Incisions and Inscriptions

Abstract

This chapter follows the dead body as it moved out of the public spaces of vernacular forensics and into the sequestered space of medicolegal science, the morgue. It attends to the efforts of the Siamese state to implement medicolegal science in the form of autopsies (incisions) capable of producing forms of documentary evidence (inscriptions) that foreign consular courts would recognize in the prosecution of foreign residents accused of having harmed Siamese subjects. Engaging with science studies scholarship on the work of mediation, the chapter focuses on the collaborative work of Dr. P. A. Nightingale, a British physician in the employ of the Siamese state, and Mo (Dr.) Meng Yim, his Sino-Thai assistant and translator. It discovers in the documentary fruits of their collaborative labor, the death certificate, a “boundary object” capable of entertaining discordant forms of knowledge. It became a testament to the emergence of a new form of necropolitics in Siam.