Ethics of Medical Experimentation in Anatomy by Dana Schwartz
Thematic Claim: Knowledge Without Consent Is Violence
In Anatomy, Dana Schwartz examines the proposition that medical progress loses its moral justification when it is achieved through the exploitation and sacrifice of human beings. The epigraph, quoting Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, declares that to “examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death.” This frames the entire narrative: the pursuit of anatomical knowledge inevitably involves the dead, but the novel asks who dies, how they die, and whether they—or their survivors—have any say in the matter. Through the arcs of Hazel Sinnett, Jack Currer, and Dr. William Beecham III, the story argues that ethical medical experimentation must prioritize consent, compassion, and the dignity of every person.
Plot Evidence Across the Novel
1. The Prologue: Resurrection Men and the First Test of the Tonic
The novel opens with resurrection men Davey and Munro exhuming the body of Penelope Harkness for sale to surgeons. This illegal trade in corpses is the grim foundation of Edinburgh’s medical education. When three well-dressed strangers intercept them, they do not merely take the body—they cut Davey’s arm and drip his blood into a purple vial. The liquid glows gold. This moment introduces the ethereum gold tonic, a substance that requires living human blood to activate. The strangers are recruiting for Dr. Beecham’s experiments, treating Davey not as a person but as a resource. The scene establishes that the pursuit of medical miracles in this world is built on non-consensual taking from the poor and vulnerable.
2. Beecham’s Classroom: From Rabbit to Human Dissection
When Hazel disguises herself as a male student to attend Dr. Beecham’s anatomy course, she witnesses the gradual normalization of violating living beings. On the first day, Beecham kills a rabbit in front of the class to cull the faint-hearted, then hands out dead rabbits for dissection. He treats the animals as disposable teaching tools. Later, when a human cadaver—a hanged murderess—is brought in, Hazel feels a pang of sympathy for the woman’s “strange, naked, alien thing” on the table. Beecham’s treatise, quoted in the prologue, defends using executed criminals for dissection as “final penance,” but the novel shows how easily this logic slides into justifying the use of living people. The classroom environment, where students are humiliated and expelled for minor failures, mirrors a system that values knowledge over human feeling.
3. Hazel’s Treatment of Roman Fever Patients: Experimentation with Care
After leaving Beecham’s course, Hazel takes in Roman fever patients at Hawthornden Castle. She begins to experiment, using wortflower-root tea and poultices based on Jack’s folk remedy. When her first patient dies, she wants to dissect him—“I need every corpse I can”—but Jack insists she bury him instead, because she knew him and cared for him. Hazel’s decision to respect the dead man’s remains marks a clear ethical boundary: experimentation must stop when the subject is someone you have loved. She later writes to Beecham asking about inoculation against Roman fever, showing that ethical inquiry and cautious treatment go hand in hand. Her approach contrasts sharply with Beecham’s ruthless pursuit of results.
4. The Surgical Theater: Non-Consensual Organ Transplant
The novel’s most explicit horror comes when Hazel follows a veiled figure to the Anatomists’ Society and witnesses Beecham performing an eye transplant. A kidnapped poor boy is on the table, his eye socket bleeding, while Baron Walford lies unconscious, receiving a new eye. Beecham explains that he takes organs from “thieves and criminals” and gives them to wealthy patrons who pay. He claims to “give order to the chaos” and that poverty itself is the real murderer. Hazel accuses him of playing God. Beecham’s justification—that his work saves lives and that the poor would die anyway—is a chilling articulation of utilitarian ethics stripped of empathy. This scene crystallizes the theme: the powerful use the vulnerable as raw material for their ambition.
5. Jack’s Execution and the Refusal of the Tonic
Jack Currer is sentenced to hang for crimes connected to his underground work. Before his execution, Hazel brings him the immortality tonic, hoping to save him. Jack refuses, saying Hazel deserves a normal life as a physician. He chooses death over becoming an experiment. His body is then taken to the teaching hospital, but the novel leaves its fate ambiguous. Jack’s sacrifice reinforces the idea that some lines should not be crossed: even the promise of eternal life cannot justify using another person without their consent. The epilogue, with a burnt letter from Jack declaring his “beating heart” still belongs to Hazel, suggests that love and memory survive death, but only because Jack’s bodily autonomy was respected in the end.
