Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and its Trade in the Dead Poor, c.1834 - 1929 - Hardcover

Hurren, E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0230219667 ISBN 13: 9780230219663

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Synopsis

In the nineteenth century the business of anatomy was very profitable. However, existing in a Victorian underworld, its shadowy details and potential links to the Jack-the-Ripper murders were seldom exposed. In this accessible and vibrant account, Elizabeth Hurren brings to life lost pauper stories recovered from the asylums, infirmaries, workhouses, body dealers, railway men and undertakers that supplied the medical profession with dissection subjects. The details of those trading networks, corpse sales, body parts fees, railway transportation costs and funeral expenses have never been documented before now, yet this economy of supply in the dead underpinned modern medicine. In Dying for Victorian Medicine, Hurren allows us to look for the first time into the human face of abject poverty, working back in the archives from death to touch the lives of those compelled by pauperism to give up a loved one's body for dissection.

About this title

Review:

"Hurren takes up where Richardson left off to explore the demography, geography, culture, finance and socioeconomic dimensions of dissection. She successfully combines elements of the storyteller with penetrating historical insights to chart the growing complexities of the trade in cadavers after 1832. The result is a groundbreaking and exciting study of the dissected as 'matter out of place' that never loses sight of the poor or of the fear and impact of dissection."  - Keir Waddington, Cardiff University, UK

"...a valuable contribution to the social-humanist and economic history of death and dissection...Dying for Victorian Medicine marks the most detailed scholarly dissection to date of one particular set of traffics in dead bodies as well as perhaps the most eloquent literary effort to capture the lives of the dissected." - Roger Cooter, University College London, American Historical Review
 
'The first book to provide a detailed analysis of the body-trafficking networks of the dead poor that underpinned the expansion of medical education from Victorian times. With an even-handed approach to the business of anatomy, Hurren uses remarkable case histories which still echo a vibrant body-business on the internet today in a biomedical age. 4*' - www.goodreads.com
 
'This book demonstrates that Ruth Richardson's Death, Dissection and the Destitute is not the last word on the Anatomy Act (1832).The trade in bodies clearly thrived throughout the Victorian period and into the 20th century. Hurren explores the practical workings of the system and the dispersed historical fragments into what at times seems like a detective story, with undertakers and traders reappearing in a vast network of opportunist body suppliers." Dr Jonathan Reinharz, Social History of Medicine
 
'Hurren weaves together stories of paupers across England with hard data on the fluctuating numbers of medical students, workhouse inmates, and bodies supplied to anatomy departments; poor law union incomes and pauper burial costs; as well as distances that the bodies travelled along newly built railway tracks - The most illuminating part of Hurren's book is her skillful mapping of the fluctuations in body supply...this is a wonderful contribution to the study of poverty and medicine." - Dr Tatjana Buklijas, Bulletin of the History of Medicine
 
"Elizabeth Hurren's study of "dissection as a lived, rather than simply a death, experienced" (304p) is an exploration of the economy of the supply of corpses in the Victorian period and beyond, which highlights the impact of the New Poor Law and offers both national and local perspectives on the treatment of corpses by medical professionals and students. Her archival research is certainly one of many the strengths of the book, as she digs up case studies and resurrects patients'—or victims'—names. Looking at this part of the history of anatomy through the perspective of the corpse, Hurren's Dying for Victorian Medicine follows in the footsteps of Ruth Richardson's Death, Dissection and the Destitute (1987) or M. Sappol's A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (2002), claiming that time is now ripe to look at medical science through the looking glass and to examine the implications of its construction of the body as an anatomical object from a new perspective.' - Professor Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Miranda
 
'Dr Ruth Richardson's seminal work Death, Dissection and the Destitute (1987) opened the eyes of researchers to the social impact of the anatomy trade, and yet in the twenty years since its first publication there has been comparatively little new research in this area. In Dying for Victorian Medicine Hurren has picked up the mantel and opened a new era of socio-political study. Hurren's writing style makes for an easy and fascinating read...it is in her quest to humanize the dead poor, the raw materials of the anatomists that this book really excels. This book is an outstanding piece of work concerning the conditions of the Victorian poor and the impact that the anatomy trade had on them.' - Al Charlton, Local Population Studies

Book Description:

This groundbreaking book rediscovers the business of anatomy, by bringing to life the lost histories of the poorest that peopled the dissection table in Victorian times

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0230219667
• ISBN 13: 9780230219663
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416