a wonderful lecture by Kirsty Chilton of The Old Operating Theatre. Check our events page for similar lectures and seminars.

References

"Human Remains" by Helen MacDonald
Old Bailey Transcript of the Case

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