1734: Judith Defour, in the Gin Craze

ExecutedToday.com ^ | March 8, 2016 | Headsman

[CheshireTheCat]

On this date in 1734, Judith Defour (or Dufour; she was also known as Judith Leeford) was hanged at Tyburn, and afterwards anatomized.

Defour’s four companions in death were (male) robbers, highwaymen and housebreakers, feared but commonplace scourges of London’s propertied. Defour was a different type of terror to panic the moral sense of a metropolis that daily outgrew its denizens’ comprehensions: she throttled her two-year-old daughter “and sold the Coat and Stay for a Shilling, and the Petticoat and Stockings for a Groat. We parted the Money, and join’d for a Quartern of Gin.”

Gin — short for Geneva, a corruption of the Dutch word jenever which denoted not a city in Switzerland but the potent elixir’s juniper flavoring — boomed in popularity as production advances sank its price in the early 1700s. “Cheap, widely available, and several times stronger than the traditional alcoholic beverages of the English working classes, gin was the first modern drug,” writes Jessica Warner in Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason.* And per-capita consumption of it increased nearly eightfold over the first half of the 18th century.

The specter of rampant alcoholism within the financial means of the working-class terrified the respectable.....

[ZOOKER]

...Judith Defour (or Dufour; she was also known as Judith Leeford) was hanged at Tyburn, and afterwards anatomized.

Anatomized?

Sounds painful, maybe not so bad after they've already hanged you.

I'm guessing this means disemboweled?

[Boogieman]

No, more like her corpse was sold to the anatomists, for dissection in a medical school.

[CheshireTheCat]

I think it means the body went to a medical school for use in instruction.

[Sirius Lee]

Hogarth. Good times.