Human dissection and organ donation: a historical and social background

Abstract

When a nurse or a doctor unpacks a wound, they take away the dressings to see how things look beneath. Historians unpack the present by looking behind it, to try to discern roots and causes. Here, transplantation is seen in a long historical perspective (since the sixteenth century) taking in the funerary culture of the British Isles, the judicial use of dissection as a punishment, bodysnatching, transplantation itself, and the history of bodily donation, in an attempt to help provide some understanding of modern phenomena, such as organ shortage. The geographical focus is the UK, but aspects of the story have echoes elsewhere, particularly in Europe and North America.