Class Inequality in Anatomy: The Price of Privilege and the Body as Commodity
Thematic Claim
In Anatomy, Dana Schwartz argues that the wealthy elite maintain their health, status, and scientific ambition by exploiting the bodies of the poor. The novel’s central ethical crisis—Dr. Beecham's organ harvesting—is not an isolated horror but a logical extension of a society that treats poor bodies as raw material for the rich. At the same time, Hazel Sinnett’s own privilege allows her to pursue medicine in ways denied to Jack Currer and other working-class characters, even as she is constrained by gender. The thematic claim is that class inequality literally consumes the poor: their corpses become teaching tools, their living bodies become spare parts, and their lives are deemed disposable when they threaten the social order.
Tracing Class Inequality Through the Plot
1. The Gravemarket and the Anatomy Classroom
The novel opens with resurrection men Davey and Munro digging up Penelope Harkness’s body for sale to doctors. This instantly frames the poor corpse as a commodity. By Chapter 2, Hazel sees a beggar being examined in Lord Almont’s hall—an uncomfortable intrusion of poverty into wealth. When Hazel tries to attend Dr. Beecham’s anatomy demonstration, Bernard rips up the broadsheet and sneers that surgery is “the field for men with no money. No status. They’re butchers, really!” (Chapter 3). Bernard’s casual dismissal reveals how the upper classes view surgical work (and those who perform it) as beneath them, even as they benefit from the knowledge it produces.
2. Hazel’s Disguise and Straine’s Class Anxiety
When Hazel disguises herself as a boy to attend Dr. Straine’s lectures, she is eventually discovered. Straine’s rejection is not based solely on misogyny: he explicitly contrasts himself with dilettante aristocrats. “I do not waste my time on students who will not go on to be doctors,” he says, adding that Hazel’s sex precludes a medical career—but also that her intelligence would have precluded it. Straine’s bitterness stems from his own struggle: he worked his way up through “discipline and effort and ingenuity.” He sees Hazel as a privileged girl playing at science, unaware that her class position makes her a poor fit for a rugged profession. Yet his own reliance on stolen corpses implicates him in the same system that exploits the poor.
3. Beecham’s Operating Theater and Jack’s Trial
The climax reveals how class inequality becomes literal organ theft. In Chapter 33, Hazel observes Dr. Beecham transplanting a kidnapped boy’s eye into Baron Walford’s socket. Beecham uses ethereum—a glowing gold tonic—as anesthesia, a luxurious substance only the rich can afford. The boy, unnamed and poor, bleeds out on the table. Later, Jack is kidnapped for a heart transplant. When Jack and Hazel escape, Jack is arrested and tried for murders he did not commit. Beecham testifies against him, and Bernard claims Jack confessed. Jack is hanged, his body taken to the university. The rich collude to preserve their power: Beecham needs organs, Bernard needs to eliminate a rival, and the state needs a scapegoat. Jack’s execution cements the message that poor lives are cheap.
Character and Symbol Connections
Hazel Sinnett: Privilege as Both Shield and Blindness
Hazel’s aristocratic background gives her a carriage, a country home (Hawthornden Castle), and the freedom to pursue anatomy. She can bribe guards and borrow her brother’s clothes. Yet her privilege also blinds her: she does not initially grasp Jack’s desperation or the danger of her own investigations. Only after witnessing Beecham’s surgery and losing Jack does she truly understand the cost of the system she has been dabbling in.
Jack Currer: The Disposable Body
Jack survives by digging graves, selling bodies, and working in the theater. He is resourceful but trapped. His poverty makes him vulnerable to Beecham’s kidnapping and to the criminal justice system. When Hazel offers him the immortality tonic, Jack refuses: “You deserve a normal life as a physician.” He knows his death will free her from a scandalous match. His refusal is both selfless and a recognition that class mobility is a fantasy for him.
