#he'd just think they're naive and stupid and don't understand medicine and medical education

[aleximedicusa]

welcome to why lewis’ moral stance is not very good and he should get off his high horse! under a cut because dear god this got long.

so, i do want to preface this by saying that the core of lewis’ stance has merit. he is right that adequate medical education requires access to dissection. we have evidence of that. wax casts and drawn diagrams just aren’t sufficient to learn the human body well enough to treat it, as a physician and especially as a surgeon, and any society that inhibits proper access to dissection will be causing severe detriment to society, and especially to the poorer classes. rich people can afford to pay for doctors who might have been able to travel abroad to get a better education; poor people just have to make do with the doctor down the street, and if the doctor down the street barely knows where your spleen is, that’s an issue. lewis is very justified in believing all of this. 

however. 

what this leads him to think and feel on the matter of bodysnatching is a lot less defensible. his anger with the legal systems in place has led to him having a really defiant stance: if they’re not going to provide the bodies, well, then anatomists are just going to have to get them, and illegal means for doing so are fair game. and he takes that further in thinking that the public has no right to get mad at them for how they get bodies. he thinks they should be angry at the government for not changing the laws, not at the anatomists. they’re just doing what they need to do, so why is everyone having riots at the houses of anatomists when they’re implicated in graverobbing? don’t they know it’s for society’s own good? 

and that, in turn, leads to him defiantly refusing to feel guilty about what he’s doing. and hey, lewis, that’s bad! he’s right that it’s not fair, and even dangerous, for the system to refuse to provide necessary materials for medical education, but that doesn’t mean that he should be let off the hook. he is treating the bodies of real people like they’ve got as much moral weight as a saw or a scalpel. he straight up does not care that what he’s doing is really horrible for the families of the deceased. there are some really heartbreaking stories of people finding the bodies of their loved ones half-dissected. i can think of one, specifically, where a guy found his sister’s head significantly mutilated in the dissecting room of a surgeon after finding out that her corpse had been exhumed and sold. there were mass cases where people found out about graverobbery in a certain cemetery and they frantically went to dig up the coffins of their loved ones to make sure they weren’t empty. and... a lot of them were. take a second to imagine how fucking traumatising that must have been for them. 

and that’s made worse by the fact that a lot of the public just really didn’t understand what surgeons did with the bodies. they didn’t understand that dissection was a necessity for basic medical knowledge. there were sensationalised rumours of surgeons making candles out of human fat, feeding organs to dogs, kicking bodies down stairs, etc. the general public seemed to view anatomists like drunken buffoons just hacking up bodies for a laugh. were there cases of anatomists mistreating the bodies? yeah, absolutely. but dissection was still a necessary part of the study of medicine. cooper points out that a lot of really intelligent, hard-working candidates were failing their exams to obtain their licenses because they just... didn’t know enough about the body. not because they didn’t study hard enough, but because they couldn’t familiarise themselves with the human body to the extent necessary for competency, and that familiarity can only come from dissection. but the public didn’t know that.

so is it really any wonder that everyone hated the anatomists so much? if you know that bodies are being stolen for anatomists to use, and you think that those bodies are just being hacked up for fun because you have no idea why dissection is an important part of medical education, then of course you’re going to be extra mad! that’s not to say that they wouldn’t be angry even if they fully understood (or to say that they’d be wrong for that anger), but the common belief that bodies were being dug up simply for anatomists to carve up for no real benefit exacerbated that anger a lot. 

and lewis doesn’t respect that. he doesn’t respect that even though the medical community is exploiting bodies against the wishes of the dead their families for genuine benefit to society, they are still exploiting bodies against the wishes of the dead and their families. if you tell him he’s being immoral, he’ll turn it right around on you and say that you can’t blame him for it because he’s just doing what the system is making him do. you will not be able to get through to him and make him understand that what he’s doing is wrong. even if he believes it’s a necessity and even if he believes that the system is the root of the cause, he’s still doing horrible things without accepting responsibility. 

there’s also the matter of how that turns into hypocrisy once the burke and hare case breaks. for those who haven’t read my posts about him, the novel has another character named connor morrison, who is an assistant to dr. knox and a friend of lewis’ (friend is a generous term, but... eh, it’s complicated). if you don’t know what the burke and hare case is, i did a quick rundown on it, so feel free to have a peek here. now, when the case breaks, everyone’s horrified, but lewis gets pretty angry at connor for giving the medical community a bad name by paying for murdered bodies. and connor points out that lewis... doesn’t really have a leg to stand on. every anatomist working at this time knows you don’t ask questions. why the fuck would you? you’re not an idiot. you know that the shady men coming to your back door at midnight with a body in a sack didn’t just pop down to b&q to get it. why would you ask about the details when you know the answer is that they got it illegally? you pay them and move on. that’s the way things are done. and now lewis is blaming him for not looking closer? not to mention, lewis is judging him for the morality of the bodies he used, when lewis is also exploiting bodies obtained immorally while explicitly refusing to feel guilty about that? connor was in the wrong for what he did, absolutely, but lewis isn’t in the right. 

and i get where he’s coming from, at least in part. being an anatomist kind of requires a certain amount of clinical detachment. if he got too bogged up in the identity of the bodies and the potential impact of what he’s doing, he probably couldn’t keep being a surgeon. but there are absolutely ways that he could acknowledge that what he’s doing is wrong. he could acknowledge his own guilt. he could acknowledge that the public have a right to feel the way they do. but he doesn’t. his stance is arrogant, callous, condescending, unapologetic, and sanctimonious. 

lewis is right that the law needs to be reformed and that the state of dissection needs to change. he’s right to push for that. but there’s a hell of a lot he isn’t right about.