M&D - Tyburn Tree 'resurrections'

[Doug Millison]

Stumbled on this in a book I'm reading:

"Peter Linebaugh has written a fascinating chapter about public hangings at
Tyburn Tree in London during the eighteenth century. It addresses, among
other things, riots between the condemned's friends and the surgeons who
wanted the body for dissection. "At times it was reasonable to regard the
surgeons, not the hangman, as the agent causing death. During the first
half of the eighteenth century the cause of death at Tyburn was asphyxia,
not dislocation of the spine. A broken neck was decisive. Asphyxia,
however, could result in temporary unconsciousness if the knot was tied, or
the noose placed around the neck, in a particular fashion . . . .
Incomplete hangings without fatal strangulation were common enough to
sustain the hope that resuscitation ('resurrection' as it was called) would
save the condemned. Life after 'death' therefore had a quite practical
reality for those sent to Tyburn to hang, and for many of them their time
in Newgate before the hanging day was spent in preparation for such
'resurrections' " There is, for example, the case of William Duell in 1740,
who hung at Tyburn for half an hour and revived as the surgeons were about
to dissect him."
--John Dominic Crossan, _The Birth of Christianity_, p. 549, quoting a 1975
article by Peter Linebaugh, "The Tyburn Riot Against the Surgeons" in
_Albion's Fatal Tree:  Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England_

Something like this might be what TRP's getting at (it's conceivable that
the 1975 article might even have served as one of his M&D sources) when he
writes:
"Mason has been shov'd about and borne along in riots of sailors attempting
to wrest from bands of Medical Students the bodies of Shipmates come to
grief ashore, too far from the safety of the Sea" (MD 15.11)

This apparently historical possibility of such "resurrections" may also
cast a new light on Florinda's speech at p. 112.7, where she speaks of
murderers who commit the "fatal Crime out of a need to re-converge upon
that blinding moment where all his life was ever focus'd. . . ."


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