Sir Anthony Carlisle's gothic (medical) intervention: Carving the criminal body in The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey

Until the Anatomy Act, 1832, executed murderers were the only accepted legal supply of subjects for medical education and research. With demand outstripping supply, the bodysnatcher became a visible aspect of British culture as medical practitioners relied on a black market trade of bodies, largely acquired through graverobbing. The connection between anatomical study and bodysnatching thus underlined medical practice with connotations of criminality, immorality and murder even before Burke and Hare were found to be committing murder in order to sell the bodies to medical institutions. Gothic fiction recognisably played a role in perpetuating fears connected to anatomy, but little has been done to consider how the popular genre could also convey arguments in favour of anatomy reform or how it could be used by medical practitioners to reshape popular conceptions of anatomy practices. The suggestion that the surgeon and anatomist Anthony Carlisle (1768-1840) was 'Mrs Carver', the pseudonymous author of the Minerva Press novel The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey (1797), presents us with one such opportunity. In order to reevaluate the cultural significance of Minerva Press fiction, this chapter argues that both the material and textual elements of the Minerva Press gothic novel make it an ideal vehicle through which to construct popular superstition as a form of myth and misinformation that facilitated the depredations of the bodysnatcher.