Character and Symbol Connections
- Dr. Beecham embodies the unethical experimenter: he is brilliant, skilled, and utterly convinced of his own righteousness. His leather gloves and surgical precision symbolize a detachment that allows him to harm without guilt. The ethereum gold tonic is his greatest achievement and his moral ruin—it requires human sacrifice.
- Hazel represents the student of medicine who struggles to reconcile ambition with conscience. Her early frog galvanism experiment shows raw curiosity, but she learns to pause and grieve. The heart symbol recurs in her love for Jack—a love that is “beating or still,” alive even after death.
- Jack is the victim who refuses to become a resource. His body is valuable to science, but he insists on being seen as a person. The music box?
- Bernard Almont and Iona: their weddings and normal lives contrast with the dark world of anatomy. Hazel’s decision to continue healing the living after Jack’s death shows a middle path: medical practice that serves, not exploits.
Complexity and Contradiction
The novel does not offer a simple condemnation of all experimentation. Hazel herself experiments on patients, develops an inoculation using wortflower root, and feels the temptation to dissect a man she cared for. Dr. Beecham, for all his villainy, makes a coherent argument: he saves lives by using bodies that would otherwise be wasted. The rich patrons who fund his work are complicit, but the poor who sell their bodies out of desperation are also part of the system. The narrative suggests that ethical lines are not fixed—they must be actively chosen in every case. Hazel’s final position is that the living deserve care, and the dead deserve dignity. This is a hard-won stance, not a platitude.
Study Questions and Answers
1. How does the prologue establish the ethical stakes of medical experimentation?
The prologue shows resurrection men digging up a fresh body and being intercepted by strangers who test a boy’s blood for the immortality tonic. This immediately connects the acquisition of corpses for anatomy with a secret, non-consensual use of living bodies. The theft of Penelope Harkness’s corpse is illegal but routine; the cutting of Davey’s arm is a violation of the living. The epigraph from Frankenstein then frames the entire story as a meditation on what it costs to “examine the causes of life.”
2. Compare Hazel’s approach to experimentation with Dr. Beecham’s.
Hazel experiments out of necessity and compassion: she tries wortflower-root tea and poultices on Roman fever patients, carefully observing results and writing to Beecham for advice. When a patient dies, she initially wants to dissect him but listens to Jack and buries him instead. Dr. Beecham experiments with cold efficiency, kidnapping the poor to harvest organs for wealthy clients. He sees individuals as interchangeable parts. Hazel treats her patients as people whose stories matter; Beecham sees them as “specimens.”
3. Why does Jack Currer refuse the immortality tonic?
Jack refuses the tonic because he believes Hazel deserves a life as a physician without being tied to him as an immortal experiment. He also refuses to become the kind of being that the tonic would create—a creature kept alive by the deaths of others. By refusing, he asserts his humanity and his love for Hazel, choosing a natural death over a fabricated eternity.
4. What role does the ethereum gold tonic play in understanding Beecham’s ethics?
The tonic is the ultimate symbol of Beecham’s moral calculus: it requires a drop of living human blood to activate, meaning every dose comes at the cost of a life. Beecham justifies this by arguing that the tonic saves the rich and powerful, who in turn advance civilization. The tonic literalizes the idea that progress built on exploitation—the blood of the poor becomes the gold of the wealthy. It shows that Beecham’s ethics reduce human beings to ingredients.
5. How does the epilogue complicate the novel’s message about medical ethics?
The epilogue reveals that Jack is alive (or his letter implies he survived) and has fled to New York. Hazel pins his letter above her workstation and continues her work. This hopeful twist risks undermining the earlier moral clarity about Jack’s sacrifice. However, it also emphasizes that ethical choices have consequences: Jack’s refusal of the tonic was valid even if he survived. The novel ends not with a triumph of medical magic but with Hazel healing the living through ordinary medicine, suggesting that ethical practice—not miracle cures—is the true path forward.