At any rate, the illustration initially puzzled me -- one of hundreds of incorrect medical depictions of the brain (note the pomegranate-like cluster near the hypothalamus) which flourished in 17th century Britain. The assumption of medical historians has always been that there was one incorrect original drawn from an anomalous sample which was then copied and distributed to medical students, who in turn created their own copies.
After some thought, however, I remembered the words of Emma Pease, British crusader and suffragette, in her 1848 anti-vivisection pamphlet called An Outcry Against the Impediments, Defects, and Abuses Existing in the Present System of Medical Education, with Suggestions for Their Removal and Correction, which includes a rather curious mention of “other means by which to experiment on living tissue, which have been practiced these last hundred years.” She then goes on to write that “with such an excess of semi-sentient human subjects for surgical experimentation why must dumb animals continue to suffer?”
This could perhaps be overlooked if it weren’t for the fact that the London Medical Gazette ran the following ad for several months in 1848:
LIVING CADAVERS
For hire
For research and experimentation
Contact Mr. James Foley, 14 Pudding Lane, London
Further, a news story dated 1849 from Bell’s New Weekly Messenger recounts the arrest of Charlie “the Hound” Frobisher, a.k.a. James Foley, who was charged with numerous counts of human trafficking, counts which were later changed to illegal goods trafficking, for which he was jailed.
A little detective work leads us to the conclusion that the subject of the original illustration was a member of the Tzombi race.
Thank you, papillonnoirs, for your insight!
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