Note 171 — HOGARTH ILLUSTRATED. (continued 3)

Numerous as are the executions, they are not sufficient for the anatomical students. It is not more than four or five years since one of those necessary assistants to the art of chirurgery, called resurrection men, being employed in his vocation of stealing a dead body from a churchyard in the neighbourhood of London, was discovered by a patrole, and shot in the grave. To prevent his employer being disappointed of a subject, and to show her reverence for that art which her husband had lost his life in endeavouring to improve, and save the idle expense of a funeral, his afflicted widow, with the fondness of an Ephesian matron, three days afterwards sold the body of her murdered lord for sixteen shillings, to the very surgeon in whose service he had suffered!