Elizabeth T. Hurren. Hidden Histories of the Dead: Disputed Bodies in Modern British Medical Research.

Abstract

When we think of the relationship of the dead body to British medical research, we might imagine the work of the “resurrection men” who turned a profit by grave robbing and selling corpses to medical schools in the early nineteenth century, or perhaps the Edinburgh murderers Burke and Hare, whose victims were bought and dissected by Robert Knox. Maybe we think of the numerous “unclaimed” poor, who died alone in hospitals, workhouses, and prisons, their bodies used by medical science following the 1832 Anatomy Act. But as Elizabeth T. Hurren, whose previous research has focused on death and dissection in nineteenth-century Britain, shows in Hidden Histories of the Dead: Disputed Bodies in Modern British Medical Research, the relationship between the world of medical and scientific research and the bodies of the dead remains both complex and contentious in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Britain. Hidden Histories of the Dead traces the contested relationship between the individual body and British Medical Research in postwar Britain, showing how the belief that the bodies of the dead were the property of medical science did not die with the creation of the National Health Service. Its scope is wide, encompassing issues of consent, organ donation, developments in medical technology, changing understandings of death, and the increased medicalization of death as the process of dying moved from the home to the hospital (or sometimes the hospice). The book examines medical ethics and their relationship to both scientific developments and social mores, considering issues such as the harvesting of human tissue and organs and questions of consent. At its heart, though, is the question of who “owns” the dead body. In a time of rapid medical developments, as we uncover the secrets of the genome with its ability to predict, and thus to prevent or control, a range of health conditions, and as transplant surgery becomes more reliable, the ethical questions around usage of the dead body become more important and more widely debated.