Use Of The Dead To The Living: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Use Of The Dead To The Living, credited to Thomas Southwood Smith, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Use Of The Dead To The Living by Thomas Southwood Smith. Read in English by David Wales In 1827 Thomas Southwood-Smith published The Use of the Dead to the Living, a pamphlet which argued that the current system of burial in the United Kingdom was a wasteful use of bodies that could otherwise be used for dissection by the medical profession. "If, by any appropriation of the dead, I can promote the happiness of the living, then it is my duty to conquer the reluctance I may feel to such a disposition of the dead, however well-founded or strong that reluctance may be". Southwood-Smith's lobbying helped lead to the 1832 Anatomy Act, the legislation which allowed the state to seize unclaimed corpses from workhouses and sell them to surgical schools. While this act is credited with ending the practice of grave robbery, it has also been condemned as discriminatory against the poor. Thomas Southwood- Smith (1788 – 1861) was an English physician and sanitary reformer. - Summary by Wikipedia and David Wales

Recording facts

• Recording title: Use Of The Dead To The Living
• Author credits: Thomas Southwood Smith
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 5
• Listed recording duration: 2:02:39

Catalogue topics

• england
• Anatomy
• nineteenth century
• life sciences
• dissection
• public health
• history of anatomy
• autopsy

Track guide

1. 00 - Advertisement — 2:02
2. 01 - Part 1 — 20:18
3. 02 - Part 2 — 36:02
4. 03 - Part 3 — 32:36
5. 04 - Part 4 — 31:41

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.