NEWS RELEASES
Public Dissection
20th November 2002
Horsham did it first and what’s more turned the skin into shoe leather!
Gunther Von Hagen is causing a great deal of controversy over his public dissection of a human body, amid threats of prosecution and police action. All of this is ‘small beer’ for the town of Horsham. A platform was once set up in the market square and spectators paid to watch two doctors dissect a human being for ‘science’. What’s more, the skin was not turned into plastic for educational reasons but given to the town’s tanner and turned into shoe leather. However, the human being who was dissected was not someone who gave their consent but someone who was found guilty of incest, murder and attempted suicide. The event took place 200 years ago. The man who was dissected was Richard Grazemark and his story is told below, taken from the pages of ‘The Sussex Weekly Advertiser’ for late March, early April 1790.
RICHARD GRAZEMARK PUBLICLY DISSECTED 1790
Richard was about 50 years old, ‘had many children by his daughter and so violent was his unnatural passion for her, that he could not bear the thought of another possessing her. . .’ However the daughter married and on the day of the wedding Richard burnt down his house own house at Ferring. Later he confessed to murdering his own daughter and ‘sat six hours on the body of the deceased and horrid to relate, in that situation, cut his own throat’ He recovered and was sent to Horsham for trial for incest, murder and attempted suicide. He was found guilty and hung at Horsham where he cried out to the crowd ‘Ladies and Gentlemen I wish you all well. I meant no harm. Kicked off his slippers among the crowd and left the world. . .’ It was further reported that his daughter had nine children by him.
The body was given to Messrs Price and Sopay, Surgeons for public dissection. The newspapers reports that ‘…his skin which in some parts was a quarter of an inch thick was given to a tanner of that place for the purpose of manufacturing into leather, and several persons of Horsham have bespoken portions of it for soles to their shoes’.
Grazemark, when he was last committed to gaol, ‘…was lank and spare but had grown lusty on the miserable diet of the prison, and with the load of accumulated guilt on his mind as appeared manifested on opening of the body, which proved remarkably fat’.
‘We do not hear that the young surgeons attempted to give lectures on the body but every one who chose to be present at the dissection was admitted whether led by curiosity or by the love of anatomy. In short the whole process was performed in public from the first incision to the boiling of the bones’.
In 1910, the grandson of Mr Mills, aged about eighty, related how‘…at one period (circa 1790) one Mills was engaged to boil the hanged men. He cut off the fleshy parts and put them in baskets and buried them (I think in S.W. part of Churchyard) and afterwards boiled the bones for the doctor’.
For further information please contact:
Jeremy Knight, Curator.
Horsham District Council’s Horsham Museum
9 Causeway, Horsham, West Sussex RH12 1HE
Telephone: 01403 254959. Fax: 01403 217581. Email: museum@horsham.gov.uk
Opening times: Mon to Sat (ex. bank hols) 10.00-5.00pm. Admission free.
CONTACT: Richard Morris, Communications Manager (Tel: 01403 215549)