Speaker 1
So of course, for the purposes of training exercises,
Speaker 2
like we were saying, only recently deceased bodies would really suffice here, that's where that issue came from that we were just talking
Speaker 1
about. So this created a demand that was far away at the time. And the only legal supply of bodies for the purpose of dissection were those who had actually been executed at the gallows. Oh, okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2
Which at the time was only about 50 people per year.
Speaker 1
Okay, well, so. That's good, but
Speaker 4
But not for this. It's not giving you a great supply of people. But
Speaker 1
like at the time, executions themselves were heavily attended by spectators, the dissections were also heavily attended social events. They often
Speaker 2
took on kind of like a carnival
Speaker 4
atmosphere. Yeah, there was a lot of showmanship involved, a lot of theater. It's like the, I think you did a whole episode
Speaker 3
on that, way early on.
Speaker 1
Yeah, and the podcast. It's like, and we were talking about how like the,
Speaker 2
how executions. Executions, yeah. Yeah, and that's definitely what happened with like dissections in medical theaters. When it was like a
Speaker 1
new carnival to go to, it's probably how they saw it. Exactly, how they saw it. Macabre thing that was happening before you were very eyes. And at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, for example, early 19th century instructor, professor Giovanni Aldini, he was known to perform tricks in
Speaker 3
the form of like,
Speaker 1
basically macabre experiments on corpses. Don't love. He would make disembodied heads open their eyes
Speaker 2
with like electrical shock.
Speaker 1
Oh no. He would have like a dead hand clutch things. He's having a little too much fun with it. Yeah, he would use galvanic experimentation and this involves using electrical sparks. Like static electricity to demonstrate that it could cause different muscles to twitch and even move a dissected specimen. Wow, it's, yeah.
