Ruth Richardson in her remarkable work on death, dissection and the role of the 1832 Anatomy Act, remarked she was "horrified" by the "hero worship most medical history represents." Labelling the authors as "hagiographers" who presented medical history as "an ever ascending line of evolution up to the glorious and smug enlightened present."¹ This sense of enlightened …

Continue reading Phrenologists, Punishment and the Lit and Phil.