This essay analyzes Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White in relation to the 1856 murder trial thought to have inspired it: that of William Palmer, the notorious “Rugeley Poisoner,” a physician accused of poisoning his patients under the guise of medicating them. While most critics have followed Collins’s lead in emphasizing the format of the legal trial – specifically, its sequence of testifying witnesses – as the inspiration behind the novel’s then-innovative rotating cast of narrators, for Tucker, the Palmer trial illuminates The Woman in White as much by way of its status as a revelatory moment in the history of modern anatomical medicine as it does as a moment in British legal history. The difficulty of definitely distinguishing between clinically salutary medicating and criminal poisoning that made Palmer’s crimes possible and their prosecution vexing also served to point up some fundamental contradictions at the heart of anatomical medicine’s claim to be able to diagnose what goes on in the interiors of sick patients’ bodies, claims that rest upon the presumption of the interchangeability of human bodies. The plot of Collins’s novel details the process of this interchange of bodies rather than simply presuming such interchangeability, and as a consequence makes apparent some of the mid-century challenges attendant upon the effort to recognize, identify and control particular bodies through time, as they age, sicken, die.