Dr. William Beecham III: The Gentleman Butcher
Beecham is the ultimate embodiment of class exploitation. He is wealthy, respected, and utterly ruthless. He does not dirty his hands with grave robbing—he pays others to supply him with poor victims. His treatise on anatomy condemns grave robbing even as he commits worse crimes. He represents the hypocrisy of a medical establishment that feigns ethics while commodifying the poor.
Symbols
- The Ethereum Gold Tonic: This glowing substance is used by Beecham to anesthetize his wealthy patients—but also to drug his victims. Gold, the color of wealth, literally enters poor bodies to make them compliant. It symbolizes how money buys control over life and death.
- The Heart: Jack’s heart—both literal and metaphorical—becomes the key symbol of class inequality. Beecham wants Jack’s heart for a transplant; Jack’s beating heart is what Hazel vows to love forever. The epilogue’s letter, signed “beating or still,” affirms that even death cannot erase Jack’s humanity, yet the system tried to reduce him to organ meat.
- The Frog / Galvanism: Hazel’s early experiment reanimating a frog with lightning shows her scientific ambition, but it also foreshadows how she treats living bodies as objects of inquiry. The frog comes from nature, but Hazel’s privilege allows her to risk it (and later, human bodies) without consequence—until Jack.
Complexity and Contradiction
The novel does not offer a simple condemnation of all medicine. Hazel becomes a genuine healer, using wortflower root to treat Roman fever without deaths. She works to heal the living, not just dissect the dead. Yet her success is built on the corpses of the poor and the lessons she learned from Beecham’s horrors.
Class inequality also fractures the poor community: Jack’s associates betray him to the magistrate, and the resurrection men are pitted against one another. The system turns poor people against each other for survival.
A final contradiction: Jack refuses the immortality tonic that could save his life. He chooses death to give Hazel a future. This act transcends class—it is love—but it also reinforces the idea that the poor must sacrifice for the rich. Hazel cannot save him because her privilege cannot undo the machinery of the state and the medical elite.
Study Questions
1. How does Bernard’s destruction of the broadsheet in Chapter 3 represent the tension between upper-class expectations and Hazel’s ambitions? Bernard rips up the advertisement for Beecham’s anatomy demonstration because he views surgery as beneath their social class. He calls surgeons “butchers” and insists Hazel’s role is to be a wife and mother. The scene shows that the upper class actively discourages women from medicine and simultaneously denigrates the manual labor of surgery, even though that labor is essential to their own health.
2. What does Dr. Straine’s speech to Hazel reveal about his views on class and gender? Straine says he refuses to teach women because they are “dilettantes” who will never practice. He considers himself a self-made man who must earn his living through discipline—contrasting with the landed gentry who “eat themselves to death.” While he correctly identifies Hazel’s privilege, he wrongly assumes she lacks seriousness. His class resentment becomes a barrier to her education, showing how class-based gatekeeping harms even extraordinary individuals.
3. How does the ethereum gold tonic function as a symbol of class inequality? The tonic is used by Dr. Beecham to render both Baron Walford (rich) and the kidnapped boy (poor) unconscious. However, only the baron receives the new eye; the boy is left to die. The gold glow of the tonic mirrors the wealth that gives Beecham access to bodies from the underclass. It symbolizes the way the rich can literally buy sleep, health, and life while the poor are used up.
4. In what ways is Jack’s trial and execution a class-based punishment? Jack is arrested for murders committed by Beecham (through his henchman). Beecham, a wealthy doctor, testifies against him, and Bernard, an aristocrat, falsely claims Jack confessed. Jack has no powerful allies—only Hazel, whose privilege is ignored by authorities. The trial is a show of power by the elite to protect Beecham’s organ-harvesting scheme. Jack’s body is then taken for dissection, completing the cycle of exploitation.
5. Why does Jack refuse the immortality tonic Hazel offers in prison, and what does this reveal about his understanding of class? Jack refuses the tonic because he believes Hazel deserves a normal life as a physician. He knows that if he survives, their relationship would ruin her socially and professionally. His refusal acknowledges that class inequality makes their love impossible within the existing system. By choosing death, he reclaims agency, but the choice is forced by the same poverty that has always constrained him.