Taking place only 3 years after the exploits of Burke and Hare in Edinburgh...John Bishop, James May and Thomas Williams are arrested for the murder of Carlo Ferrari for the purpose of selling his body for dissection. The worst of the lot, John Bishop, was a veteran resurrectionist of 12 years! The bodies he and May had been selling were barely fresh enough, so they preyed on London's most vulnerable for higher gain. They only got caught because the anatomist thought Carlo's body was TOO fresh...

Wise takes you down to the criminal underbelly of London. Wise examines how a unforgiving civil government allowed the poor and desperate to be taken advantage of. You learn about the underground tunnels and passages connecting various pubs that acted as guild halls. How resurrectionist wives would pretend to be a relative of a dying pauper to obtain their body for their husbands. How a body could go to an anatomist, but the teeth and scalp might go to a dentist or wigmaker. Through the subsequent trial, Wise then demonstrates just how elaborate this system was and every notable surgeon was in on it. Sir Astley Cooper, King's College, Guy's Hospital, all of them.

I'm glad Wise decided to focus on Carlo, because he was also a victim of rampant child-trafficking in Italy at that time, and it's a rare thing for historians to dive into that. The "padroni" would buy children from peasants in northern Italy and use the child to beg for them. And thankfully, the result of this trial led to legislation dictating the rights of a corpse and the eventual downfall of the resurrectionist trade. ( )

Story of the murder of a boy in London to sell his body to the anatomy schools. Wonderful research & writing. Anecdotal history at its best.
Read Aug 2006 ( )

http://moloch981.wordpress.com/2013/08/23/the-italian-boy/ ( )

True story of bodysnatching and murder in and around Spitalfields in the early 19th century. Manages to make the time seem both real and impossobly distant from today. Brings to life a sense of what London's east end was like in those days. ( )

The Italian Boy is the story of a little-known 19th century murder. The story begins in 1832 with the delivery of the body of an "Italian boy" to one of London's many private medical schools. In the 19th century, medical schools acquired subjects to practice on from London's many pauper's graves; the body of the body was fresher than one might expect, and lacked burial marks.

What followed was an investigation into the murder of an Italian boy, never fully identified by contemporaries. The search for the boy's murderers led to the infamous trial of his suppliers--John Bishop, James May, and Thomas Williams. The murders echoed those of Burke and Hare, two famous resurrectionists after whom the term "burking" was coined.

I liked this book, sort of. Although the author goes off on tangents (she talks in general about poverty in the early 19th century, Italian politics, and the Smithfield meat market, which seemed to me to be "filler" for the book, almost like a newspaper article extended to a 300-page book), she presents to her reader a compelling murder story with a bit of a mystery--who was the Italian boy that Bishp, May and Williams supplied to Kings College? On the other hand, I felt as though the author failed to draw any conclusions about the murder, murderers, or to connect various pieces of the puzzle. The book is accompanied by nice engraving reproductions. ( )