Richard Sugg, Murder after Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England, Ithaca & London, Cornell University Press, 2007, pp. xi + 259, h/b. $45.00/£23.95, ISBN: 978-0-8014-4509-5.Richard Sugg's recent publication Murder after Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England is a fresh, original and engaging contribution to the literature on Early Modern anatomical history and literary analysis. This work is, and will remain, immensely valuable across a number of fields, from the history of medicine, to that of literature and art. The author draws on a breathtakingly detailed knowledge of both seventeenth-century literature as well as medical history, making this publication truly informative and interdisciplinary.Murder After Death is predicated on the notion that a post-Vesalian literary anatomy can be found in late sixteenth-century, and seventeenth-century, literature. Writers, from the mid-Elizabethan era onwards, Sugg argues, helped to shape both the direction and form of seventeenth-century anatomical enquiry. He writes that it was 'writers rather than experimenters who first grasped the direction and potential of this new form of medical enquiry' (p. 206). As the anatomist anatomized the physical human form, writers anatomized the more intangible aspects of humanity.The broad framework within which this book's content is developed is the Vesalian anatomical revolution of the sixteenth century. In considering how this anatomical programme was advanced in seventeenth-century English literature, Sugg draws on a wide variety of sources, from popular plays to medical atlases and textbooks. Often his sources are unusual but popular. Chapter one traces a literary elaboration on the pictorial tradition of the echorche, or animated cadaver, as well as popular notions of violence and death, through the examples of Henry Chettle's play, Hoffman, or the Revenge for a Father, 1603; William Painter's 1566 collection entitled The Palace of Pleasure; and George Peele's play The Battle of Alcazar, 1589. These well chosen examples offer valuable insight into this period in English history where public hangings and anatomical dissections of criminals served as poignant moral examples.In a chapter entitled 'Ill eat the rest of th' anatomy, Dissection and Cannibalism' the author considers medical cannibalism as another form of murder after Death. Sugg distinguishes the ritualized cannibalism found in the New World and in the Christian Mass from medicinal cannibalism. …