A servant is hanged before a crowd, declared dead, and sent to the university as a cadaver. Then a faint gasp stops the scalpels. We follow Anne Greene’s astonishing survival in 1650 Oxford—where public justice, scarce cadavers, and emerging medical practice collided—and explore how a single breath unraveled the era’s certainty about death, guilt, and divine will.
We walk through the culture of the gallows, where executions doubled as entertainment and moral theater, and the legal pipeline that delivered bodies to anatomy labs. Anne’s path from a risky pregnancy and a stillbirth to a murder conviction under the 1624 concealment law exposes the ruthless logic of a system stacked against poor, unmarried women. From there, we examine the mechanics of short-drop hanging, why strangulation often replaced the intended neck break, and how cold air and rope placement might have preserved a thread of life. When Oxford physicians William Petty and Thomas Willis opened her coffin, quick action—rewarming, stimulation, and the period’s humoral remedies—helped pull her back.
The fallout rippled across faith and law. Many called it a miracle, a sign that God had overruled the court. Officials chose a pardon rather than testing the limits of punishment twice, and Anne went on to marry and have children, becoming a living challenge to the assumptions of her age. Along the way, we weigh miracle versus medicine, highlight what records confirm and what remains unknowable, and trace how this case sharpened medical observation and public debate about justice, gender, and power.
If stories that bend the line between death and life fascinate you, hit play and join us. Subscribe, share with a curious friend, and leave a review to help more listeners find the show. What saved Anne Green—providence, physiology, or both? We want to hear your take.
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