Customer Reviews

Human Remains: Dissection and Its Histories

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Just last week, the Natural History Museum in London agreed that it would return the bones and teeth of some seventeen natives of Tasmania. The specimens were collected in the nineteenth century, and will be repatriated, probably for burial or cremation, because the Tasmanian Aboriginal Center made a request for such a return. The museum's trustees agreed to the return, but the museum's scientists don't want to let go of their bones, as they were seen as important to the global scientific community. However, in Human Remains: Dissection and Its Histories (Yale University Press), Helen MacDonald has already shown that the insistence of keeping such specimens to advance the cause of science is disingenuous. Skulls and other bones residing in the British Museum, for instance, are "filthy with dust, and in a dark cellar", and the cataloguing is such that it is difficult even to determine the number of specimens. It is hard to say that such specimens are vital to science if this is how they are kept, but the current keepers are also keeping up a tradition of holding on to skeletons from distant regions as souvenirs. MacDonald's is not a history of human dissection, but rather an examination of some particular instances of what happened to the dead bodies themselves. When doctors work on the dead, they are tinkering with an object that is not like any other. "Human remains matter," writes MacDonald, "Every society has conventions for dealing with them in a way that involves regulating who has access to bodies and care in their disposal." And yet, in the England and its colonies of the nineteenth century when most of her stories are set, anatomists and others treated bodies with a shocking professional callousness.

Education and research are sensible justification for using cadavers, but MacDonald shows that much less laudable goals are often at work. For instance, dissection used to be a sort of post-mortem punishment assigned particularly to murderers. The College of Surgeons was assigned any harvest from the noose, and the legal dissections on executed murderers were public, "crafted social events". Crowds would come to see the hanging, and then would jam in to see the body taken apart. The anatomists found that the applause during the dissection would be distracting. Female corpses were especially prized. Mary Paterson was a prostitute whose body was sold by William Burke to an instructor of anatomy in Edinburgh, Robert Knox. Knox's career would end when it was discovered that he was buying cadavers from the infamous Burke and Hare who were turning living people into anatomical specimens prematurely, and indeed Mary Paterson was their third victim. Her body was voluptuous and still pliable, and so the anatomists did ply it into an artistic pose, and she was drawn by an artist before the anatomists had a go. Most of the stories which MacDonald, an Australian, tells have to do with anatomizing in Tasmania, or Van Diemen's Land as it was known. Certain English gentlemen liked to collect bones, especially skulls: "In Britain, collecting human bones was a kind of mid-Victorian mania, shared by amateurs and professionals alike." Such specimens were amassed in order to buttress the idea that different races were different species, and of course that Britons were the best among them. The final section of the book is about what happened after the death of the supposedly last Tasmanian native, and how while the body was in the hospital morgue, a surgeon covertly cut out the skull to steal, while substituting another one into the emptied head of the cadaver. So onward marched science.

MacDonald makes clear that we still are trying to define exactly how bodies stop being persons and become objects. She describes the now-famous exhibits by Dr. Gunther von Hagens, who "plastinates" bodies (a way of colorfully embalming them) to put them on public display. She also describes how von Hagens performed a public dissection in London four years ago, a performance she attended even though such dissections were outlawed almost two centuries ago. Von Hagens insisted to his crowd, "I stand here for democracy," just as other anatomists had claimed some sort of higher ground in previous centuries. MacDonald's gruesome and amusing book shows that such high-minded words about the use of cadavers have not always matched the truth.

This book is a good account about a rather unknown and dark part of the History of Medicine : the History of Anatomy and Dissection based on the raging way for getting cadavers to dissect. Boddy snatching, grave robbing, burking... You will be dragged into the dregs of the Society and Ethics.

An excellently written book examining the intersections of colonial, indigenous and scientific history on the Australian frontier.

Another blow for ignorance and superstition

One might think that in the 21'st century people would be smarter than they were in poor Dr. Knox's day. Sadly MacDonald shows they aren't. She rails against von Hagen's

public dissections, yet her entire book is noting but a thinly disguised bit of sensationalism using the very thing she decries to sell books. Like a carnival barker she incites the crowd to "come one, come all . . .see the bearded lady. Watch Jo-jo the dog faced boy eat a live chicken and shudder at every disgusting bite . . ."

"Human remains matter" according to MacDonald. What do they matter, other than as food for the worms? What does she think happens to the average corpse? That it's magically imbued with perfume and sealed under glass?

Sorry, but dead is dead. Either the anatomist or the worms get the body.

As for the specious argument about the British Museum bones "filthy with dust, and in a dark cellar" . . . a bit of research would have shown that many museum specimens remain uncatalogued and unexamined for years due to lack of funds and researchers. This does NOT mean the samples are unimportant. A cursory reading on paleontology, archeology or anthropology will show the utility of artifacts and specimens that have lain in a "dark cellar" for decades.

Interesting book, but badly flawed due to the authors bias