Abstract
In 1829 Thomas Carlyle voiced his concern that the French physiologist Pierre Jean George Cabanis dared to ‘la[y] open our moral structure with . . . dissecting-knives and real metal probes’.¹ In the same year, Thomas Lovell Beddoes completed his macabre dramaDeath’s Jest-Book. Cronin has observed that a young Beddoes went to Germany to conduct ‘medical researches . . . [in] an unavailing attempt to find physical evidence for the immortality of the soul’.² His drama reflects that research. The body inDeath’s Jest-Bookis portrayed as ‘a machine that even the ghost has deserted’.³ At one point in